I know it’s been highly anticipated and you’re all on the edge of your seats, so (finally) here is a glimpse into the last three months of my life in Albania.
For the first two weeks here in Albania we had to opportunity as an entire squad to live on a farm compound in the northern town of Lezhë. Together as a squad we whitewashed walls and herded sheep and saw the biggest spiders we have ever seen. Our host, George, taught us through the book of Proverbs every morning and spoke into us about the value of wisdom and hard work and work that’s done to the best of our abilities. He taught us about finding our own places to dig into the word and to saturate the ground with prayer. He spoke truth into us; especially about the roles we are given as the body of Christ and how we grow into those roles.
Lezhë was all about learning to live a little bit more slowly and a lot more simply, well that and only eating carbs and wrangling chickens.
After Lezhë, the squad split up to different cities around Albania: some stayed in Lezhë, and some to Durres, Lushnje, and Tirana. My team has been living in the center ofthe capital, Tirana, for the last 2.5 months. Our apartment is, well, cozy. With one bathroom, one bedroom for the boys, and one main room that functions as the kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom for the 5 girls of my team. My team spends every day, all day together laughing, yelling, cooking, and just living.
Our apartment is right next to the church we work in, Kisha e Perendise (Church of God), where we have been doing a variety of things. The first few weeks were spent painting the entire inside of the church and reupholstering chairs.
After that we began making posters to invite the children in the neighborhood to come a Kid’s Club that we run on Saturday mornings. The boys we have at the Kid’s Club (yes, it’s all boys) are never-ending fun and a surprise each and every time. We play games with them like dodgeball and jenga, perform skits or show stories (Noah’s Arc, the story of Moses, David and Goliath), and sing and dance to songs, mainly the Banana Song- it’s a hit every time.
We also run a Friday night program for the teenagers of the church and the ones that we have invited from local high schools that we call English Club. There we play “minute to win it” games, and talk about friendship and what we are called to do in the future and they get to practice their english. They are so joyful and open to this bunch of crazy Americans who just want to hangout with them so they sing karaoke with us and try to teach us to do traditional Albanian dances (which I am horrible at).
We’ve gotten to participate with the Bible School that’s run through the church one week out of the month and listen to some incredible talks by some great speakers that flew in from America. Through the bible school we were asked to create an event for the community and threw a date night for all the couples in the church. We decorated the church, made a three course dinner, waited on them, and watched the kids for the night.
Also recently we’ve been visiting Qender (an outskirt of Tirana) to visit and pray with the families there. Honestly, that’s where I have seen the true beauty of what we are doing here the most clearly. Albania is beautiful with it’s mountains and fascinating with it’s history, but there I see the best things about this country. We are welcomed into homes with hospitality I have never seen in America. Some of the families we visit have so little but want to give us everything they can. All they want is to sit and drink coffee with us and to tell us how they came to know Christ and for us to lay our hands over them and pray for healing over injuries and sickness, for peace over their families, to celebrate what God has given them, for joy, and that they be used in their lives to spread the love of God. Their faith is limitless, unrestrained, and radiant.
While we’ve been in Europe we’ve been blessed with the ability to travel to Montenegro for a squad debrief in September and to Athens, Greece with my team this past week.
Montenegro was probably the most beautiful I have ever been in my life with it’s green valleys and mountains and bright blue waters. There we had opportunities to stay at the coolest hostel ever (Hostel Anton check it out) and worship together, prank each other, laugh, hike, go night swimming, and hurt ourselves while trying to do front flips into the bay (just me? okay).
This past week we took a 15 hour bus ride to Athens and let’s just say it was a dream come true. We got to be in the center of the tourist area just below to Parthenon. We spent that week drinking Starbucks and walking through the flea markets and seeing temples and buildings that were thousands of years old amid narrow streets covered in graffiti. We walked until it hurt and then and ate copies amounts of chocolate cake. We spent a lot of time taking photos but more time just wondering how are lives became like this and how good our God is.
It’s life. Pure and simple.
Update: I currently leave for the Philippines in less than 2 weeks! Crazy right? My deadline for being fully funded comes up in about a month, which means I have to raise the remaining $907 by that time! Please consider supporting me so I can continue on the race!
