Wedding, Playing, And Praying

Last weekend we attended the wedding of our friends Cristi and Amy. We went with many of the H2H staff and had a really nice time. This was our first Romanian wedding and it was quite the experience, and we didn't even stay until 5:00 AM when it was done. The ceremony started at 6:00 PM and after lots of pictures after that the reception started. The first course of appetisers came out at around 9:30 and the main course came around 12:00. We left after we ate the main course, there was probably cake later but we were all too tired to stay longer.

Sunday afternoon Rebecca moved to the girls transition house along with several other staff and interns to prepare for the girls camp that will be starting soon. Older girls will come to the house and will be pampered, have a scavenger hunt, and learn how to be the kind of woman God wants them to be. I stayed home and have been working on preparing for the hiking trip with JT, who is in the process of raising money to come on full time staff. We will be taking 11 older boys on a backpacking trip in the mountains with a few other volunteers. The boys will learn how to rough it, do orienteering and geocaching, and will learn about purity and what kind of men God wants them to be. After the girls and boys camps we will be running two separate camps since we'll be working with kids from around 6 orphanages. It will be non stop fun.

We also went to two orphanages when we had time in between all the prep work, as we also have a short term trip going on here. It was fun playing with the kids as always. There was a line for piggy back rides, and we colored and played games.

The balloons were a big hit too.

As we start the summer ministry we will be in different locations and have different schedules than normal, and we're not sure what kind of internet access we'll have. We'll try to keep the blog as up to date as we can.

Please pray for these things during this time:

-for God to supply us and the rest of the staff and volunteers with strength, energy, patience, and overflowing love. We know we can't do this without God's provision.

-for opportunities for us to share Jesus' love with the kids and for the kids to have open hearts and to receive Jesus in their lives.

-for safety in traveling, we'll all be doing a lot of it.

-for us to be flexible and to be lead by God to follow His plan.

-against the forces of the evil one who will try to stop our ministry because we are giving glory to God and making disciples.

Thanks so much for your prayers and your faithfulness. We really appreciate your support and thank God for your involvement in our ministry.

Spring- New Beginings

Spring is coming here! Today was in the 60's and sunny. After winter we all look forward to spring. Just like after difficult phases in our life we look forward to less difficult ones. We have been in Romanian for over 6 months now! And what does that mean? We are almost finished with language lessons! We have one more, on Friday, and we are going to tour some of downtown and talk about the architecture and history. Does this mean we can speak Romanian fluently? No! But it does mean we understand a lot and can speak Romanian, we just have a lot more work ahead of us. As we took a walk today through the park- Tineretului Park is just down the street- I was thinking about the new life springing forth and how a lot of things are just a matter of perspective. The following two pictures are our view from our apartment.

We could think about how much less space we have, how we don't have a garden or a yard for that matter, how many people are around, OR we can be thankful for a nice place to stay, being close to a metro (subway) stop, having a little market just outside our building, and the opportunity to impact all the people around us. And have our eyes open for the gems amidst the concrete jungle. Like the school below for example, way cooler than my high school!

Below are some picture of the lake in the park. Which side do you prefer to look at?

And I had to include a picture of Mark's favorite friends, some of them are actually very pretty, just not the ones that poop on our window sill :)

Part of moving to a different culture is finding ways to join in the new culture while keeping part of who you are. Eating gogosi is an easy way to be a little Romanian! We are thankful to be here, to be learning the language, the culture, and getting to know the babies and our kids at the orphanage. It hasn't always been easy, but we know God has a great purpose here and we keep looking for the signs of new life...and sometimes the smell of gogosi.

More Christmas Activities And A Birthday

This past Thursday was the Peris kid's Christmas program. They preformed plays, sang songs and even had a dance. It was fun to watch them preform and they had so much fun doing it.

The first play, about Santa Claus.

The second play, about Christmas trees.

One of the programs we've done at the orphanage this year is the dance class. This was the debut and the kids did great!

Us with Cladiu, who made sure to sit between us for the shows.

After the program at Peris, we had our staff Christmas party. We had an awesome spread of food and dessert. We played some games and exchanged gifts.

Yumm!

Heidi, our intern (who just returned home), read her awesome rap about all the staff.

The Staff at the party, we all had such a good time.

Saturday was Rebecca's birthday. We celebrated with some of the staff at Pipera. Krista made awesome stuffed french toast.

Jen and Krista shoveling snow. We got around 10 inches over the course of the week which Jen thinks is the total amount they got last year. We spent some time shoveling and then Krista and Heidi made a snow gnome. The week ended with a wonderful church service where we sang traditional Romanian Christmas carols and heard (and mostly understood) a nice Christmas message.

Christmas Parties

Everywhere we look we see the signs of Christmas here in Romania. Lights and decorations are up all over town, stores and vendors have stocked up on holiday items, and we've heard carolers in a subway station and in our apartment building. It is a fun time and it is celebrated much the same here as it is at home. This is also a time filled with lots of hustle and bustle making it is easy to lose focus of the real reason for the season: the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Since the focus of our lives is to glorify God we felt privileged to help with some Christmas parties that put the focus of the season where it should be, on Jesus.

We had a great time serving along with our H2H family. We started the party's out by telling the story of Jesus' birth. Then we had the kids guess who each of us was in the story by asking questions about the story.

We played a word scramble game and then a candy game that taught that it is better to give than to receive, although some of the kids didn't really agree with that :-) We also had a snowball fight with paper snowballs.

We helped the older kids to make gingerbread houses. They really enjoyed this activity and especially enjoyed eating the houses when they were done building them.

It is always great to see the kids smiling like this, it is wonderful to be involved in their lives and to brighten up their lives.

Later in the week we drove to Rosiori and Alexandria where there are separate schools for boys and girls. We watched the boys Christmas program and later handed out gift bags to them for Christmas.

At Alexandria the girls were really excited and overjoyed to receive presents from us. It is a big deal for them to have presents because they have so few possessions of their own.

One more thing that happened that had nothing to do with Christmas was that Mark had an accident with the computer. While plugging the computer in it slipped out of his had and the screen hit the corner of the coffee table. Ouch. Mark ordered a new screen and will try to replace it on his own, because to have it repaired by Apple would cost the same as the entire computer. Thankfully we're still able to use the computer, we just can't see very much.

Preparing for Christmas

This past week the kids at Periş decorated the club room for Christmas. We made snowflakes, snowman mobiles, and ornaments. Later that week they decorated an artificial tree. They kids really enjoyed making these crafts and were very excited. This time of year is busy, but a fun time to be working with the kids.

Making snowflakes

Mark and I with Lorenzo and Catalina

Excitement (and crafts) in the air

This past week we also decorated our apartment for Christmas. We went to Carrefour and bought a small artificial tree and decorated it. We also put on display the glass ornaments and table cloth we bought in Sinaia.

Our apartment

Yet in this time of business, shopping and activities sometimes we forget what we are celebrating, or lack the joy we should have. Do the gifts really matter? Do we really need all homemade goodies? Or is what we need some excitement like the kids have. Not excitement for presents, toys, and candy, but excitement in remembering our Savior's coming to earth. This Christmas we are telling (again) the true Christmas story to the kids. Will you join us in praying for these kid's hearts, that they will be able to know who Christ really is and have eternal joy? It is the best gift of all!

Ziua Recunostintei - Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving week is always a time of reflecting on our blessings and giving thanks to God for what He has done for us. This year our hearts are especially overflowing with thankfulness and we wanted to share with you what we are thankful for. One year ago we had just put our house up for sale and started fund raising so that we could come to Romania as missionaries. Praise God that even in the down economy He miraculously sold our house and raised up many faithful people to support our ministry here. We are so thankful for our supportive family and great friends who continue to pray for us and stay in contact with us.

We are very thankful for our financial and prayer supporters and want to let them know how much they mean to us. We could not be doing this without their support. We are thankful for the call God placed in our lives to minister in Romania. We thank God for giving us a great family here in the staff of H2H and our friends from our church here. We have been blessed with a smooth transition and have been learning the language quickly. Our faith and bond with the Lord has been tremendously strengthened over this last year as we learned many lessons about patience and looking to God as our sole provider. His guidance is precious to us and we thank Him so much for all these things.

We celebrated Thanksgiving here by having most of the graduates of the H2H Transition Programs over for dinner. We had a wonderful feast and after dinner there were several skits and songs. It was a really fun time and it was great to see so many young adults that have changed lives because of the work that H2H did with them.

Nearly 60 people came, everyone did a wonderful job preparing everything for this huge get together.

Of course what we are most thankful for is the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for us on the cross. He has given us the gift of eternal life and has called us to a life of service to Him. It is still amazing to think of how much He loves us and that He longs to call us His children.

After reading this I hope that your heart is overflowing with thankfulness to God. We have all been greatly blessed and we usually take it for granted. We would love to hear what you are thankful for, please comment so that we can share in share in rejoicing with you.

Romanian Experiences

Since our trip to Sinaia we have continued to keep busy each week. It was time for us to apply for our long term visas. Thank goodness we have Costel here who is the Romanian president of H2H. He was working on our visas before we even knew it. First we had to have a doctor give us a clean bill of health so we went and had a very thorough exam. He asked us if we were sick and he listened to our breathing, then declared us officially healthy. The day we were supposed to apply there was a problem with the department's fax machine and they changed their schedule so we had to go back a couple days late. After waiting in line for two and a half hours we finally made it to the window, slightly afraid that they would hassle us for applying late. Praise God that they didn't even say anything about it, so we should be on track to get our visas on time.

On Saturday we went out to eat to an Indian Restaurant for a date night. It was a very nice place and we really enjoyed it. The food was wonderful, top notch quality and it tasted so good. This is one perk of living in the biggest city in Romania, there are lots of different restaurants here.

Mark had Lamb Vindaloo, a very rich curried lamb dish. We had Nan bread and rice with our meal also. Mark had ginger lemonade to drink which had quite a spicy bite to it, very tasty.

Rebecca had mango chicken which was amazing. She also had a mango lassi to drink, which is a yogurt smoothy drink.

The next week started out with Rebecca getting a manicure from Andrea, one of the transition house girls. The girls are doing a program to learn how so that they can earn certificates from the school. This should help them find jobs since this job is in growing demand in Romania. They need live models to practice on so Rebecca and Jen went in, and after three and a half hours and several band-aids they had beautiful nails.

We went to the orphanage twice since the baby hospital is still closed. We had fun with the kids, Rebecca got her hair styled and Mark played soccer. It is always a joy to see the kids and to see how they react when we come there.

We also helped with the class that H2H is doing with the kids, the theme is heros and the qualities they have. We are trying to teach the kids that they can have these traits in their lives also and that they can be heros too.

We continue to study the language and this fills up our time when we are not doing all these other things. It has been going well and we are able to understand a lot more of what people are saying. We still have four months of class so there is still much to learn but we are thankfull that God is blessing us so far.