April 8, 2018

r o m a n i a ,

draganesti olt, r o m a n i a

location: draganesti olt is in southern romania – it’s a small town with a population of about 10,000. spring is here, and it’s a little rainy and muddy – (watch out for the stray children & dogs)-

language: romanian, english

ministry partner/host: we are working with hope church – which is an amazing church that is doing great things here in romania and abroad. they have many ministries including discipleship programs, a project in which they want to distribute the new testament to 7,000 people in the olt district for free, a program for missions for seniors, “a fishing rod not a fish” which tries to help missionaries and poor families, with a focus on women supporting children, to gain valuable skills to support themselves such as bee keeping, raising goat farms, greenhouses/gardens, working in the fields, and a social house project, which they have built a house to allow people down on their luck to live while they get back on their feet, they currently have three women and one family there. their goal is to build more that focuses on orphans who are turned out of the system at 18 and to have a mentorship program in place to help them. this is a church that is in action and it’s really cool to see.

lodging: we are staying with three other teams (yikes) in the missions house, but it’s nice. we have bunkbeds, each team has their own room. we have a washer, flushing toilets, showers, and a kitchen. we are responsible for all our own meals, but my teammate jenny has graciously offered to cook us dinner! (thanks, girl). and we have wifi! the grocery store and church are about a 15 minute walk from here. we also have the occasional friendly slug in the sink and mice that like to come and visit.

what are we doing? it depends on the team, two teams will be out in the community working with the programs and missionaries, but my team is the office team. my teammate cristina is romanian and speaks romanian so they requested us to work closely with our host, raul. so for us? we are to “amplifiy the ministry” and be assistants so that raul and his team can be more in the field and less in the office. we’ll be doing a lot of answering emails, setting up appointments, delegating tasks, taking phone calls, paperwork, organization and making sure things are in place so that the programs run smoothly. in short:

we are b e h i n d the scenes.

we’ll also go out onto the field too and assist in different things but in the background. we each have a role and my role will be media. so i will be in charge of taking photos and videos when i can, but more so being a point person for media people on each team. so i collect photos and videos daily, and then edit them, make little videos of the day for our team to post on their social media – that way they can spread the word about all the amazing things God is doing here! basically, i’ll be making/editing a lot of videos from the video footage supplied by the teams out on the field and from jen & miranda who are our on the field videographers.

can’t always be center stage,

but every good play needs a solid

background crew.