We made it!

Yep, as the last post said, we made it to Romania. Once we FINALLY got there we went straight to the church to unload and had about 30 minutes before kids started showing up for the one night program we were doing there. This program was supposed to be on Thursday but because of us being late they didn't want us to miss any time in the village so they shuffled some things around. After having our little carnival type games with them we went to eat dinner.

I guess i should say first- the church we worked with over there is my church in Knoxville's sister church- it's Bethany Baptist Church.

The kids all seemed to have fun and we had games and face painting and prizes (they really liked the prizes). I would say one of the favorite parts of the evening though were the clowns. I don't know what it is that always seemed to get a laugh. What the best part for me with the clowns was seeing a completely different side of someone as she took on the role of a clown and did an excellent job!

We arrived to our homes about 10:30/11;00 or so and my friend and I stayed up with our host family until 2:00- introducing them to the world of skip-bo. They enjoyed it (although they didn't enjoy losing!). After 4 hours of sleep it was time to get up (already) and then we headed to the village of Ortisoara. We went to a school (kind of like our elementary school) to begin our day. We were scheduled to be there from 9-? with the morning starting at 10- we didn't get there until 9:30 and when we got there the kids were already lining up. We were really glad to see that because they didn't get the message in time that we were late in arriving in Romania and they had shown up on Monday. However, they came back out and followed us around. We had shadows all morning. Here's the schedule of our day: 10:00- brief (5 minute) gathering in the big room, 15 minutes outside all-group game, 15 minute gathering in the big room, into the classrooms for teaching, games, songs, puppets, clowns, Bible verses.

Now- I should preface this by saying we almost were not allowed to come to the village. Romania is very much Greek Orthodox and they don't like outside people coming in to teach things that aren't necessarily in line with their teaching- however, the mayor told the principal that we were coming and she had no choice in the matter. That didn't sit well with her- at the beginning. However, you will see through the next few posts that time changed a lot!

After the teaching time (and all the other stuff mentioned above) we headed back to the gathering room for about 5-10 minutes before heading outside for the carnival time. We did that for about 30-45 minutes before it was time for the kids to head home.

About 1:30- we left and went back to Timisoara to eat lunch (the bistra we ate at belonged to a member of the church so she allowed us to have a tab that we paid at the end of the week) and basically turned around and headed back at 4:15 to do the same thing from 5-7:30ish. The morning was designed for the younger children and the evening for the older (they were taking exams in the morning) however, the first day we had several of the same children come back (that's important for tomorrow's post). We headed out of the village about 8 and back to the bistra for dinner and then to our host family's houses. We again stayed up late (about 12:30 this time) before another short night of sleep. Come back tomorrow to hear/read some more. I will say that it does get a little more interesting and I'm going to work on getting some pics up but I need to be careful because they involve children so I'm trying to pick out some that are representative of the week.