We are now back in Bucharest and trying to recuperate and prepare for the last two weeks of our summer. I can’t believe that it is almost done already. I have not been able to find the time or energy to blog during the last two weeks so I will now try to go back and cover what we have done.
We have spent the last two weeks in Transylvania, Romania doing VBS in several different villages there. The first week we stayed in Tigmandru, Romania with a local host family, Magda and Nelu Cini and her son, Nelutu and daughter, Diana. Magda is the pastor there and Nelutu is the youth leader and runs the children’s program. They are a wonderful family and we loved staying with us. Magda called us her daughters and she became our Romanian mama. Tigmandru is a very small, poor village and has many, many needs. It was a humbling experience for me to live there for a week and to see the people and how they live. The living conditions are startling and their way of life is very different than anything I’ve seen.
My team and I did about five days of children’s programs there. The number of children varied a bit from day to day but we averaged around 30 children every day, sometimes over 40. For how small the village was, I couldn’t believe how many children there were! On Friday, the day after we arrived, we did not have a VBS but were able to participate in the program that Nelutu gave regularly on Fridays. This gave us an opportunity to meet the children and and for them to meet us. Because of that day, when we walked in to the sanctuary on Saturday for our VBS, they were all waiting for us and their faces just lit up. They were excited to see us and I was excited to see them. Then as we started with some songs and an impromptu puppet show, they were smiling and giggling and so happy. I realized how simple it was to put a smile on these children’s faces. A blanket, some hand puppets and funny voices kept them happy for a while. Later, when we were doing a craft with them, it was even easier. We gave them colored paper, crayons and different fishy stickers and told them to decorate and make name tags for themselves. They loved it. I wondered how many of them had an opportunity to see and make pretty crafts. A few of them wanted more and more stickers and took more than some of the others. In the States, children tend to be a little more greedy and concerned about fairness and everyone wants what everyone else has. Here the children are very well behaved. They wanted more and more because it was so rare for them to be able to do crafts but they did not fight over the items. They are also so desperate for attention and love. They would fight over who got to sit by you or who got to hold your hand. They cling and grab on to you as if they don’t ever want to let go. They learned our names really quickly and we did our best to learn theirs. I think we did a pretty good job of making relationships with such a large number of children and so little time. I think it meant a lot to them when we would call them out by name.
A couple of times we would go to the village futbol(soccer) field and play with the children. That was quite an experience. The first time we went, when we left the house there were about 10-15 children coming with us. As we continued to walk down the street, more children came out of their homes to join us. By the time we were in the field and began to play, there were probably over thirty children playing with us. It was mass chaos trying to play with the sheer number of children and the language barrier, but it was still fun. We all had a turn falling in the mud/poop and having a great time with the children.
Like I said before, the living conditions and poverty in this village was startling for me. The children who came were very dirty, small, skinny, and some had lice. We had to take showers after every VBS because of the lice and just the fact that we would smell so bad after so much contact with the children. I felt bad having to wash myself after touching the children but we didn’t have a choice. But I refused to let the dirt, germs, or lice prevent me from loving the children. They needed love so bad and their smiles and laughter were worth it all.
By the end of the week, the children were very attached to us and us to them. Even during the evening or morning hours before and after our daily programs, some of them would linger around the front gate of the home we stayed in and wait to see us. They were always asking us to come play with us sometimes they just wanted to say hi. For me, it was very hard to leave at the end of the week. We probably had about ten rounds of hugs before we were able to get in the car. There were some tears and as we drove out, the children ran after our car waving at us.
There is one other great experience that we had in Tigmandru that I want to mention. Magda, our host mother, is an amazing woman and does so much for this village. Every Friday, she and her family prepare a meal for the children after the regular program. Magda said that most of the children do not get adequate food at home so they can count on at least one hot and healthy meal at the Cini’s every Friday. It was really neat for us to be a part of that on the two Fridays we were there. The other thing that Magda does on Fridays is have a baby massage class for the mothers in the village and their infants and very small children. One the second Friday that we were there, Magda allowed my team to be a part of that and observe what she does. First, she sets of little plastic bathtubs where she washes as many children as she can. She is trained in baby massage therapy and so she massages each one aster their baths. Magda let myself and Kristen help bathe the babies. We would bathe them and then hand them off to her to massage. After their massages, each baby would get a clean set of clothing from Magda’s supply of donated baby clothes that she has. We helped bathe probably 10-12 babies that day. She also takes this opportunity to talk to the mother’s about child care and parenting skills. Many of the mothers are very young or just simply don’t have the proper skills to care for their babies properly. After all their babies were bathed, massaged and dressed, Magda has each baby weighed on her scales and keeps track of their ages and weight in a book. It really impacted me because it was such a obvious need in this village. Some of the babies were so tiny and they had dirt caked under their fingernails. It broke my heart to see some of the conditions they were in. Some had really bad diaper rashes or sores on their bodies. It really meant a lot for me to be able to serve these mothers and their babies in this simply way. It was also really powerful to see Magda’s heart for these people and how she is doing everything she can to serve her community. Besides the baby program and the feeding the children every week, she lead bible studies and prayer meetings during the week, as well as preaching on Sundays. She and her family live in a very small apartment on the top floor of the church. They have very little according to our standards but they give so much to others. They opened their home and their hearts to my team during the week we were there and I was very humbled by their generosity.
