I feel like the World Race officially began this past week. Yes, we have been on the field for 7 weeks tomorrow, but Serbia was pretty mild. We lived without television and had to walk 10 minutes to get internet. But, it was pretty comfortable and Western. Our arrival in Dragonesti took us down a step, but we now have internet in the house, a washer, kitchen, beds etc.
Last Wednesday, we headed out to Stoborasti, Romania. Honestly, we were still living in great conditions by most world standards. We slept in a Sunday School classroom on beds and had doors and windows to close. We had access to a kitchen in the pastor's home. But, for those of us from the West who are use to modern comforts, we had a few shocks to our system. The first being that there was no hot water. It was a week of cold showers (well would have been a week if I had taken more than 2 showers). It was rather warm last week and so we needed to keep the windows open, but this required slathering ourselves in deet before bed so we didn't get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I would sweat enough in the night to require that when I woke up in the middle of the night to a mosquito buzzing around my head, I knew I needed to reapply my bug spray.
We also had the joy of our first regular usage of squatty potties of the race. We were thankful they had running water as we worked at a house where they only thing they had was a squatty potty outhouse and water from the well in the garden.
It really leaves me to appreciate the small things in life that I so often take for granted. Even the fact that we did a children's program (like a weekly vacation Bible school) in a neighboring village which meant we walked an hour and fifteen minutes to the village and then back as very few people in the village own a car and the pastor was not one of them.
I am thankful for the small things in life and thankful for the opportunity to see the joy the rest of the world lives in without the modern conveniences I so often see as neccessary.
