Seven Days of Adventure and Learning

Seven days, the number of days recorded for God to create the earth. Somehow I have to believe that His days had a different time value than mine (or He is way more productive). Most likely both are very true.

My last Seven days felt long although were packed with things to do and see, places to go, people to met and lessons to learn.

Things to Do and People to Meet:

1) Help Cerbu a Romanian who, with his New Zealander wife Nadine, provide shelter and a home for street kids (Association Mana). We spent a day painting Caleb House, the soon to be opened Boys Home.

Looking down on common area from second floor landing

Serving as "edging girl". Check out the ladder!

View from the second floor

Temporary restroom and electrical box

(yes the door to the restroom is missing)

2) Help a missionary friend pick some of the seemingly never ending fruit in his garden. We picked raspberries, mini pears and peaches. We left the apples, big pears and other fruit for another day.

Some "fruit" of our labors

3) Help Jackie Ramsey bag food for distribution to some of the Arad's poorest residents. Jackie has been here for over 15 years and her ministry is called Romanian Children's Relief. With the help of five Romanian volunteers and us three Americans we assembled over 230 bags containing oil, flour, corn meal, beans, rice, noodles, soup flavor packets, and cans of pineapple. And to celebrate the end of this project we all shared pizza and soda. It was a fabulous day. (Sorry, no photos of this event.)

Things to See and Places to Go:

Old plane made into a restaurant

Buzias, the beautiful town of mineral springs

Village scene

Romanians seem to love tile - check out this exterior wall!

One determined Billy Goat

Baby Porcupine - it was the size of a softball

Lessons Learned:

I really enjoy Romania, the people and the culture. Some of the things I really enjoy is that people will just stop by without calling ahead or making a plan. Of course, it does take some getting used to people just walking into the house without knocking.

Romanians are probably some of the most helpful people I have come across in all my travels. While at the tram kiosk purchasing "one way" tickets a woman approached us and explained that it is best to purchase a day pass since it is only 50 cents more than ours and you can ride as many trams as you want in a day. Then another woman made sure we knew where to stand and also explained the purpose of the three domes on the cathedral (which was across from the tram stop). Now just in case you think my Romanian has grown by leaps and bounds, we had a Romanian friend (Dea) with us who translated all these interactions for us. See how nice and wonderful Romanians are?

I continue to acquire (learn) more Romanian language and can construct a few sentences. Some of the kids I play with have taught me new words: Fund (someone's bottom) aroma - means "flavor", ie - what flavor ice cream, spune pronounced like our word "spoon" with an "eh" sound at the end - means "tell". My new "favorite", only because it is such a mouthful, is dumneazeu sa te binecuvinteze which means "God Bless You" in the church sense. Luckily, the way to respond to a sneeze, sanatate, is much shorter and wouldn't take me all day to figure out how to pronounce. Sanatate really means "health to you" or something like that.

Over the next couple of says I should have a better idea of what my last three weeks in Romania will look like and what might happen next. Until then "Dumneazeu sa te binecuvinteze".