Christmas in TM

A Doua Zi A Craciunului - the 2nd Day of Christmas

While much of the English speaking world celebrates Boxing Day (and those in America celebrate after-Christmas clearances & long lines for returns), we in Romania celebrate "the second day of Christmas." In the village of Bahnea, the children's Christmas program was held on the 26th. Our team has worked with the church in Bahnea for several years, and our translator Gabi was responsible for planning and directing this year's Christmas program - so a bunch of us loaded up in the car & made the trek out to the village to enjoy the show.

And what a show it was! I'm not sure where Gabi got the idea, but she decided to tell the Christmas story as a news broadcast. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she and the kids spent a lot of weekend and evening hours recording "interviews" with the shepherds, the angels, people on the streets in Bethlehem, etc. Then she edited all of the clips into a news broadcast. Most of the kids got to do the "hard part" ahead of time, without an audience (which helped eliminate the nerves, giggles, etc. that often punctuate children's programs), leaving only the two "anchors" to do their parts live during the service while cutting away to "on the scene" reporters shown on the monitor. SOOOOO much work, but excellently done!

The anchorman & anchorwoman (on the right) speaking to a

"prophecy expert" (on the monitor).

All of the kids involved in the program

After the program, the kids all received their Christmas boxes from Samaritan's Purse & Operation Christmas Child. The boxes are such a blessing to our kids - and it was so much fun to watch some of them open their boxes and discover the treasures inside. For those of you who helped packed shoeboxes this year, thank you for your sacrifices on the behalf of children around the world. (In case you were wondering, this year it appeared that the boxes distributed here were from the UK.)

What Is Christmas?

For our kids' Christmas program (at 5 pm on Christmas Day - the 2nd service of the day), a group of the teens presented a skit that we had seen at the youth conference in Bucharest a few weeks earlier. The lines & music were all on a prerecorded track, so all they had to do was lipsync & act (a huge relief for most teens!). The skit, entitled "Ce este Craciun?" or "What is Christmas?" is about a kid entering the library, looking for information about Christmas. The librarian hauls out her mega-size Bible concordance, and all are shocked to find that the things they normally associate with our celebration of the birth of Christ are nowhere to be found in Scripture (things like the word "Christmas" itself, the word "Noel", the concept of a silent & still night at the manger, a little drummer boy, etc.). After all of their misconceptions are exposed, the teens are left to ask, "Then what IS Christmas?" That's where the pastor jumped in with a reading of the Christmas story and the younger children took over with their songs and poems about the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of the Savior, the incarnate Son of God - one of the events in history that is far beyond my ability to comprehend!

Choir

Christmas Eve, before caroling, was our choir program. A couple of days earlier, I had managed to talk my way out of the solo descant part I was supposed to sing (no one wants to hear a soprano singing flat, and I just wasn't hitting it right), so I was much more relaxed than in the preceding days. Just singing with the choir & playing my flute for one song (yes, Sarah, I know it's still technically your flute...but possession is 9/10 of the law, right? And you're on the other side of the world...if you want it, you'll have to come and get it!). The choir did a great job, and it was nice to see some extra faces in the congregation, too.

Colindat

I wish I had (or knew) a way to attach sound files to my blog. As I learned last year, Romanians take their Christmas caroling seriously! Last year, I showed up at 6 pm on Christmas Eve as instructed, expecting to be home by 9 or so. Nine came and went...and ten...and eleven...and midnight. I finally arrived home at almost 2 in the morning! And that was only because I told pastor I really had to go (silly me...I thought I could just eat dinner when I got home...by 2 a.m., I was in trouble!).

This year, I was prepared for the all-nighter (I made sure to eat dinner first!)- and we were all prepared to sing, because we had had several rehearsals in the weeks preceding (I told you they take their caroling seriously!). The result was an incredible harmony, which was only enhanced by the acoustics in concrete stairwells. I have several short recordings...I wish you could hear them!

We finished at the "last" stop at about midnight and shuffled passengers so that people were headed home to the correct areas of the city with their drivers. But we weren't REALLY done yet. One of the men took Dani, our choir director home, and then the rest of us reconvened near his apartment and surprised him by caroling at HIS door.

Pastors' Wives' Fellowship

On December 13, the ladies on our team hosted a brunch for pastors' wives from our partnering churches. After a nice breakfast (especially nice for those of us who rarely cook breakfast!), we made a Christmas craft, sang some Romanian Christmas carols, and then spent some time praying for each other. Overall, a great time - and I'm sure a nice change of pace for these pastors' wives who rarely have opportunity to fellowship with others "in the same boat" as they are.

Can we rewind a couple of weeks?

The last couple of weeks have been so insanely busy that I pretty much missed Christmas. Not the actual day - that comes whether you are ready or not - but the whole spirit of Christmas. Between preparing our new office space, moving in, moving my office home and about a bazillion church services, life has been crazy. Now it's starting to settle down and I'm thinking about putting up my nativity set (yeah, I know it's two days after Christmas...but I still have to do some Christmas baking, too).

Some scenes from the last few weeks:

Gotta' love men in hot pink gloves...and ya' gotta' love handprints painted on the back of the door (Actually, they were kinda' cute...until you have to scrape them off. Then, not so cute.)

Sue scrubbing...
...while her husband Tom put new baseboards around the conference room (absolutely worth the price to not have to scrape a thick layer of blue paint off of the old baseboards, which we did in the other room).

Oh, how I wish I had pictures of the actual moving process...some scenes would have been priceless! But alas, my camera was always seemed to be in the place that I was not. Maybe it's better that way...

I'll save the rest for future posts. I promise to get caught up sometime this week, especially since my wireless network and my Vonage phone are both working at home again AFTER EIGHT LONG MONTHS!!! I plugged everything in on Saturday and made a quick 5 minute phone call to the internet company letting them know the MAC address for my router. They said it would be working in 10 minutes and I (somewhat cynically) asked how late they would be working (expecting to have to make several more calls before it actually worked. You can imagine my shock when, less than ten minutes later, the wireless actually worked and the Vonage started without a hitch! Why did it work for 10 months, NOT work for 8 months, and then, all of a sudden, it works flawlessly again? Who knows...but I'm so thankful it's all working again!

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas...

Maybe not...but at least it's beginning to LOOK a lot more like Christmas. Santa Claus came to my house today! His sleigh had been transformed into a yellow Polo with "DHL" plastered on the side, and actually, he didn't quite make it to my house. He left a note telling me to come pick up my goodies at his workshop here in town (apparently the Romanian DHL-Santa Claus doesn't do return visits when he tries to make a delivery while you are at work and not home to answer the door). So, I made the trek this afternoon & lugged my Christmas goodies home. And, no, I didn't wait until Christmas to open it (it wasn't an "official" Christmas gift...I don't think). But I did put it all under the tree. Frankly, the nativity set was looking a little bit lonely (although it was inspiring me to write a short piece about what's under the tree...I think I can write it, anyway!).



Just in case you couldn't see it all under the tree, here's a closer shot on the table before I decided that it all needed to go under the tree.



Yeah...food that I don't have to think about or make the ingredients for before I can make the dish! Rice, mac & cheese, Reese's peanut butter cups, tomato soup, peanut butter...what more could a girl want? (Seriously, that's not my entire diet. I have all the "good for me" stuff...I can buy that here. But I had absolutely nothing left that didn't require time & energy, both of which are in short supply these days.)

And fun stuff, too! A wind-up monkey who does backflips, a handtowel with a random penguin on it, yellow rubber ducky soap, a card game called "There's a Mouse in the House", Uno, and enough DVDs to double the size of my collection (not that that required too many, but still...). Oh, I mustn't forget the whoopee cushion! What shall I do with that...

Thanks, Jenny, for my first "real" package since I came to Romania (the ones I order over the internet or sent to myself while home don't count!). And thanks for all the goodies & even more for the laughs...I miss you being here to make me laugh every day!

Celebrating Small Victories

Living in a post-communist country, sometimes the everyday bureaucracy sucks the very life out of you. To better cope with that (and not always feel like I'm living under a black cloud), I am trying to learn to celebrate the little joys in life.

Some of today's causes for joy:
1. Meeting today's "deadline" on the book I am currently working with. I always set daily deadlines for these projects to keep myself on track, but I always seem to overestimate what I can accomplish in a day and thus end up missing more "deadlines" than I meet. Staying on track so far for this project means that (1) I'm getting a better handle on what I can really handle each day and (2) I'm being more disciplined about pushing through until finished, even when I want to quit hours before.
2. EVERY dish in my kitchen is now clean. I realize that this doesn't seem like a big deal (and I SHOULD be able to say this every night!), but right now it is a big deal. I can go for months and always have a clean kitchen (and apartment, for that matter), but then something happens, I get behind, and it takes forever to dig out of the hole. It feels good to finally be out of the hole.
3. Mail in my mailbox. Okay, so it was just a magazine, but hey, at least there was something.
4. Lots of walking time. To the office this morning, back downtown to run errands this afternoon, back to the office, back home again. Tonight's next project is to rip all of my Christmas music onto my laptop and then onto my MP3 player...it just doesn't feel like Christmas yet, so I need some good Christmas music!
5. Information! We finally know the process that we have to go through to get my car registered. Of course, it will likely take several weeks to actually go through that process...but I'm excited to at least know WHAT we have to do, if not exactly HOW or WHEN.
6. Oh, yeah...nah, I think that one deserves a post of it's own...

You know you're a missionary when...

...your shower occasionally looks like this! If you've ever lived overseas, you know that ziploc bags are worth their weight in gold - and can be washed and reused many times before they are in poor enough condition to throw away. This morning I washed my "collection" of ziploc bags and "decorated" the bathroom walls. Yes, I do realize that washing them one at a time as I used them would be much more efficient...I don't remember how or why the collection of dirty ziplocs began, but it's been growing under the kitchen sink for a while. I can think of worse things to have growing under the sink... And yes, I also realize that this picture hints at my obsessive/compulsive personality; all the pinks together, all the blues together, etc. Again, there are worse issues to have. :-)

New Babies

10 down, 14 to go (7 student manuals, 7 teacher manuals). Look for a BIG celebration in January when we get book 6 back from the publisher and officially hit the halfway point! I'm making plans for a big night out with all of our translators, proofreaders, and anyone else who has contributed toward the project.

Not up my alley!

Our team has had annual budget/business meetings this week & decided to "destress" ourselves a bit by trying out the new bowling alley in town. Lest you think "bowling" with some sort of sneer or tone of disgust, please remember we are in small town Romania - not a lot of entertainment options and even fewer that are enjoyable for the average American. Just the fact that we HAVE a western-style bowling alley in town is quite novel (despite the limitations of only 5 lanes, 3 of which are currently out of commission!).

Fun times...although bowling is not really up my alley. That big fat 65 proves it!

What did YOU do tonight?

I...

1. broke my favorite glass :-(
2. went a little bit overboard in catching up my blog (really, I don't normally post 3 times in the same evening!). But I hate leaving big gaps, and I finally downloaded all of the pictures off of my camera for the first time since the end of October.
3. made this...can you tell what it is?

Maybe it would help if I showed you what it looked like a few minutes earlier...



During the "lean times" of the last couple months, I completed emptied my freezer and pantry. Thanks to a cash Christmas gift from one of my supporting churches, I was able to go on a "real" grocery shopping trip for the first time in six months. That means time to cook up a storm! Early this morning, I started the multipurpose pasta/pizza sauce in the crockpot, and tonight was time for the lasagna-making assembly line. I will eat so much better when I again have a stash of things in the freezer to grab & cook when I get home from the office! Dinner tonight was tacos, and tomorrow... hamburger soup. Gotta' use up all of that ground beef that I browned!

Te-a prins?

One of the delights of my life right now is working with the teens at our church. This weekend, I got to travel with 18 of them (and four other adults) to a youth conference hosted by Sfanta Treime (Holy Trinity) Baptist Church in Bucharest. About half of the teens who came with us are orphans who live in several of the group homes around town. And the vast majority of the kids had never been anywhere near Bucharest - so they were a lot of fun to travel with! Everything was new and different, somethings that they liked and others that they didn't. I'm a city girl at heart, so I always enjoy time in the capitol.



Although the trip itself was great, the purpose and the highlight were both the conference itself, "Te-a prins?" or "Are you caught?" The challenge of the weekend was to live "In lume dar aproape de El" - "In the world, but close to Him". Our teens joined 500 others from all around the country in singing, praying, and learning together for two days.



The speaker was one of my favorites, simply because he communicates so well with the teens AND because I can listen to him almost without thinking about the fact that he's speaking in Romanian. With some speakers, I have to concentrate so much on understanding the words and sentences that I never really get to concentrate on the message that they form. When Sammy speaks, I can concentrate on the message and be challenged in my own walk with Christ. I have lots to process from the weekend...maybe that's seed for another post later this week sometime (no guarantees...team meetings this week and all of the "extras" that go along with that).

Catching Up

A few pictures to catch up on the last few weeks...


At a conference for worship leaders with a team from Hillsongs (Australia)


My sad Thanksgiving turkey...have you ever seen such a skinny thing? He's almost all bone!


My 3rd Thanksgiving dinner this year (Canadian thanksgiving in October, American thanksgivig on the "real" day, and then again a couple of days later at the English school here in town, an outreach activity with all of students who are coming to learn language and culture.) I made another 5 kg. worth of mashed potatoes (and now have a nice stash of leftover mashed potatoes in the freezer) and several green bean casseroles (no French's Dried Onions here...but I learned that a snack food something like Funions works just as well).


The Christmas lights at University Square in Bucharest. Most years, they are very colorful. This year, everything is dominated by the European Union theme as Romania will officially become part of the union on January 1. So, the lights are all blue with the occasional ring of gold stars (from the EU flag).

Happy Thanksgiving!

No fun pictures today...but we had a good time celebrating "the real Thanksgiving" as a team. Since we have Canadians and Americans on our team, we celebrate both (today was my 4th Thanksgiving in Romania!). But we occasionally tease our Canadian teammates by insisting that American Thanksgiving is the real Thanksgiving.

Since there are 11 of us, I bought the biggest turkey I could find last week. 3.4 kg. Maybe 7 1/2 lbs. Not really enough. So I went on a hunt yesterday to find another one. Rented a car (mine's still sitting...I hope to be able to drive it again someday soon). Drove to every store in town. No turkeys to be found. Ended up with a decent size chicken to add to the scrawny turkey (seriously, when I opened it this morning to get it ready to roast, I laughed out loud...it was the boniest, skinniest turkey I've ever seen...good thing there was a lot of meat on the chicken!).

I love having people in my home, and I don't get to do it often enough. Groups are always easier...it's hard to host a couple for dinner since I can't finish dinner in the kitchen & be a good hostess at the same time (yes, that goes on the list of reasons to get married...but frankly, it's a pretty weak reason!). And, having people over always motivates me to clean - this is a good thing. While cleaning, I decided to rearrange furniture in preparation to put up my Christmas tree. So, now my house is clean (again...thanks to Mike & MaryLou who stayed to help me wash dishes).

All I've done for the last couple of weeks is work. That & be sick. Apparently my body finally relaxed enough to allow me to get sick - so I've picked up every bug going around for the last few weeks. This week I'm just looking forward to being able to breath through my nose and sleep through the night again. Someday. And I'm looking forward to getting this book to the printer tomorrow. And doing something different for a few days before jumping into the next book.

A Visit to the Past

Although our hotel was gorgeous & comfortable, I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was in Turkey & see a little bit more of the country. On Friday I joined a small group for a visit to a waterfall (pictured yesterday) and some ancient ruins from the Byzantine and Roman times. We visited the city of Side (pronounced "see-day") - where the modern city is built on the ruins of the ancient city. Pictured above are the ruins of the temple to Apollo on the shores of the Mediterranean (which is just right of the picture).

Also from the temple to Apollo

Back to the Real World

After a travel day, I arrived home this morning from a fantastic trip to Antalya, Turkey for our biannual regional conference with all of my colleagues from Central & Eastern Europe. It was fantastic to see old friends & meet new ones. Dr. Tony Beckett - one of my favorites - was our keynote speaker and a challenge to my heart...more to come in the next few days. For today, just a few pictures, extending the "high" of sunshine, swimming in the Mediterranean, eating meals while overlooking beautiful pools & palms...refreshing & recharging as we head into the long, dreary Romanian winter!

The view from my breakfast table

The "inside" breakfast view...food/art on the buffet line

(the seahorse is actually formed/carved out of lard)

...and the requisite waterfall!