6:20am- I am awakened by Dan moving around. He has been
sleeping in the aisle of the bus next to my seat. The bus is stopped, must be
another bathroom break. I fight back towards sleep. Then an unfamiliar voice coming from the
front of the bus shakes us out of sleep.
It’s our contact. Without much
introduction he calls out two team names.
“Silas and Unwritten, this is your village,” he says. “You are the first Americans to ever stay
here.” Those words stick with me.
No formal goodbyes are exchanged, none are needed. We exit the bus leaving the other teams to
keep going on their way. Outside we
search through piles of backpacks until both teams locate their bags. 13 packs. 13 sleepy, eager kids.
Within a matter of minutes our two teams are walking in
opposite directions; our towards the church, our home for the next few weeks.
Team Silas towards a home in the village that will house them. Unpaved roads and fields lead us the short
walk to the church. From the outside it
looks like any other building here- small and understated. Once inside we are greeted by light shining
through brightly colored glass onto a few homemade pews. It’s
charming. You can see the pride in the
pastors face as he shows us our new home.
They fixed it up for us, our contact tells us. “Just last week this was a
dirt floor,” he says. Now it’s brightly
colored plastic. Two small rooms are
where we will sleep and live. A few
exposed light bulbs and wires fill the ceiling. An outhouse for a bathroom and
a bucket for showers. This is not what I
imagine when I think of Romania, I think to myself. ..but it could be worse.
The pastor leaves us to sleep and get settled…and tells us
in broken English that someone will come get us when lunch is ready, maybe
12:30 or so. We are exhausted after 24
hours of travel, so we comply.
8:24am- We are abruptly awakened by a woman who has a young
son at her side (note: there is no lock on the church at this time). She is clearly very excited to see us. We think she is there to get us for lunch.
Then we check our watches, weird, its way too early. She starts pointing to her mouth and showing
some of her teeth. We are still in our
sleeping bags at this point, so she has to come to each of individually. It’s a humorous scene. We ask her if we are supposed to go with her,
she says yeah. We ask her a series of
other questions and answer is always yeah. Most of us are sleepily
giggling. Dan pulls it together enough
to try a conversation desite the language barrier
He says, “Are we supposed to go
with you to the pastors to eat?”
She says, “yeah.”
“OK, are we NOT supposed to go with
you to the pastors to eat?”
She answers, ‘yeah,’ again.
“Do you think I’m cool…” he asks
…”ok,” she replies.
We start laughing really hard. I couldn’t have written the dialogue any better than
that if i had tried. It was humorous. We quickly decide she has not been
sent to get us, and that she has come for prayer. So we pray for healing for her tooth, then
show her to the door. We all lay back
down and I am laughing to myself at what we have gotten ourselves into. I don’t think anyone was prepared for the
culture difference. Regardless, we are
here and this is life for the next few weeks.
This is it.
