Last month in Ukraine are ministry was really awesome, but not so busy and I had a lot of free time for reading and sleeping. This month in Draganesti, Romania we have been going none stop since we jumped off the train and I really do love it, but it seems that I can now never catch up on my sleep and am always exhausted.
On one frigid morning we began with team devotionals and breakfast around 8am, I being absolutely exhausted, rolled out of my bed and threw on some clothes at about 7:57 and slowly made my way down stairs. At 8:30 our contact Marian picked us up in his station wagon and drove us to a different part of the city to go help a woman with whatever she was in need of. This is what we do every morning, we go to a different person’s house and offer our services, helping and blessing them in any way that we can.
When we pulled up to our destination we were greeted by a big pile of mud and some women covered with the mud and making bricks.
As soon as we stepped out of the car Marian didn’t waste any time, he turned to us girls and told us to take off our shoes, roll up our pants, and get to work. We all stood their with quizzical looks on our faces and looked at Marian to see if he was joking, you never know with him he’s always quick to play tricks on us and sometimes it’s hard to tell if he is serious of not, but this time he was serious. So ever so slowly we slid out of our sandals and rolled up our jeans.
Let me remind you that it was not a warm morning in Romania, but that it was so cold that I was actually wearing two jackets. Stepping into the mud that came almost to our knees, it was freezing cold and our feet quickly lost feeling. But then they added straw to the mud and because our feet were so cold everytime we stepped on a piece it felt like we were stepping on nails and the pain would just shoot through my legs.
After getting over this initial shock of the coldness of course we got really into and had a lot of fun dancing around in the mud.
So now we have mixed the mud and now it is time for the guys to step in, get their hands dirty and form them into bricks, but wait a minute they don’t just want the guys to help they wanted me to help too. As if I wasn’t already dirty enough with thick mud and straw up to my knees, did I really have to get my hands dirty too? Well yes I did and of course as always it turned into a good time. I think I was just more miserable on this day than usual because it was freezing cold outside and we never saw the sun once or even got much warmer during the work. I’m sure that if had been a sunny day I would have gotten right in their and completely rolled around in the mud if they had given me the chance and of course if it was hot and sunny outside.
Around noon we our done making bricks for the day, we’ve finished about 100 so we go home to eat lunch and rest for a couple of hours.
Every afternoon we do a prayer walk around the city with a couple of the church members.
Then in the evening we go to their City Center, which is just a small park with some benches, but a lot of people hangout their in the evening, so we go to talk with them. We have made friends with a group of teenage girls and have been able to spend some time with them and share some of the gospel with them.
