Draganesti to Craiova and Beyond

I’m not entirely sure where to begin. We made it to Draganesti (dragon-esht) late in the evening and house host had pizza ready for us. Then we went around looking for our rooms. The Dear God girls were assigned a room with the Sweet Baby Ray girls aka the SQL girls. Someone was feeling sick and so they moved into, what would soon be known as, the sick house, next door.

The next morning we had orientation. Hope Ministries is a busy place. Raul told us a bit about how the ministry worked and he also had each of us answer some questions: Who are you in the US? Who are you in the Kingdom? What is your 5 year plan? What can you do for Raul? What can Raul do for you? He then took notes on each of us and our answers, highlighting things that will immediately be useful for his ministry and asking for a one on one meeting with anyone that mentions an interest in continuing international missions after this trip.  Then we were free for the rest of the day. The only problem was that several more people came down sick and all moved into the sick house.

The rest of the squad went to work the next morning. 9am we had group worship and prayer and from 10-12 we worked on posting and commenting on the many different social media pages started by Raul. Well the rest of the squad did. A man named Nic showed up at the house just after 9am and asked for a group of 4 to come do ministry with him for the day. With two people out sick my team was a group of 4 so I volunteered us.

We ran to get our hoodies and sweatshirts since it was only supposed to be in the mid 40’s and Nic decided my jacket from Guatemala wasn’t going to be warm enough. He then told me I could borrow a coat from his house once we got there. We got to his house and he showed us around and we met his wife and son. It turns out he is a honey bee farmer and that honey was sooo good. He also introduced us to a new super fruit that we don’t really have in the US but we absolutely should. In English it’s called sea buckthorn. When mixed with honey and water it tastes a bit like Sunny D. Anyway he let me borrow a very nice coat and then we sat outside and put packets together to give to people around the neighborhood. There was a calendar a devotional book and 2 seed packets. After we prepped a bunch of those we went back inside for lunch. Pasta. It doesn’t get better than that. After lunch we drove further into the village and started handing out the packets. At the same time I started feeling a fever coming on. I tried to push through while avoiding direct contact with the locals but it got to the point where I was starting to feel dizzy, so when we went back to the car to get more packets for street evangelism, I got into the back seat and curled up and slept until everyone came back to leave. We drove back to the mission house and found out 3 more people had come down sick during the day and so they had turned Lilac’s room into the latest sick room. I grabbed my stuff and joined them.

Five miserable days of an off again on again fever and a horrible racking cough and finally I moved back to my room. I’m so tired of getting sick.

Finally I was capable of getting out of bed and so I tried my hand at another day of ministry. Of course I managed to be in a group walking around outside for several hours. Colton, Jack and I went around ton handing out calendars with bible verses on them and talking with people when we got the chance. I finished the afternoon coughing like crazy again and so sat out the next day to try and recover.

A squad fresh from training camp was in a nearby town, working with our same host, so they came down to meet us and we got to do a combined worship session. It was a refreshing and reviving morning spent with O squad.

Joey decided to distance himself from the ministry that day and packed his things and moved to Bucharesti (book-uh-rest) to think about whether he wanted to continue on the trip or not.

Afterwards we split up into groups again and this time I went to do some yard clean up. We had to get all the trash and glass, and bricks out of the yard so they could move a shipping container, they were using as a church, onto the property. We were burning the trash and the thick black smoke kept blowing in our faces and everyone in that group with me had also been sick and the smoke set off our coughing again.

We all claimed first dibs on showers when we got back. We smelled like we’d been hanging out at the dump in Nicaragua. Plus we ran the water as hot as we could to try and use the humidity to clear up our coughs because we were heading to Bucharesti for the weekend.

We found out that Joey decided to go home that evening and spent some time in our team praying for him and his future back in the states. God has big plans for him and I can’t wait to see what amazing things will be done through him.

It was a 5hr train ride on the world’s slowest train. It only went 25kmph. We could have driven there in three hours but the train was too cheap to pass up. We got there in early afternoon and everyone split up for lunch as soon as we checked in. I found an Italian place around the corner from our hostel so Samantha and I ate there. Then we headed towards old town where most everyone else went to find the Van Gogh café. The wait was over 30min so we decided to find dessert somewhere instead. On our way there we passed a bookstore and so I popped my head in real quick and it was gorgeous. I forced myself to leave before I got lost in the shelves.

The dessert place we found was AMAZING. The served desserts on one side and tea on the other so we got both and sat and enjoyed the warmth of it before heading back out into the cold. While we were there someone sent me a photo of a Korean foods store. It wasn’t really out of our way so I forced Samantha to go with me on our way back to the hostel even though she wasn’t feeling great.

No one else was there from our group just a couple of other guys traveling so we chatted with them and ordered dinner online. Then Samantha went to bed because she really wasn’t feeling well. Everyone went out for breakfast the next morning except a couple of us. I stayed up too late and my bed was really uncomfortable. It was like trying to sleep on top of the monkey bars at a playground.

I did meet up with a group for lunch and then, thanks to Samantha, made early afternoon train back. The whole group from lunch was supposed to be on that train but they stopped to look at a building and didn’t make it to the subway in time to get to the station to get on the train.

As soon as we got back we went shopping. Our team was out of groceries and it would be after dark before any of the others made it back. We borrowed a shopping cart from a store the week before so we used that to haul our groceries. No one else does that and the sidewalk was not made for it so basically we looked like crazy foreigners.

Ministry started again the next day and our entire team was together for the first time. We went with our host’s brother and his family to pass out food to some people in a nearby neighborhood and help clean up their church.

I got sick again and took another day off after that. The cough had come back in force and I wasn’t able to sleep because of it. But once I finally went back out for ministry we met the sweetest family ever. Our group was requested because they wanted the guys to do some digging. M&D welcomed us so warmly and we all got along so well we forgot to leave! We spent our day cleaning up trash behind their house while the guys dug a large hole to put it all in. The trash pickup hadn’t been running for 2 years. Once it started getting dark we went inside for tea and we got them to tell us how they met which prompted M to pull out the family photo album which we proceeded to go through, twice! Then I finally checked my phone and realized I had a lot of missed calls and texts because we were very late for dinner back at the house.

Needless to say, we went back again. This time they held a special kids program and we helped with the games. Lots of games. Then we went inside for a snack and the young adults started to arrive for their small group. We all ended up playing a game of silent football that was very entertaining because when we lost the football we could ask who had it in English because most of them didn’t know English and other times we would ask in Spanish because a couple people knew that language too. If one of us was it then they would ask in Romanian! We were late for dinner again but this time I made sure to let everyone know that we were still alive.

Then my cough came back and I just felt miserable so I moved into the sick house to let everyone else in my room sleep. I stayed there for our last few days before we all packed up and moved to Craiova.

Craiova was huge compared to where we had just been. Our house was a 20min walk away from our ministry location and it was still cold and windy. I was still sick so I missed the first day of ministry but I joined in the next day.

Each day looked something like this: be at ministry by 9am, start with 1hr of worship. At 10am do an hour of prayer. 11am was an hour dedicated to updating all of our host’s social media pages. 12pm to 1pm was lunch and after that a few would leave with local missionaries while the rest of us went out and tried to make connections with the teens and invite them to a nightly worship and a weekly game night.

One of those days Caitlyn, Samantha, and I got to go visit the Roma community and help with a youth program. We put on a skit (David and Goliath) from memory dating back to Guatemala and played a couple of games. I think that was the only time I went out and did anything extra while we were in Craiova.

Now this may surprise some of you, but I’m very introverted. Going up to people on the street and striking up conversation isn’t something that comes naturally to me. So I mostly joined others when they would go meet up with people to chat and invite them to whatever we were doing that night or I’d be working on typing up the lyrics to the songs we were planning to do.

We were warned by our host that the southern part of Romania can feel very spiritually heavy and that it can manifest itself in different ways. Some people had bad or weird dreams, some people felt tired and unmotivated all the time, and others got sick. My cough didn’t go away until I got to my next ministry location.

I know this blog is way overdo. Forgive me. I clearly wasn’t feeling up to writing a blog during the month and the next month was quite distracting. I’ll post about it in a couple days just so I don’t overwhelm you with so much reading at once. Thanks for all of your prayers in Albania!