Beautiful Vienna

After all of our summer camps and the busy summer ministry are done we usually get some time to recharge and take a vacation.  This year we headed home for Rebecca's sister's wedding which is this weekend.  On the way over, we stopped in for a short visit in Vienna, Austria.  We met up with and stayed with our friend Carolin who was an intern with H2H last year.

Vienna is a really beautiful city with many palaces, churches and buildings with amazing architecture.  This is one of the three imperial palaces there that we saw.  Inside was an art museum with lots of classical paintings.

At the palaces the landscaping is always immaculate with flowers, shrubs and fountains.

This is the banquet hall in another one of the palaces, unbelievably big and so ornate and rich.

In the old part of town there was limited car traffic and lots of horse drawn carriages.

There were also many well kept parks.

We also had the good fortune of going to a symphony orchestra concert where they played Mozart and Strauss pieces.  It was really fun and we enjoyed hearing such classical music in the place that it was composed and first played.  That is one of the neat things about touring different places in Europe, there is so much history there.

This is one of the main churches in town, St. Stevens.  I climbed the 343 steps of the bell tower to get a great view of the whole city.

The inside was amazing and we got to do something that we've never done before, going down into the catacombs underneath the church.  It started off as just some normal looking rooms that were nicely finished but as we went further they got darker and older feeling.  Then we were able to look inside some rooms and see the bones and old rotting coffins.  It was kind of creepy knowing that these were real bones and skulls that used to belong to real people.

In the streets there were many statues and monuments like this one.

This is the altar inside of another church that we visited.

This is the state opera house all lit up at night.

This is one of the palaces that we visited and it looked really cool at night.

You can tell that Vienna takes a lot of pride in their city and loves to show off the beauty of their historical buildings.  This is their town hall.

We stayed with Carolin and she was a very good hostess, arranging all sorts of good breads and cheeses and cooking for us the first night after we arrived.

The following nights we went out to eat and had some delicious Indian, Thai, and Austrian food.

We really had a good time in Vienna and with Carolin.  It is always fun to see a new city especially one as nice and full of things to do as Vienna.

FairHaven Team!

Last week we had the incredible pleasure of working with a group of people from FairHaven Ministries, our home church!  We have been praying for a group of people to come and work with us her from our church for a long time, and our prayers were finally answered.

The McCrum family came along with Howard and Genny.  They all have awesome stories of how God provided for them to come.  Howard is the only one who had been here before, in fact, he was with us on our very first trip in 2007.

Each day we went to one of the orphanages and did the same VBS program that they did at our church this summer.  The kids absolutely loved the singing and making motions with the songs!  After singing we did crafts like paper plate fish, painted sun catchers and bracelets.

After crafts we went outside to play on the playground and always had a blast.

 

There are many new kids at this orphanage so even we don't know them all since we normally don't work there.  It was fun getting to know more kids.

The girls had their nails panted many times.

The guys carried lots of kids around.

And we had lots of fun playing around.

 

More nail painting...

...and lots of sidewalk chalk drawings.  Usually after the orphanage the team would go to the baby hospital and love on the many babies there.

We had a really great time working with this wonderful group of people (here the other couples on staff are with us, Steven & Haley and Josh & Missy)!  It was a big encouragement for us to have people from home come here to work along side of us.  They all had a great time too, building lasting relationships with the kids that they worked with for the whole week.  A big thank you to those who supported them and helped them come.  

We would love to have more people come from home!  Next year another group from our church will be coming so please start thinking and praying about whether God is calling you to do this too.  We will keep you informed of the details as they come.  Of course, you don't have to be from FairHaven to come, you can come with them or with one of the many other groups.  The main thing is that the more people that come to help us out the better, there are so many kids who need love!!!

On another happy note, our car is finally fixed and running great!  Earlier this summer we were driving and a stone somehow got into the engine compartment.  It hit the radiator and caused the coolant to leak out quickly, which caused the engine to overheat rapidly.  That caused the head gasket to rupture.  So we had that all replaced and now it is back to normal.  Thanks for your prayers as we went through trying to figuring it all out and waiting for it to be done.  Please pray that something like that doesn't happen again!

Boys Camp...the best for last

After day camps we had two boys camps.  Boys from four of the orphanages we work with came and spent three days and two nights out at Nenciulesti.  The location is in the middle of a small village so we are always trying to be creative in the activities we choose.

 

One of our longer activities was a compass course through the village.

We had three guys from Kansas that stayed the entire summer and were a big help.

It was quite hot, upper 90's, so we played water games. This is water balloon baseball.

Tug of war on the slip and slide

Ultimate Frisbee

The first group of boys

The first day of the second group of boys ended up a little different than we planned.  We had rain with high winds and the tents the boys were going to sleep in got flooded...but if there is one thing we have learned while being here in Romania, it is to be flexible because plans will change!

 

The wind blew the gate open!

The next day was beautiful!

A different kind of human pyramid :)

And of course, lots of soccer!  The older boys love to play and several of them have a lot of talent!

Singing at the campfire

Obstacle course

 The second group

I hope you are still reading, because the important things are coming now ;)  One of the best parts of having the oldest kids at camp is the level of conversation you can have.  The same curriculum was used from the backpacking trip, from the book of James and about the life of David.  And after the lessons there were many good questions and conversations that occurred.  There are many different reasons why some of these boys are choosing to not follow God, and it is a privilege to be able to openly talk about and discuss the questions they have.  And while we may not have seen anyone change the way they thought, we have the hope that one day God will use our words and bring them to him.  So please join us in praying for these kids, for God to soften their hearts and reveal himself to him, to open their eyes and give them the faith and life they need.  It is a blessing that God has choose us to be a part of these kids lives and that he uses us to show them his love.

Day Camps +

Summer is here and that means summer camp is here too!  We've been having a great time with kids from all the different orphanages.  Our program is about the Olympics and the kingdom of God, so we have lots of fun games and stories and crafts that we are using to point the kids to a relationship with God.

It has been really hot so we've been doing water games every day.  Here we are playing on the giant slip and slide.  This is also a way to get the kids to take a bath without even knowing it because we put soap on to make it slippery :-)

 We also play with water balloons a lot, and we have some special big ones saved for soaking the kids at the end.

Of course we love loving the kids and being loved back!

Duck Duck Goose with water is always one of the favorites.

And we even turn an old milk bin used for making cheese into a mini-pool.

We spend some time each morning and afternoon taking about God and doing crafts like bracelets and cross necklaces.

And we play other games like the pulling the boat relay, bowling, scavenger hunt, hula hoop, and more.

More water...

... And the penalty for getting caught in Duck Duck Goose.

Each time we also separate the kids into different groups and we assign each one a different country.  Then we color flags from our countries and do a parade with the Olympic torch.

Here is where the "+" comes from in the title of this post.  There are a couple other things going on right now that we would like to ask you to pray about.  

We've been talking a lot about the kids we work with who needed to pass the college entrance exam to get into college.  The test is done now and unfortunately no one passed.  This isn't just something that our kids are facing, only about 40% of kids passed in the whole country, just like last year.  There is something majorly wrong here on a country wide educational scale, but it hits our kids the hardest because they will be put out of the orphanage with no possibility to go to college and better their lives.  Many of them will probably enter into our transition program which is great but for some going to college would be a better fit.  Some will retake the test this fall but they have lots of studying to do if they want to have a chance of passing.  Please pray for all of these kids, that God will reveal his plan to them and for there to be good options for them to go forward.  Without family support we may be all that they have as a support network.  Please pray that we will be led by God and know how to help them.

Another unfortunate situation that we have right now is with our car.  We were driving down to camp when we noticed a change in the A/C temperature and very shortly after that the car overheated.  There was no more antifreeze at all even though I had checked right before we left.  We were able to get to a Ford mechanic after filling it back up with water and found that there were around 5 holes in the radiator, probably caused by a rock that somehow got in the fan and was shot at the radiator.  After having that replaced I drove it to camp and noticed that it was low on antifreeze and there was really high pressure in the cooling system.  I took it back to the mechanic and they said that all of their repairs check out and they believe that something was damaged when it overheated.  At this point we need to figure out what it is and are hoping it isn't the worst case scenario which would be the head gasket.  Please pray that we will be able to find the root cause of this and that it can be resolved permanently and inexpensively.  We know that our car is a true gift from God and we praise him for it, so we are praying that if this is an attack from the evil one that it will be stopped and that this will work for God's glory.

Thanks as always for your prayers.  We really rely on God's strength and he uses your prayers in big ways.  Please continue to pray for endurance as even though our camps are a lot of fun, they are really taxing on our energy.  Thanks for being there for us!