A quick update

about our not-so-quick trip overseas. We are staying! YAY!? I think yay. We are doing the Discipleship Training School here until september then we are going on outreach (its looking like it will be in Ghana, as long as our Nigerian Leaders get here. Major prayer request for their visas to go through) for two months. We will keep you updated on that... though the blog may cease to be updated when we get on outreach due to a much busier schedule and probably less advanced base. 

We now have triple bunks in our rooms... We are all 5'10 (sammie, myself, and katie who is the other DTS girl) so there is a lot of head-banging and not the concert kind. The two dutch girls for School Of Worship should be arriving at any moment and our female leader from Ireland will be arriving this afternoon as well. 

School started Monday and has been fantastic. We have just been doing orientation but I can say for myself at least, that God did not wait for Lecture to start teaching me. We will be learning how to worship God in everything we do. Can't wait to tell you guys all about that. The Dutch just arrived so i am going to go be friendly...

Some Pictures

Not a ton, but it takes forever to upload them so I just chose a few. The first one is our house! The rest are places from the center.

This blog is killing me

I am trying to get photos up for ya'll and it is not agreeing with me... Give me some time here. 

When the blog decides to agree we will get on those pictures for you. I promise I am trying.

In the mean time, allow me to update you. We went to a romanian "free" church yesterday... Wondering what that means huh? See here in Romania, religion take a huge role. There are "free"churches and there are "Stronghold" churches. Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, these all fall under "stronghold". They are place where religion, law and a Medieval concept of God take a higher place then the love and grace offered to us by Jesus Christ. "Free" churches are trying to break away from all this... 'trying' being the operative word. The pastors are still struggling with control and competition for members. And though the spiritual strongholds are supposedly gone, anyone with a true relationship with Christ can see them lingering right under the surface. Needless to say, we had an interesting time. Between what I have just explained, the crazy heat in a room full of people and the little issue of us not speaking a lick of romanian... oh yeah, it was fun. But we made it through, we did some shopping, we've met the kids. We have a meeting with Selina in a couple hours to discuss how to bring more kids in for the English classes. Life is busy, but we are having an amazing time.

 Here's some stuff I bet you didn't know...

Interesting Fact About Romania #1: People stare at you (usually if they think you are attractive, Sam has started staring back. She's turned it into a game... I always lose)

Interesting Fact About Romania #2: If you want to cross the street, you find a crosswalk, step into the street and hope no one hits you. (It's truly an art to do it without looking like a fool, and we have yet to become artists)

Interesting Fact About Romania #3: Crazy number of Mullets and scene kids...

Interesting Fact About Romania #4: McDonald's is considered a 'nice' place to eat. (And it is! everything is fresh. It's bizarre.)

Interesting Fact About Romania #5: There are 3 classes of Gypsy. Low, Middle and Rich. (We are getting much better at figuring out who is who)

Well, this is all I have to say for now. If there is anything you want to know about or know more about, feel free to leave a comment requesting that info. 

*Amy*

Romania at last...

hey you guys. this is sam. sitting in my new bedroom in romania. i cannot even begin to express how incredible this country is. everything about it takes my breath away. we have the window open in our room and can here the cars passing by outside, and the river, and the frogs =] haha. 

the weather is incredible =] as we got off the plane it was raining. and now its like super humid and amazing. 

the city is so cool. you can walk in the street in front of cars and the cars will stop! its frkn amazing! everything is so old. there are outdoor markets and malls and a man on a horse statue baha.

we went to a football (soccer) game at the mall and it was really awesome. everybody was really into it like screaming and hooting and hollering at the projector screen haha. i can still the horns honking from the celebration of the tied game.

ha well i'm going to go take a shower or something. i wish you all could see how amazing it is here. its incredible to think how different this place is from colorado. we will continue to keep you updated. and we are going to be taking tons of pictures tomorrow so that you can see what we see. love you all.

-sam

European women are scaaaaarrrryyyy

So where did we leave off? DIA? Oh yes... well, we ran though Newark airport nearly missing our flight...

But our bags made it to Stockholm! YAY! We have our clothes! We got questioned by the nice swedish lady at the Visa Counter... at least, I think she was trying to be nice... she was more all around horrifying... asking us question about how much money we had and when we returned... asking to see our tickets... scary scary lady... or maybe we are just tired.... 

Currently, we are waiting in the Hotel in Stockholm until noon [it's 9 here, 1 am back home] so we can check in to our room and get clean... cause trust, at the moment we are not. Just getting to the hotel was a hoot... the bus driver laughed at me cause I am not strong enough to lift our bags onto the bus... the elevator was crazy small! Us giant americans and our 4 bags barely fit... I was actually convinced the door might hit by bottom...Right now there is a man wandering around the hotel with blocks of cheese in a plastic bags... 

It's hard to believe that by tomorrow afternoon we will be in Romania, ready for the rest of this adventure to start. For now we are just trying to amuse ourselves and hoping that someone checks out early. Keep on praying, cause I am convinced it's making a difference.  

Because we are stuck in DIA

Our adventure began a little ahead of schedule... well, actually it is behind schedule, but we didn't expect things to get this crazy this quickly. Our flight to Newark was cancelled because (and I quote Sam on this) "We are going to be missionaries and make a huge impact and somebody doesn't want that" Yup, it's true...and everything almost went crazy bad... because there were no Continental flights out until tomorrow. But eventually that worked out and after an hour and a half, we got our bags checked (but stay tuned to see if they make it to stockholm, cause we are cutting it more then close with our flight connection =])

So we get to Security... and we were in trouble... we had to go in the thing that blows air on you... and then we needed even more screening because we must look like terrorists... so they wiped everything in our bags down with little white clothes and put them in a machine...

Now we have gotten through security, we have eaten and we are waiting to get on our 10:15 to Newark... good times

A bit about Romania

Hi Everyone,
So I promised a post on Romanian History (which is a bit complicated) so here goes....

Romania was part of the Communist Block, but is awesomely unique the goals of the dictatorship. You see the romania was under the tyranny of a man named Nicolae Ceauşescu. Ceauşescu visited China at some point and was in awe of their Army, he returned to Romania to build his own army. How did he attempt this you may ask? Well, he paid women to have and raise children. And it probably would have worked too, if he hadn't been executed on public television during the Revolution in 1989. The people were so concerned that he or his wife was not dead that there were riots because only the bodies and not the act of murder. With Ceauşescu dead, The government was no longer paying women to have children...or raise them. So can we guess where all those kids wound up?


Orphanages. Hundreds and Hundreds of orphanages, thousands of orphans....at least abandoned children. the orphanages were (and are) horrible places full of neglect along with physical, emotional and sexual abuse. many children would rather run away and live in sewers, becoming theives and prostitutes, than live in these homes. The moral slump and high rate of prostitution has only added to the issue of abandoned children.

Upon entering the EU [which promotes some super fun end times stuff, like one world currency and all that jazz] Romania was forced to shut down all orpahnages. These days, all the children (supposedly) have been moved in to group homes, which are children from 0-10 or 11-18 living in homes of 8 kids and two "house mothers". That is where Sam and I will be going, to help those children trapped in this cycle of poverty and sin, trying to bring the one thing that can break it, God's Love.

Keep on checking up. We will talk in Romania.


In Christ,
Amy

Let us introduce ourselves

Hey everybody!

I just got done setting up this oh-so-lovely blog. I figured we should get to a bit a of an explanation for those of you who have either forgotten or simple are unaware of what Sam and I are going to be up to in Romania. At some point, I will explain Romanian History to you a bit, but for now let's just say it wasn't good. There are tons of orphans, so that is half of our job. We are going to go and take care of them to give their regular care-takers a break and hopefully show them the Love of God through our actions. Also, we are going to be teaching english to high school students. We ar going with Youth With A Mission and staying on the base there with all the missionary and DTS people. We are going to technically be staff members. YAY! We will keep you guys updated via this splendid blog. Both Sam and I will be writing on it, telling you all kinds of stories to remind you that we are safe and doing the Lord's work. We leave on June 11th...I will try to get that Romanian history blog up before we go, but things are kind of crazy!

Your Sister in Christ,
Amy