This year has been a beautiful, challenging, wrinkle-forming, loves-accumulating conglomeration of experiences that has brought me through lies into freedom and has spanned 3 continents.
As I sit in a small house in a gypsy town in northern Romania, with lush green hills and apple orchards within a stone's throw away, I cannot help but be elated to be alive.
I woke this morning with a newness—a new thirst for life. I left our house in silence, laced up my running shoes, and aimed for the hills to the left of the village. I passed horse-drawn wagons, weighted down by tin milk jugs, gypsy women with stern faces, children with laughter in their eyes as they mocked my greeting of 'salud,' and farmers gathering corn, apples, and plums. An occasional truck swept by me, splashing the fresh rain onto me—but instead of annoyance, I found myself laughing. Laughing at—once again—the realization that I am beyond blessed to be serving God and the community of gypsies here in Villa Ticci (pronounced Villa Tea-chee.) This small village is surrounded by a lake, hills for as far as the eye can see, and a social discrimination that is as thick as the clouds are as they shroud the hills and whisper around the dilapidated but colorful homes and churches that comprise less than a mile of the main road in Transylvania.
Our purpose this month is to reach out to the gypsies, who are discriminated against and undervalued within this eastern Europe country. Our first day was Tuesday, the 7th, which entailed door-to-door outreach, praying for the sick, playing with children, and after I volunteered myself—assistance in reconstructing a family's roof after a tornado's wrath had passed a few days before.
From the vantage point of the roof, I could see people living and working together in a nearby orchard, homes in close but comfortable proximity to each other, and children playing with stones and flowers. The simplistic life here is appealing to me—an individual who complicates the simple without meaning to. I feel honored to be a part of our contact's family (which includes 2 little boys who have become brothers within the first few hours of playing with them and fetching milk for their nephew) and am looking forward to what else lies ahead.
