...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. :)