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. :)