Around The Blocks

As we move closer to the start of our fall program we've been busy doing many different things. We put together proposals to send to the directors of the orphanages and we came up with new ideas for our classes. This year we will be spending the whole week working in our southern location which is where we've been seeing so much fruit in the young people's lives. This will be good for us because we'll be able to focus on and work with all the kids there instead of just a few like last year. It will also cut down on all the traveling to and from different places like we did last year.

Since we'll be spending most of the week there we spent much of this week looking for an apartment where we can stay. It turned out to be way harder than we thought to find something. After walking around for hours the first day and looking at the front doors of every single block building we saw, we hadn't found a single apartment for rent. The second day we finally found an announcement for a one bedroom apartment that sounded good, so we checked it out and it would be perfect for us. The problem was that the owner is in Spain and the person managing it was trying to take advantage of us because we're Americans so we must be rich! We had our Romanian director call him later and he made an offer so we are waiting to hear back if it accepted by the owner or not. Please pray for this, being the only apartment we found in three days of searching it is really important that we can rent it. We are trusting that God will provide and we would really appreciate your prayers for just that.

By the third day of searching everything started looking the same and we found ourselves going in circles and looking at the same places twice, it just took us a while to figure that out. The city isn't even that big but there are so many blocks that look nearly identical.

We found this fighter jet in one of the parks we walked through.

Another thing we did was hand out school kits to all the kids at the local orphanages, even ones we don't get to work with full time. The teachers were especially thankful for this help since supplies like crayons, notebooks, pens, and pencils are hard to come by for them.

Our partner Mariana handing off one of the kits, we gave one to every classroom.

Of course we were immediately greeted with lots of hugs and happiness from the girls we know from summer camps.

There were also some meetings with directors to go over our programs which leads to the next big prayer request. We had a problem with one of them over the summer because some of "his" kids were baptized, and he is still trying to keep us from talking about God at all. Please pray for God to lead us and give us wisdom in how to deal with this and how to be creative in how we share about him. Please pray for God to soften this man's heart so he lets us openly share about Jesus again. Please pray for the meetings with other directors that will happen soon and pray that we will have a great program that will lead these kids to Christ. Please pray for us and the rest of our staff and especially the two new couples here who will be starting language lessons soon.

Thanks so much for lifting us up in your prayers, we are so thankful that God honors the prayers of his children!