After several short term trips and a gap year, I still haven't figured out how to come home from missions. The movement from going to bed each night exhausted from a day pushing your comfort zones and doing the Lord's work to unpacking, grocery shopping and sleeping late never makes complete sense to me. And yet each time I adjust back to everyday life only with a slightly wider perspective and hopefully a more tender heart.
Romania has been no different, my head and heart have been impacted by places, people, responsibility and emotions. This trip was a first for me as I experienced leadership like never before, and a first for David and I as a couple by marking the beginning of a journey of ministry together.
In an attempt to write down our experiences I will begin with explaining how we actually spent our 12 days:
We flew from Dublin to Budapest (Hungary) then travelled by bus to the Exodus center in Sutor Romania where we slept for what was left of the night. We then received two sessions of placement training before we entered 'Bush Camp'. The idea of Bush Camp is that all ‘luxuries’ are temporarily stripped away for 48 hours of experiencing living in poverty. On arrival we could bring only the shorts and T-shirt we were wearing, a hoody and a pair of long trousers (also suncream, our tooth brush and tooth paste). That's no clean undies, no deoderant, no soap.... all of which were considered ‘luxury’ items.
For our first activity we were assigned a patch of land and two ground sheets then built our shelter for the two nights from the stack of wood and limited rope available. The experience continued with several other poverty simulations such as hiking to get firewood, doing blindfolded activities to highlight blindness as a poverty issue and making paper bags with flour and water to try and pay rent to slumlords in a simulation of an Indian slum. Meals were frugal and evenings were spent round the campfire.
Some enjoyed bush camp more than others, but certainly all our team missed it when it was over. Personally, I loved it, nonetheless I was still overly excited when it was time to be reunited with a proper toilet and shower. Its fair to say at least one aspect of the poverty experienced impacted each individual bush camper. Though our time was just a small glimpse into the every day reality of others; it was effective in gaining a better grasp of the hardships and in beginning to understand the cyclic nature of poverty.
After scrubbing off the layers of dirt we were eager to get started at our host church. We were staying in fantastic accommodation as part of a Reformed Church in a small village called Kornesti. Our schedule began on our first morning with the start of our children’s club where we taught the story of Daniel using games, songs, a memory verse, main story, snacks, craft and quiz. Our team of young people ran the kids club and we assigned them a different responsibility each day (mostly prepared in advance); stretching themselves by learning and delivering talks, embarrassing themselves in the kids songs and quizes and completely exceeding our expectations of them as they communicated love to the children and developed initiative in the preparations.
Afternoons were divided between practical work around where we were staying and home visits in the local village. Home visits consisted of taking a food parcel to visit (usually) a widow in the village and chat with her through the translator, find out about her life, then read some verses from the bible and pray together. I had done something similar several times on my gap year but other than that, this was something completely new to the team who were all individually impacted by the stories they heard, homes they visited and emotions these visits involved.
We would return from these ministries to a welcomed meal cooked by our hosts then we went straight into a time spent with the youth. Working with the Romanian youth was a huge learning experience for the team as they had to adapt a slightly awkward first night into an engaging programme through rethinking and giving it over into the Lord's hands. These times became really valuable as the team shared testimonies, we played crazy games, had a movie night, bonfire and an Irish night; complete with Irish food, decorations and dances.
Of course we did lots of other things outside of our schedule such as David preaching in the Sunday morning service, and the team taking part of the afternoon service. We also had a day off where we could play tourist and visit a salt mine, do a high ropes course, swim in a salt lake and explore the nearest city in the evening. But this is a taster of what our ministry looked like out there, to be followed soon with further reflections.
