Is This Real Life? (Moldova)

 
1. Getting to Moldova was an interesting adventure. The bus that our squad was taking from Ukraine to Russia picked up our team from our home at around 6 A.M. We drove a short distance and then picked up the 4 remaining teams. The drive was estimated to take us around 6 and a half hours. The first several hours were great! Daniel, Hannah, Julia, and I watched “Remember the Titans” in the air-conditioned comfort of the bus. This travel day was going to be a breeze! After about 4 hours, we stopped for “lunch”, which consisted of potato chips and ice cream, and then boarded the bus for the remainder of our trip. When the bus started running again, we realized that something was very different. The air-conditioning was gone! I should also mention that we happened to be travelling the hottest day that Moldova had seen this year. It was nearly 100 degrees OUTSIDE of the bus… Where there was the possibility of a cool breeze, or at least fresh air. But we were INSIDE the bus. So, we spent the remainder of the day sweating more than any of us knew we could and choking on the fragrances of junk food and body odor mingling in the air. We ended up spending around 4 hours at the Ukraine/Moldova border, where we were not permitted to exit the bus. Our drive that was supposed to take us 6 and a half hours ended up taking a little over 14 hours. This lovely travel day culminated in our bus driver refusing to drive us on the “too small” roads to campground, so we grabbed our packs and hiked the remainder of the distance with all of our gear loaded on our backs. When we finally arrived at the entrance to the campground, we were greeted by our squad parents: the real life example of the light at the end of the tunnel. They happily hugged and loved on each and every one of us… No matter how sweaty and stinky we all were. Now that is love.
 
2. My best friend this month was the cafeteria lady at the orphanage we visited for 3 days. She spoke no English, but drew me a picture and wrote me a letter and a poem (in Russian). Sound familiar, Georgetown friends? Tanya the cleaning lady anyone??
 
3. Communication was interesting this month. Living in and among people who spoke primarily Russian and/or German meant that we had to get pretty creative with our sign language and descriptive abilities of basically everything. We were also able to practice our deductive skills in our attempts to read between the lines to understand what is being communicated to us. However, sometimes things just didn’t make much sense.
 
One night, we were sitting and talking to the Germans about our professions back home. Three of us on our team were teachers, so they taught us how to say “teacher” in German. (Something along the lines of ler-her-en. With a lot of German umph!) One of the men, Andy, told us that he worked where “cheese is made”. So we said, “Oh, you make cheese!” and did a churning motion. He looked very confused and then said, “No, CHEESE IS MADE! I am a timma-man!”.  It took us a few minutes to finally realize what he was actually trying to say. He was a carpenter… Like “JESUS MADE”.

4. Another time, one of the Germans looked at me and said, “You are a little mouse in a world full of cats.” That was not a communication error. He really thought I was afraid of everything. Whatever.
 
5. When ministry is slow, it is important for a team to find ways to keep themselves entertained. This month, our team (and by that I mean: Ashley) had a funny habit of daring other people to do ridiculous and disgusting things. And some people were just silly, bored, or hungry enough to accept these challenges.
 
One night, our team leader, Lindsay, decided to pamper herself and give her feet a good soaking and scrubbing. She filled a bucket with hot water and soap, soaked her feet for a while, and then used a pumice stone to scrub them. After she was finished, Ashley dared Hannah to drink from the bucket in exchange for 8 Snickers bars. Now, that’s 3 months worth of dead skin and grime, folks. Needless to say, Hannah accepted. She slurped from the buckets like she was bobbing for apples… Earning herself 3 Snickers bars… And maybe a hand, foot, and mouth disease yet to be detected.
 
Another afternoon, I had offered (out of the kindness of my heart) to share with my teammates some small tablets which, when soaked in water, would become hand towels. Ashley took a tablet and instead of saving it for a day when she would need a towel, dared Mary to put it in her mouth. To be honest, I don’t even remember what Mary was offered in return for her acceptance, but she accepted nonetheless. She placed the towel in her mouth, and kept it there for nearly 10 minutes. It soaked up all of her spit, but there wasn’t enough for it to fully expand. Fail.

6. Our dear, sweet teammate, Julia, has friends in high places. It just so happened that Julia’s friend, Stephanie, is married to an American diplomat to Moldova. It also just so happened that Stephanie and her husband, Michael, moved to Moldova while we were in the country! This was cause for celebration anyway, because Julia was so excited to have the opportunity to visit with someone from home. It was also cause for celebration because Stephanie brought with her a giant box of goodies from Julia’s mother. Just. For. Us!!! She brought gummies of all kinds, 6 different varieties of Cheez-Its, Pillow Pets for 3 of the girls, and little battery-operated fans for all of us! We were SO excited! So, to honor this event with the respect that it deserved, we decided to celebrate Christmas in September. Our team knew that the chances that we would all still be together in December were pretty slim, so we decided to honor this holiday as a team while we could. Plus, it meant we could get presents! We listened to Christmas music throughout that day, much to Mikala’s dismay. Mary and I cut and hung paper snowflakes around the room, while Mikala and Ashley rigged up the cutest little Charlie Brown Christmas tree from the trash pile in the backyard. Each of us hung up a sock to be our stocking. We drew names for a Secret Santa gift exchange, but our gift had to be something from our own pack. Lindsay and I ended up drawing each other’s names. She gave me her notecards that she knew I LOVED, and I gave her Burt’s Bee’s chapstick, because it’s our favorite… and something else that I can’t remember at the moment. It was a lovely evening of laughter, “Elf”-watching, and gorging on junk food. Can’t beat it.
 
7. This month, we made friends with a great guy from our English-speaking Bible Study named Heath. Heath is an American who came to Moldova with the Peace Corps several years ago, and basically never left. He is now a teacher at the International school, and is truly the nicest guy you could ever meet. Heath took the 7 of us under his wing. He showed us around town, bought tickets for us to see a string quartet, and even cooked dinner for us one evening. The night that he cooked dinner, we were all SO excited! He made fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and grilled zucchini! Talk about a BLESSING! We were enjoying our dinner, when out of the blue, I thought it would be a great idea to totally kill all of the fun and knock my drink right into Heath’s lap. Ok, it was an accident. I turned crimson from head to toe and ran to get him a towel. Then, in an effort to lighten the mood, I said: “Peeing your pants is cool!” Oops. Sorry, Heath. This is why we don’t have nice things…
 

8. One day, Mary and I rode with Julia and Vadim (our pastor’s son) to the post office. They told us they wouldn’t be long, so we decided to wait in the car. Vadim left the car running for us, and they took off around the corner. After about 30 minutes, Mary and I felt the car shaking. We looked around and there was a man dressed in the clothes of a policeman, taking the license plate off of Vadim’s car! We were in shock! We had been warned in Ukraine that sometimes men would dress up as policemen in order to gain your trust or take advantage of you. Obviously, the man could see that the car was running and that there were people inside! We had never heard of policemen taking license plates. So, frozen in shock, we watched as this man took Vadim’s license plate, walked back to his car, and drove away.  About 5 minutes later, Vadim and Julia returned. We told them the story, and Vadim told us that policemen in Moldova do take the license plates from cars if they are parked illegally, so that the driver must go to the station and pay his fine in order to get his plate back. Oops. The cop also later told Vadim that if we had gotten out of the car and asked him to stop, he would have. Double oops. European laws are weird. Sorry, Vadim!

9. One night, our team decided to take a late-night (and by that I mean 9 P.M.) trip to McDonalds downtown. It was about a 20 minute trolley ride or a 10 minute drive, so our sweet friend Vadim agreed to drive us. As we were driving, Vadim received a phone call. When he hung up, he yelled back and told me that a woman had just called his father looking for me, and that she was going to be calling his phone in a few minutes to speak to me. I was confused. Our team started listing off all of the people that it could be. I was worried that it was the woman mentioned above in #2, but she spoke absolutely no English, so I had no clue how that was going to work out on the phone. When the woman called, we were standing inside McDonalds.  She told me that her name was Nancy and that she was a high school classmate of my Pastor in Kentucky. He had written to her and asked if she could find me and give me a hug if I was close enough to her in the country. How great is he? So, she did some research, found the girl from Kentucky on the World Race site, and found out that we were working with Emmanuel Baptist in Chisinau. She knew Pastor Niccolai and decided to give him a call. She asked if we could meet that night, and I told her that we were at McDonalds, but were leaving soon because we had ministry in the morning. To my surprise, she told me that she was right down the street from McDonalds at that very moment and would be there in a minute. Meeting her was wonderful, and such a blessing straight from God. She took me and Mary to lunch the next day, and while we were there, she found out that Mary was going to have her 24^th birthday while we were in the country. She insisted that we let her throw a party at her home, so the whole team went to her home on the evening of Mary’s birthday to celebrate. She made grilled chicken, salad, a cheesecake, and cake pops! It was such a fun night for all of us, and a birthday to remember for Mare Bear! God definitely cares about the little stuff, even if it’s just one of His children needing a hug and a small taste of home.