The Last Post

Shaun and I have had a lot of time already to reflect on our trip, but I think its nearing the end has made us reflect a whole lot more about what we have seen, if we did a few of the things we set out to accomplish, how our mindsets have changed, etc. Besides having slightly more interesting looking passports (Sidenote - We both have pretty mugshot looking passports to begin with, and our most recent flight from Romania, the borderguard did a double take at my passport picture, then gave himself a little chuckle and said "Bad picture...I think also bad haircut." That made us both laugh pretty hard. When I traveled Europe with Sharelle I had a borderguard show all of his friends my maiden name signature because he thought it was hilarious too...something must be wrong with me). As I was saying...besides having slightly more interesting looking passports, we have learned some things.

In terms of world knowledge, I think we have learned a lot. 'Perspectives' is a theme I have been interested in. I think that the longer I am immersed in one culture the easier it is for me to forget what a different culture's perspective may be. Apart from our ministry and just from our traveling I was able to see this. I was thinking about what it was like last time I was in Italy and how much more chaotic it seemed (I had come from Germany and Switzerland), but this time coming from Africa, Romania and Ukraine, the country of Italy now seems like a highly organized and efficient country.

We certainly feel less "green" in the traveling department than we were when we embarked on the Costa Rica portion of our trip. Shaun did some calculations and figured out that we will have been to 19 countries by the time we get home (which sounds like a whole lot less when you realize that it is a measly 10% of the countries of the world) and will have spent approximately two whole weeks on planes, trains, ships or buses (and by whole I mean 2weeks of 24 hour days).

We had a few goals in terms of doing ministry while we were gone. One of those things was to try to be a blessing to the organizations or missionaries we were visiting and we hope that we did that, but our hosts would be the only people who could really answer that question. We also hoped to discover what some good ways would be to support ministries from home...I do not know where I would even start trying to describe what we have learned in this area...I think we have a whole lot more questions than when we began. What I do know for sure is that quotation that states "The older I get the less I realize that I know," has already proved true for me in my short life. If I could reword it (even though I do realize the first was a paraphrase) I would say, "The extent of my knowledge is indirectly proportional to my perception of the extent of knowledge I have already obtained." (After looking back at that, I realize I maybe only just changed it into a math equation). There are too many things in the area of ministry that we have learned to be able to post on here, but we will be home soon, so if you have questions, feel free to ask.

I should probably also let you all know that we will not be officially settled again in the Lower Mainland until October 5th. We will only be home for just over one day and we head to my parents' cabin for a couple of weeks with my family, then we will be home for three weeks and will head to the Maritimes for a couple of weeks with Shaun's family to celebrate his great grandmother's 100th birthday.

So thank you to all of you who have faithfully read this blog up until now. Sorry for the disjointed thoughts again today (we are back in countries with reliable but expensive internet). We are really looking forward to seeing everyone when we get home.

Brenda

On the home stretch

There are a few things that have indicated to me that it's about time to go home. Firstly, at one time or other both Shaun and I have have expressed our desire to be able to find a an outlet converter from someone at home so that we will finally be able to charge some of our electronics that have been dead for some time. We seem to have forgotten that North American products containing North American plugs intended for use with 110V do not need converters. The second reason is our diminishing health. I have mentioned before that illness and health issues have been a theme of this trip so far.

As mentioned in my last blog, the "ministry" portion of our trip is finished, so when Shaun headed to the airport in Odessa I did not know where we would end up. It is a good thing for him that we did not catch a flight right away because he ended up getting fairly ill losing the entire contents of his stomach multiple times. Although still not feeling wonderful, he felt recovered enough to feel up to catch a ship to Turkey. It was a day and a half journey on the sea traveling on a glorified ferry without beds. It ended up being bad timing for me because it was just as I was falling asleep my body decided to catch whatever it was that Shaun had. The contents of my stomach then proceeded to be emptied several times all through the night and into the following day. However, had I not been sick, the ride into Istanbul by ship is really quite beautiful, and I would highly recommend it.

We spent some time in a quiet town by the Black Sea trying to recuperate and then some time in Istanbul. According to Wikipedia (in other words believe it or not), the city has a population more than a third of all of Canada's population. We found that quite hilarious.

We are now back in Bucharest for the purpose of catching a flight to Venice. (Yay Venice!) This whole country (Romania) is full of crazy drivers (and not crazy drivers like in Germany where they are fast but know what they are doing - here they are fast and don't know what they are doing). In Bucharest one of the more amusing sights is the location people decide to park their cars. The only rule here is that anything goes. It really doesn't matter how many other cars you block in or whether you are on the sidewalk or a bike lane or in the middle of the street, you park wherever it is convenient for you at the moment.

Camp

Since last time I wrote we have been cut off from any form of communication with the outside world, so it's hard to know where to start. We were staying an hour and a half outside of Odessa and were leading two eight day English camps. The camps were very similar to Christian summer camps in Canada with the added aspect of English lessons: games, worship, bible study, swimming, skit nights, special activities, etc. Each camp had about 60 people total, 16 of those being Americans coming solely for the purpose of the camps, 5 of those being long-term Odessa staff and 6 of those being translators.

Shaun was volunteered (by me) as the "Games Master" and was much appreciated by everyone in the camp for creating a wide variety of games for the campers to play. The hit of the camp was a game he created similar to Around-the-table ping pong (aka 'Terrorist Ping Pong' in our group of friends) using a giant skipping rope where a new person has to enter and exit the rope each time it revolves. People really enjoyed themselves.

I became a bit of a "Grammar Lady" while I was there. I do not profess to have perfect grammar, in fact, this past week I discovered how little I really know about sentence construction. I learned more about perfect tenses, progressive forms, active voices, when to use present versus past participles, etc. than I learned in most of my high school English classes. It was humbling when we first got here to see that many of the advanced Ukrainian students knew more about grammar than any of us. They learn all the grammar rules in school (when they were about twelve years old), but need practice in conversation and with understanding idioms. When I realized the need for the leadership team to understand more about grammar, I started putting together English lessons to teach them during our morning meetings. These were exceptionally keen lessons (especially considering "Morning Brenda" was teaching them). Then, some of the advanced students requested extra English lessons in free time, so I was volunteered (by Shaun) to teach those.

It's difficult for me to sum up camp in a few paragraphs. So many things happen at camp in such a concentrated time, that it's hard to give more than a vague, general overview. We have lots of hilarious stories, but few that would make sense out of the context of camp. We've forged many new friendships. We've been involved in many life-changing conversations, but once again, these events are all so concentrated that reporting about one single event is difficult to do. What I can definitively say is that we are exhausted and very much looking forward to catching up on sleep.

We have now been in Odessa for five weeks - we were initially supposed to be here for six weeks, but this last week was supposed to be a hiking camp and was canceled. They don't need us here for help with anything else (they are going to spend the week recovering from camp) so we once again have an unexpected free week. What that means is that the "overseas ministry" portion of the trip is now completed, and so it kind of feels like we are going to be home a lot sooner than we actually will be. Had we known it would turn out this way, we would have scheduled flights home much earlier - oh well. We are certainly looking forward to being home again (both Shaun and me). We're not sure what we're going to do with the extra time yet, but Shaun got the idea to go to the airport to see if he could find last minute cheap flights to any reasonable location. We'll see what happens....

Going to prison

We have been in Ukraine for a couple of weeks now. Shortly after we got here, Shaun and I parted ways - he headed for a sports camp that the men who work here had put on and I headed up to Northern Ukraine to go to "prison camp." The place that I went was a detention center for young female offenders. This is the only place of that kind in the whole of the country. There were only 25 girls in that prison which has a capacity of about 300 - they either don't have the funding or don't care anymore about the girls so they don't put them there when they should be - the staff actually rejoice when they get a new person because they see that another person will get help. We know that they rejoice because on the initial visit to try to get them to let us in three of our team went there to speak to them in person, and there was a misunderstanding that the prison thought two of them were new girls who were coming to stay at the prison, and they were all excited that they had come...it was pretty hilarious.Their crimes range from murdering people to pickpocketing. We went in there to teach them "Christian Ethics" which is a part of the schooling that they get. So, we were involved in sharing stories of our lives, encouraging them in making good choices, talking about how our motives shape our lives and doing our best to love them in the short time we were there.

The one word I would use to describe my time there would be "unexpected" - If I had to compare them to Canadian high school students, I would without hesitation say that these Ukrainian criminals were a much more attentive and responsive audience. We gave them all exercise books when we were there on one of the first days and told them that if they wanted to write their stories for us, we would read them, and it shocked me how many wrote pages upon pages in those books. What was also surprising were how many of them wrote individual messages to each of us (there were nine of us on our team) telling us really encouraging things. It was shocking how ready they were to encourage us when I'm sure they have not received very much encouragement themselves. So, our time there certainly felt a whole lot more like "camp" and a whole lot less like "prison."

I asked Shaun to give a short report about how his time at camp went....

"Oh rest and relaxation! My own bed for nine days, I haven't slept so well in 11 1/2 months :) I am completely joking. I did in fact miss Brenda very much and I was thrilled to have her home on Saturday. She has asked me to update you on my recent trip into the interior of Ukraine for a football camp put on by the church here in Odessa. We spent four days at an orphanage/boarding school outside of a village in the middle of nowhere. The camp was intended for youth who had been invited to come with us from the city. Our time there primarily consisted of soccer matches, volleyball matches, group games, bible studies, seminar, and worship times. The team I was on was the only team of 4 playing all teams of 5. We were absolutely dead tired and sore by the end but I am proud to report a first place volleyball victory and a second place football finish. Seeing as though I had never played soccer against anyone older than 10 years old I was quite pleased."

We're leaving Odessa on Wednesday until the end of the month to teach English at camps. The people attending know that it's a combo English/Christian camp where we teach English using biblical stories and have Christian teachings throughout the week. We don't know what our communication will be like when we're there.

Last but not least Ukraine

Every time Shaun and I are in a new place, we try not to express too many value judgments about the way people do things because what we learned in Africa was that our definition of what makes sense is completely different from 'sense' as it is applied by other people. Although North American sense may be more efficient and have some other benefits, it may not always be better. I realized after my scurry to get my last blog posted that I may have made some strong value judgments, and in doing so I hope that I didn't misrepresent Romanian people as a whole. While I will hold to my statement that abuse is very common in Romania, there are many wonderful things about people we met there. The hospitality people showed to us (including people we met randomly, those whose hostels we stayed at, etc.) was beyond what we had seen in any other European country. It actually surprised both of us becasue we were used to the stereotype that those who had lived through communism had more of a duck-your-head-and-don't-look-anyone-in-the-eye countenance, but we were rarely anywhere that someone didn't try (and persist once they discovered we only speak English) in striking up a conversation. Although abuse occurs in toward children and in the home, they were a very friendly and hospitable people.

I asked you all to pray about our crossing the borders and we are now safely in Ukraine with very little that went awry in our travels. We found it surprisingly difficult to make our way from Bucharest to Odessa because we'd have to go through Moldova (in fact if you train to Moldova, you have to wait for a couple of hours while they change some part of the train because the tracks are a different size). We heard many pieces of advice from many different people on how we should get to Ukraine. Those in Romania told us that we'd have to enter Ukriane through Hungary (which would take five full days of travel), those at the train stations told us it was impossible, those online told us our best bet would be to get close to the border by train, take a taxi to the border, say 'student, student, student' a number of times to the crossing guards and hope not to be struck with astronomical bribes, and then cross our fingers that there would be a bus on the other side.

In the end, we decided to try the route that our very hospitable hostel owner in Brasov found for us - what we titled the 'mystery bus.' He claimed it could get us there if we got on in Galati (a Romanian city close to the border). No one else seemed to know about this bus (including those in the city we stopped in), but we decided to try to wait for it anyway - it was supposed to arrive between 9 and 10 at night and only come twice a week. The bus finally arrived at ten to one in the morning (as you can imagine waiting for a mystery bus from nine until one is a long wait and our hope that it would come was dismally bleak at moments). We didn't have reservations, but we thankfully claimed the last two seats.

We've been in Ukraine for a few days now and, as usual, I enjoy making note of things that surprise me. So, some things we've learned thus far about Ukraine...

-We have been warned by people here not to speak if we see a police officer because if they hear us speaking English, they will probably ask us for our passports (of which it wouldn't be wise to carry around) and if we don't present them to the officer on the spot, we will be forced to pay them a bribe.

-They don't exactly make buses here easy to deal with if you don't speak Russian (we're in the part of Ukraine that speaks Russian rather than Ukranian) because you have to pay the driver as you get off the bus (which means you can get on to the bus on any door, but can only get out the front door, which usually means pushing your way past many people - not super easy), and then you have to tell him the name of the street you are getting off at - sometimes they require that you tell them where you got on. It is also proper etiquette to remian quiet on buses.

-In the city we were staying in for the first two days that we were here (don't know how it's spelled - not quite used to the Cyrillic alphabet yet, but it's pronounced YOU-zhnee), we learned that their heat in the winter is controlled by the city which means that one day in the fall, the city turns on the heat for everyone in the city and on a certain day in the spring, it turns it off. If it's too cold outside of their dictated times, that too bad. You aren't able to turn up/on the heat and what seems even more strange is that you also aren't able to turn it down, so if you don't like it that hot, you must open the windows.

I will let you know a little bit more about what our this last destination will hold for us on my next post. Thank you for your continued prayers.

Romanian tragedies

Yesterday, Shaun and I left Cornesti (pronounced Core-NESHT) where we had been serving at the care home for mothers and children. It surprised me, but it was probably the hardest place for me to leave. There were fewer people at the care home to get to know than there had been at other places we had visited, so we became close with the mothers and children (especially the children).

We don't really have many crazy stories about being in Romania because when you're in an American-run care home, you're a bit secluded from what normal life is like. Most of the stories I could tell you are the stories of the people who came to River of Life to be helped...stories of extreme tragedy, but also some stories of healing. Telling you that Romania views physical punishment/abuse differently that we do in Canada is an enormous understatement. According to our American friends, until a couple of years ago, the police weren't able to do anything against domestic violence cases, and they claim that now the improvement has been that they are able to issue the man a fine for public disturbance in such cases. It seems like abuse is more than a generational family pattern for many people here, it is their culture. When we were in Africa, Shaun and I saw a general understanding that "beating" children both at school and at home if they had misbehaved was good - and, if you measure its success based on children's respect for authority and their discipline, it worked. However, in Africa, we never even so much as saw anyone strike a child since beatings were only intended as punishment and I don't think they are done in anger. In Romania, whether we were at the school, church, or in the community, we saw adults striking children to the point that any responsible adult in Canada would have called Child Protection.

I said before that over one hundred women had come to the care home to be helped in their time of distress - their stories are all different. Some had fathers who had been prostituting them since the age of six, some have permanent facial damage and no teeth because of the beatings they've received, some had daughters under the age of five who, because of childhood abuse trauma, were engaging in self-injury, some experienced awful lives in substandard orphanages because of parental abandonment. I can't give very many specifics due to confidentiality agreements, but please be in prayer for the broken women, children and families in Romania and for wisdom for those working with them.

Please also pray for us as we attempt to enter the Ukraine, since we've heard from those who have tried that certain borders will not easily allow us into the country. We are scheduled to arrive at our next placement on the 22nd of June.

Romania update

Now that our time in Romania is half up, I guess it's time we let you know what we are doing. As is pretty normal, internet here is difficult for us to access, so sorry about the lack of communication.

We are working this month at a care home called River of Life associated with International Messengers. Their primary goal is to provide for mothers and their babies(/children) who need help. Each of the mothers has a slightly different story. Some of them were violently abused by their husbands, and only sought help when they were pregnant or realized their babies were in danger. Some of them were being forced by their husbands to get abortions when they came here to get help. Most of the moms have either serious emotional damage or mental handicaps which can make working here challenging. In the roughly ten years this ministry has been running, they've had over 100 mothers come to stay here. Right now, there are 6 mothers and 9 kids living in the home. Something that has been encouraging to see are the two staff members (the social worker and the cook)who are moms who used to live here, but have had their lives turn around because of what River of Life did for them.

The director of this place is a 'see a need, meet a need' kind of guy, so the ministries of this home go far beyond just caring for the needs of the mothers. They run English and Aviation camps, they have church plants, they have a clothing ministry for poor people, they teach about Christ in the local school, they have a weekly Elderly program, etc. So, it's hard to describe exactly what we are doing here, because we just kind of filling in wherever there is need. Here are some examples to give you an idea: I spoke to a group that had a retreat here, we've been organizing their room for donated clothing (folding hundreds upon hundreds of articles of clothing), Shaun has been painting buildings and fixing up their yard, we've been looking after kids, serving the elderly, etc.

We don't feel like we are experiencing too much of Romanian culture because this care home is somewhat segregated from normal Romanian life. However, we can see enough to have noticed that it is right in the middle of North American an African culture in many aspects: workmanship, punctuality, education, community values, variety of food, etc. I showed the women who came to their elderly program a slide show of our pictures from Africa, and afterward, they spoke with each other about how they should stop complaining because they really don't have such a hard life comparatively. I was agreeing and thinking about how true that is for us in Canada as well.