If you would like to help...

The cost of living in Bucharest is similar to that of living in one of the suburbs of Vancouver. Food is slightly cheaper but gas is more expensive. The Low Income Cut-Off (LICO) for a family of two in a large urban area in Canada is $22,000 a year after taxes (approx. $1833 per month). Currently, the school where Liviu works is offering him a take-home wage of $200 per month or $2,400 a year (after they deduct the rent for the dorm room where he and Ana live). I would like to supplement this income with ministry support and I am looking for partners who would like to help me. The money will be received and receipted by Eurovangelism (or their American counterpart, Partners International) and sent to our Romanian partner, Euro Christian Ministries, to give to Liviu and Ana. Liviu and I will be working together over the next few months to put into a place a process of reporting so that financial and prayer partners receive regular updates. If you are interested in joining us in this ministry, please contact me at cherylenns@gmail.com.

Back in Canada

Yesterday morning I woke up at 6:00 am, Bucharest time (8:00 pm the previous day in Vancouver) and waited outside for over an hour for Liviu to take me to the airport. When, at 7:10 am, he had still not arrived, the Administrator of the school where I was staying kindly phoned Liviu to yell at him. Apparently Liviu was still asleep...having slept through two alarms! Needless to say, he got up very quickly and did manage to get me to the airport in time to catch my 8:35 am flight to London! Thus ended my fourth trip to Romania. :)

The actual flights home went very smoothly - thank you to everyone who prayed for my journey. Today I am in the midst of laundry and putting things away and dealing with my photos and re-adjusting to my life in Vancouver. Tomorrow I go back to work. Over the next few weeks, I have reports to write about my trip and a website to develop and other such follow-up to do. I also need to set up a plan for learning how to read and write Romanian. If this trip taught me anything, it is that I must be able to speak Romanian the next time I go. Since learning to read and write languages is much easier for me, I will start there.

Amazingly enough, we actually [mostly] stuck to the "schedule" for the last few days of my time in Romania! The plan to work in the computer lab on Wednesday didn't materialize; instead I spent a lot of time that day in Liviu's car, running errands with him and having discussions. Just let me say that Bucuresti traffic is NOT recommended for anyone who suffers from any type of untreated anxiety disorder. Thank goodness for my meds! Liviu had hoped to leave on vacation by 5:00 pm (ha!) but we actually got on the road three hours later, which isn't that bad. What was bad was watching my life flash before my eyes as Liviu drove 170 km an hour down the freeway while talking on his cellphone and then passed lines of trucks with limited visibility. When we reached our destination (the seaside village of Jupiter), I actually got down on my knees and kissed the concrete. (Liviu also received a brief but very stern lecture from me about not doing that again with me in the car so on the way home he did slow down to 120 km an hour if he was on the phone!)

Our host in Jupiter was a friend of Liviu's from the Distance Learning Program. Ioan is an engineer and was on a company-sponsored course to learn more about building dams. He was getting a little bored in his room all by himself so he invited us to share it with him for a couple nights. Yep...one small hotel room, two single beds, three 20-somethings and me. Fortunately, I did get my own bed and I actually slept quite well. The weather wasn't great so we didn't go out much but I did get to the beach three times and was able to touch the Black Sea (check!). We spent the time arguing [mostly] amiably about theology (Ioan is a VERY fundamentalist Baptist) and playing games and eating Romanian food in the dining room and Ioan had homework to do and Liviu had work. I found the whole experience amusing, especially when it was all calm one minute and an absolute flurry of packing the very next minute because suddenly it was time to go RIGHT NOW! Thankfully, I'm in the know about this kind of Romanian 20-something behaviour so I was already packed and ready to go and could just sit on my bed and watch the maelstrom happen around me. :)

We did go back to Buturugeni on Saturday morning and 13 children showed up for the program. The youth of the Buturugeni church were also there and have agreed to take on this ministry. They will provide a Saturday morning program for the children as well as Sunday School. Please pray for Dorin who will be the leader and for Alex, David, Robert and Cristina who will work with him. Pray that they will grow into excellent leaders who really love the children to whom they are ministering. Pray that the church will see what God is doing and catch the vision to reach out to the children, who come with so much enthusiasm and hate to leave! Liviu is planning to supervise and encourage and mentor from a distance and show up (probably with all the girls!) every now and then for a special program. In the meantime, he and Ana and Andra are talking about starting a program in Mihai Voda, another village nearby. The church in Mihai Voda needs to be re-planted and Liviu's church has asked him to do it. More on that as it develops...

Saturday afternoon was spent shopping with Ana and then it was off to the Saturday night young adult service at church. After lots of singing, I was asked to give the Bible Study (Liviu had confirmed this with me three hours before church started!). We looked at the parable of the sower and the seeds from Matthew 13 and I "rocked their world" a bit by actually asking them to participate (usually they get a lecture). The Baptist churches in Romania continue to be quite traditional and legalistic and the youth and young adults feel like they are starving. Some leave, some get involved in outreach ministries and many just drift. This situation breaks my heart and was one of the reasons that I didn't want to go back. Please pray for me as I befriend these youth on my trips and try to stay in touch with them. There are many "Liviu's" out there who have much to give and only need some space and nourishment in order to grow into fabulous leaders. Liviu (at 25) is already beginning to mentor Ovidiu (age 16) with the hope that Ovidiu will be able to take on a village ministry in the not-too-distant future.

More

I thought that I would update y'all on my current "revised schedule". I write this with a chuckle because with Liviu "schedule" is a nasty word and what I am doing from hour to hour seems to change by the minute!

Sept 11 - Arrive in Bucharest
Sept 12 - Recover from journey and start preparing for Children's Ministry
Sept 13 - Go shopping in Bucharest, stay overnight with Ana's family
Sept 14 - Church (morning and evening) in Buturugeni, birthday lunch with family and friends, back to Bucharest for night
Sept 15-21 Children's Ministry in Buturugeni
Sept 21 - Clean up, pack up, move to Bucharest
Sept 22 - Hang out with Liviu and Ana and try to understand what Liviu does with the Distance Learning program at the Biblical Seminary.
Sept 23 - Spend time with Liviu in the morning, go to IKEA for dinner and shopping. See the main sights of Bucharest on the way there and back.
Sept 24 - Help Liviu to clean up and change the networking of the computers in the computer lab for the seminary students.
Sept 25-26 Vacation at the Black Sea.
Sept 27 - Back to Buturugeni for the new Saturday "Kid's Club". The church wants to continue what we've started, once a week on Saturday mornings. Please pray that they will find committed young people to make this happen. At this point, it sounds like Andra is willing to lead this ministry - I'll keep you posted.
Sept 28 - Fly home

I'm feeling a bit better today but now Liviu is sick. I've been able to rest a lot and drink lots of fluids which has helped. Please pray that our vacation to the seaside would be a good time of rest and recuperation. I will be very busy when I get back, Liviu is always very busy and Ana starts school next week so we all need it.

By the way, I woke up this morning to NO water at all in the dorm. :) Every day is an adventure here!

Just a Quick Update

I am writing this from the front seat of Liviu's car as I wait while he delivers some important documents for a mutual friend of ours. Bucharest traffic is so bad that Liviu can actually answer email while he is driving! The concept of "lanes" is a little fuzzy here and parking on the sidewalk is quite common. Driving here is a like playing one of those racing video games - just go as fast as you can and try not to hit anything!

I am currently staying in Bucharest for a few days at the Theological Seminary where Liviu works. I have a room to myself in the dorm (school doesn't start until Oct 1) and hot running water!! It's all good. :) I will spend the next couple days hanging out in Bucharest with Liviu and Ana and Andra.

Please pray for me as I rest and fight a cold.

More later...we're on the road and I want to look!

...and now we're done!

Buna! I'm back in Bucharest for a few hours to have a bath! It's very nice to be all clean again. I've been washing my hair "in a bucket" out in the village but that's been it! Fortunately, we've not had any really hot weather. :)

I am very pleased with how the program for the children went. My only regret is that I still don't speak enough Romanian to interact with them more than a little. We ran program every day from 5:00 until 8:00(ish) pm. The first day only two children were there by 5:30 pm. Oh oh. That's when we learned that the school has two "series", one in the morning until 1:00 pm and the other in the afternoon until 6:00 pm. This is how they get more children into the available space! One of the young adults from the church went out between 5:30 and 6:00 to gather some children and by 6:15 or so, we had six boys and one girl...all very enthusiastic! On Tuesday, Ana and Andra went to the school and talked to some of the children...that evening we had an attendance of 25. On Wednesday, the weather was miserable - dark, cold, raining. We were wondering if any children would come...but they did!...15 of them. Thursday and Friday were gorgeous sunny days and about 35 children showed up both days! We finished up this morning with 21 and are eager to see how many come to church tomorrow to perform the songs we taught them.

A "typical" day at program started with a few children playing with a ball or the skipping rope or the parachute. As more children arrived, the games got bigger (and louder!). After games, the children came into the church for songs and a Bible lesson and a craft and a geography lesson and snack. The order varied every day and two of the days we ran out of time for the craft! The children LOVE to sing and I can now sing a simple Sunday School song (I've got joy like a fountain) in Romanian from memory. :) We had a geography lesson every day except for today because the curriculum that we were using as a resource is called "The Jesus Expedition" and every day we visited a new locale, with the help of a nice globe that we bought. The first day we learned about Antarctica (did you know that it is technically a desert?), the second day we journeyed to the jungle (where we made monkeys and tigers), the third day we climbed Mount Everest, the fourth day I introduced the children to my home on the Pacific Ocean, and the last day we trekked through the desert. It was fun to watch the children get excited as they learned more about the world outside their village. We also had the children memorize two Bible verses: Matthew 19:14 and a simple version of Philippians 4:6. Hopefully, these words of encouragement will stay with them.

I have been taking lots of pictures and will have stories to tell when I get home. I so wish that I could stay and continue to get to know these children but I know that I have my "own" children at home in Vancouver to work with. :)

Time to go back to the village...I'll try to write more when I am back in Bucharest!

And Here We Go...

September 15th is the first day of school here in Romania and will also be the first day of our "AfterSchool Program". The weather is cold and dark and will probably be wet so I need to plan some games that we can play inside the sanctuary of the church. We are partially using a curriculum that Liviu found and today is "Antarctica Day" (how fitting!). I'll try and see if I can adapt some common games to a more polar and penguin theme. For our craft, we are making snowmen out of white craft foam...Ana spent hours cutting circles on Friday while I was dealing with jet lag.

Yesterday at church, I could distinctly feel God chuckling at me and I had to smile back in return. As some of you know, despite my love for Romania and her people, I really did not want to come back this fall. My call to this country has not been easy and my last trip here in 2006 left me feeling pretty bleak about it. I could not see the path ahead of me and was ready to just give up and try something else.

God, however, definitely has plans for me, even though my circle of lantern light feels so very small. I really felt pushed to come here...pushed by a series of little "coincidences" that did not feel at all random. I suppose that I could have said "NO!" anyway, but my life experience has taught me the folly of that. :) So I came and the first couple days, as I struggled with jetlag and squatty potties and Liviu bouncing all over the place and my poor Romanian, I really wondered what I was doing here again. Then I went to church on Sunday morning and felt that love that I always feel when I am here (and probably will never be able to articulate) and I felt God chuckling at me and I just had to smile at my own lack of faith and God's never-ending patience with His little child who has so much trouble giving up control and carrying on when the path ahead is so unclear.

I still can only see a tiny bit of the path in front of me. I have dreams, I have ideas, I have schemes...but I really do not know how God is going to work through me in the next two weeks and on into the future. Patience NOT being one of my strengths, this path is going to require prayer and lots of it. :)

Please pray today for the church of Buturugeni as they open their doors to the children of the village. I praise God for the pastor, Liviu, and his vision to see his church reach out to the children around them. Pray that members of the church will recognize in these children the seeds of God's kingdom and nurture them with patience and love. Please also pray for the children, that they will feel the presence of the Holy Spirit and want more. Pray that they will come to see the church as their "place of refuge"...a place where they can come to be loved and cared for, no matter what life throws at them. Pray that this church will be filled with so much light that the whole village is drawn to it.

One example of those "God coincidences" that I keep experiencing... As you know from the top of my blog, I chose to call "my ministry" Lanterns of Hope and chose as my theme verses the passage from Matthew about light. Last night for his Bible Study, without us ever discussing it, the pastor chose these same verses and spoke about the church being light for the village. It's good to be on the same page!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yep...September 14th is my birthday and my gift to myself this year was to spend it in Romania.

The day started with Ana's sister, Andrea, singing to me while attacking my ears for the first of many times! It's a strange but funny tradition. Liviu had told me to ready by 8:00 am but I have spent enough time in Romania to know that I had until 8:30 or so before anything would happen...lots of time to eat my favourite Romanian breakfast: bread with honey! True to form, Liviu and Ana showed up just after 8:45 am and everyone headed out to Buturugeni for church.

I have always attended Baptist churches (almost all of them named "Betel"!) in Romania and the services are always the same. They start at 9:00 am with an hour of Bible Study, led by one of the church elders. Everyone attends but only men are allowed to teach, although women may ask questions. From what I could make out yesterday, they were talking about the story of Stephen in Acts. Around 10:00 am they transition into an hour of prayer. Everyone is allowed to pray. After prayer, they have have a time of singing and sharing. There is some congregational singing, followed by "special music" that is interspersed with people reading Scripture or poems. Yesterday, the "special music" was ALL the young people in attendance coming up to the front to sing choruses. It didn't matter if you were a regular or a guest...if you were young(ish) and known to someone in the church, you were part of the choir! They were singing choruses that were familiar to them and they sounded really good. Somewhere in the midst of all of this they take an offering and give announcements and then the service ends with the reading of Scripture and the message (which generally runs 35-45 minutes). Liviu spoke yesterday and he is a very gifted speaker. Usually he translates for me so, bereft of a translator, I only caught snatches of his message but I do know that he delivered it very well. He engages the congregration in a way that I've never seen before in Romania.

I have occasionally railed against the "old-fashioned" attitude of Romania Christians to women in the church; for example, only men are allowed to preach or teach in the congregation. Yesterday I realized that this is not strictly true. It's like Ginger Rogers who said that she did everything that Fred Astaire, only backwards and in high heels. Because women are welcome to read poems that they have written, if women want to "teach" in the congregration, they have only to make sure that their entire "sermon" rhymes! Something for me to work on for my next trip to Romania... :)

After church, it was time for birthday lunch! Sarmale, bread, sausages and the traditional Romanian birthday cake which includes lots of fruit and pudding and is very delish! I felt well-feted. :) In attendance were the Popescu family (Ana's dad, Florin; Ana's mom, Lixandra; Ana's two sisters, Andrea and Laura) plus Liviu and Ana, two friends, Andra and Ovidiu, and the pastor of the Buturugeni church, also named Liviu. Turns out that he is from Lupeni, where I spent several days during my last trip to Romania!

Sunday afternoons are for resting and hanging out. As the house is small, my room was overtaken by the younger folks who were practising choruses for the evening service. Too bad I didn't know this beforehand so I could contain my mess first! No problem, I just joined in and tidied around them. :) I aso took a walk around some of the village - more on that another day.

The afternoon ended with mandolin practice. Children and youth here learn to play the mandolin in church and each church apparently has a supply of mandolins on hand. Florin and all three of his daughters play and the two Livius play guitar so they made a nice little string orchestra. :)

Romanian Baptists still have evening church every Sunday for two hours, starting at 6:00 pm. It follows much the same pattern as the morning service except that the Bible Study portion is a short teaching from the pastor. Last night the "special music" was the mandolin orchestra plus anyone under the age of 45 who they could coax forward to sing with them. Since I had been at practice, I was co-opted to be part of the choir! This is one of the things I really love about Romanian village churches...you just never know what might happen! They have a basic structure that everyone knows but what happens within that structure is completely a function of who shows up that day. So there I was, singing joyously, in a language that I am still learning how to pronounce and only barely understand. It was fine when we sang from the hymnbook but got a bit dicey on the choruses when I had no words in front of me. :)

The day ended where it had started, back at the Popescu's apartment in Bucharest. I am so very thankful for their hospitality. The entire family of five lived in three rooms plus a bathroom until Ana's marriage to Liviu reduced them to four. There is a living room/office where the parents sleep on a fold-out bed, a family room/kitchen where it seems that most of daily life is led, and a small bedroom where all three (now two) of the girls sleep. They quite happily added me into the mix and I feel quite at home here. The added bonus, of course, is the flush toilet and a bathtub!!

Bucharest is pretty much what I expected it to be...street upon street upon street of communist style apartments (like the one I'm in) and lots of traffic and people and beeping horns and bustle. As I prefer the sound of chickens and roosters and dogs to the sound of traffic, I am happy to be mostly living out in Buturugeni. :)

Buturugeni

Servus! Yes, I have arrived safely in Romania, WITH all my lugguge! As always, it was a long trip with little sleep. However, both of my flights were on time and I managed a short nap at Heathrow so I arrived in pretty good shape. Liviu and Ana were at the airport and, after we carefully loaded my three large and one small suitcase into their hatchback, we drove through Bucharest, around the heaviest building in the world and out into the country. Even though we arrived in Buturugeni around 1:00 am, all the suitcases had to be opened and their contents examined before going to bed. :)

As promised, I am staying in the village with Liviu and Ana, in Ana's grandmother's house. I have the guest bedroom, which is very comfortable. I have often said that I can handle just about anything that Romania could throw at me BUT I draw the line at "squatty potties". Apparently, God's line is slightly different from mine (stop laughing, Mom!) because my first night there I got out my flashlight and Liviu introduced me to the "facilities". Yep...half-way down the garden, against the fence, a nice metal outhouse sheltering nothing more than a hole in the ground covered partly with boards. (Apparently indoor facilities are planned for NEXT year!) I laugh but hope that I will get used to it sooner as opposed to later. The rest of the facilities include a bucket of wellwater, a mug, and soap...on a bench outside the kitchen door. There is a small kitchen in the house where Liviu and I will cook. It really is like staying at a rustic cottage, for which I was mostly prepared. :) Some of you reading this will actually remember this life, which is still very much a day-to-day reality here.

Ana's grandmother was born in the house 76 years ago and has lived there ever since. Ana'a mother also grew up there. Ana's parents have two gardens in Buturgeni and they harvest the vegetable and herbs for the farmer's markets in Bucharest. They also keep two pigs and several chickens at the house. I am growing used to the smell of manure. :) Sadly, many people have to "market garden" like this to survive. Almost two years after Romania joined the EU, prices are the same as in Canada but the average wage is still only $250 per month. On the other hand, some must be making good money because we went to Carrefour today to buy the rest of the supplies we need (imagine Superstore crossed with Walmart crossed with HUGE) and there seemed to be thousands of people in there buying things. Mind you, school starts on Monday so I imagine there's lots of last minute shopping happening. It was a wee bit overwhelming for my jet lagged head!

Tonight was bath night in Bucharest. We drove into the city to stay with Ana's parents and "clean up". It feels good. Ana's mother also fed me sarmale and bread with honey, my two favourite Romanian foods.

It has been wonderful to re-connect with Liviu in person after six years and to meet his new wife and her family. Once my brain has fully arrived (I think it's still in transit somewhere between here and Heathrow), I look forward to exploring the village and getting to know the children who will come to our program.

I must be off to sleep now. Tomorrow morning we're up early to head back to the village for church. Liviu is preaching. Apparently it's a Romanian tradition to pull the ears of a birthday girl so I might need to cover mine up for the day! Whatever happens, it is sure to be interesting!

Count-down

T-2! 48 hours from now I will be in the air on my way to Romania. Two of my four suitcases are packed full of ministry supplies and are ready to go. The other two are standing hopefully in my bedroom, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam that washes up from all parts of the house as I wander about deciding what to take. I have three more things to do:

1. continue to figure out what I might be doing, gather my thoughts and ideas together on my computer and then print it all out. An email from Liviu yesterday confirmed my tentative in-country itinerary and added a speaking engagement with some youth who can communicate in English and a visit to a different church. I'm apparently on a need-to-know basis and I don't need to know any further details until I arrive. :) From past experience in Romania, it's quite possible that I will be picked up on Sunday, September 21 by a pastor whom I will meet in the car and taken to another village to attend church there. I really need to practice my Romanian on the plane...
   
   
2. finish cleaning my house so that my colleague, Andrea, won't be scared when she comes to live in my suite while I'm gone. She's currently homeless and my landlord (who is 89) likes to have someone around, so it's a great arrangement. Fortunately, I've only been living here for a month and a half so I haven't had ample opportunity yet to really mess the place up.
   
   
3. finish packing. And check off all my lists.

No problem! I think I'll go to bed now.

What will you be doing in Romania?

Ah yes...my favourite question!! The best answer to this question is "I'll tell you when I get home" but I realize that it's not the most helpful. My three previous trips to Romania have taught me that what I think I might be doing when I get there is not necessarily in any way related to what I will be doing once I arrive! Romania just works that way.

One of my main interests in Romania is village ministry. There are thousands of small villages in Romania that have little or no access to the gospel. Many are isolated and difficult to reach. Pastors that serve in these areas often have to spread themselves among 4-7 tiny house churches in 4-7 villages. Transportation is a huge issue. Resources are minimal and outreach is difficult.

My friend, Liviu, and his wife, Ana, live in the small village of Buturugeni, 27 km from Bucharest. I will stay with them in their village home, participate in village life, and work with the village church to reach out to the local children and youth. Currently my schedule looks like this:

Sept 11 - Arrive in Bucharest at 11:00 pm or so.
Sept 12 & 13 - Recover from the journey and prepare for a week of children's ministry.
Sept 14 - Go to church, then have a party in Buturugeni for my 43rd birthday! I think that this would be a great way to kick things off.
Sept 15-20 - Children's Ministry in Buturugeni. Yep. That's all I know! My plan is to arrive with lots of ideas and lots of stuff and to be as prepared as I can be for whatever happens! Hopefully I will have youth volunteers who speak English.
Sept 21 - Go to church. Do whatever Liviu and Ana do on Sundays.
Sept 22-24 - Take Liviu and Ana on vacation. This is my wedding gift to them and a chance for me to spend some "quality time" with them. Life in Romania can be incredibly hectic (unless you're living in a seniors' home where no one speaks English - like I did on my last trip!) and time away is essential for a couple in ministry.
Sept 24-26 - Ladies Ministry in Buturugeni. Yep. Liviu wrote: "The ladies have difficulties in communicating with the kids, problems in communicating with husbands, etc. Your job is to talk to them and try to encourage them." This should be fun...seeing as I have no husband, no children and I speak Romanian like a three-year-old! That said, I am really looking forward to hanging out with the village women. I am bringing craft supplies and my life experience and an avid curiousity about their lives and we'll just see what happens!
Sept 27 - Last day in Romania
Sept 28 - Go to airport really early in the morning to catch my flight home.

I'm flying to Bucharest on a missionary fare, which means that I get to take three suitcases of 70 pounds each. Two of those suitcases will be stuffed with ministry supplies that will be used both while I am there and in subsequent outreaches after I leave. I really hope that my time in Romania will be an encouragement to everyone I work with and meet and that they will then take what they have experienced and the stuff that I have brought to reach out to children and youth in other nearby villages.

Why Romania?

My first trip to Romania happened during the summer of 2001. I was on a 14-week missions trip to Germany with Greater Europe Mission and thinking about joining them full-time. They decided to send me on one of their two-week work trips so that I could learn how these trips were run. The trip that they chose for me was Romania. Four of us drove from the southwest corner of Germany (near Basel, Switzerland) to Camp Bradatel in the Transylvanian Alps. It was love at first sight! :) I spent three weeks in Romania that year (we came earlier and left later than the work team) and couldn't wait to go back. Everything about Romania fascinated me.

In the summer of 2002, I went back to Germany with Greater Europe Mission and prepared to lead my own team to Romania. A small team of computer science students joined me and two other short-term GEM missionaries to run a week-long computer camp in a tiny village outside of Timisoara. The pastor of the small church there invited all the youth in the village to come and learn how to use a computer. We packed out the small room in which the church met. My translator was Liviu Oprea, a 19-year-old who volunteered his time to run the church's youth ministry. Liviu and I "clicked" immediately and have kept in touch via email and phone for the six years. After the camp was finished, I visited with friends from the previous year, went back to Camp Bradatel and then did a tour of Greater Europe Mission's other ministries in Romania. I was definitely in love and ready to move to Romania ASAP!

That, however, was not God's plan for me. By October of 2002, I had left Greater Europe Mission and taken a job as the Administrator of UrbanPromise Ministries in Vancouver. I thought that I would be there for two years or so and then move to Romania. Mmmmm...no. In the fall of 2006, I went back to Romania to visit friends and explore my options. Romania was on the verge of joining the EU and prices were rising while wages were not. The people were discouraged and many were leaving to get jobs in other countries. It became clear to me that the best thing that I could do was to stay in Vancouver, find ways to encourage my Romanian friends from afar and try to get back to visit them every couple years or so.

Sure enough, two years have gone by and back to Romania I go. My friend, Liviu, has graduated from Bible School and gotten married and I need to go and spend time with him and his new wife. Liviu and I need to talk about his ministry options and how I can help and I want to see if the model of working with children and youth that we use at UrbanPromise is a good fit for Romanian village churches. For the first time, I will visit Bucharest...and I will continue to make new friends and learn more Romanian and eat lots of Romanian food!