Whenever I talk to an Albanian, they will always ask where I am from. Usually there first guess will be the UK, more specifically Manchester for some reason. After I tell them I am from America, they will always follow with the question ‘why are you here?’ I usually tell them I am a Christian missionary. This then leads to me trying to explain to them what I do. I realize now that most people at home also do not know what I do, you know that I am in some random country in eastern Europe and that is about it. So here I will try to explain what we do here in Albania.
First of all, our main ministry is working with children and helping the church in whatever way they need. So a normal day will start out with an 8:30 prayer meeting. During this time all of the church staff and our team come down to the kitchen and pray over each other and for our day. After this my team and I will go to whatever ministry we have for the day. Most days this is going upstairs (we live on the 3rd floor of the church) to the children’s daycare rooms, these kids are preschool mostly. We basically just play with these kids until they go home. Sometimes we will go to a place called morning star which is basically the same thing as the church daycare accept there is also a place for mentally handicapped children. Another thing we sometimes do is Seafarers ministry. A few of us, usually 2 or 3, will go to the port with a guy who runs a ministry for seafarers. We will then go aboard all of the freight ships and talk to the captains about taking some of the men to the ministry. The ministry is a place with games and internet where the seafarers can come and hang out and relax for a bit while they are docked. There are also many Christian pamphlets and things for the men to read. After ministry we have a devotional at 2:30 which is always led by someone on the team, then on Wednesdays there are 2 bible studies which are also led by someone on the team, and Sunday school for the kids is also taught by someone on the team. There is also a Friday night youth group which will include a lesson by someone on the team. We have Saturdays off as adventure days where we just do something adventurous together.
Usually ministry is done once the 2:30 bible study is finished. After this is when our team will relax or go get coffee or something. We have also started doing a thing we call friend dates, where we put all of our names in a bowl and on Sundays everyone draws a name. Sometime during the week each of us will take our person out on a ‘friend date’. This is so that we can get to know each other better. After supper we also have team time (I like to call it family time) where we give each other feedback and talk about our schedule and just talk about stuff.
It is interesting living with a bunch of people who I basically just met. We literally only got to be around each other for 10 days before we all moved in together in a foreign land and had to work with each other every day. God has used this time to grow each of us a lot, these people are some of my favorite people in the world now! If I was back in the states I am pretty sure we would not even have become friends, but now we are family.
This is what we do here in Albania. This is the ministry God has called us to for our few months. We take care of kids, teach a lot of lessons, bible studies, and devotionals, and we go out for coffee.
