The calm before the craziness

      So I realize that I'm a little behind on updating, but I guess not too much has seemed "new" in the past week and a half.  I'm sure it will all come back to me as I write this.  But it has been a "calmer" week, which can be boring at times, but I'm also thankful for it when I look at my schedule for next month!

      Starting at Valentine's day... I had a great Monday of working on visa stuff and then a special date with one of my Valentine's, Hannah, and Jess.  We went to a fancy authentic Romanian restaurant called Ruby Tuesdays! haha  And I couldn't help but order the cheese fries because I hadn't had cheddar cheese, bacon, or ranch since I'd been here!  I know right, how could I have survived this long?  Then I had a skype date with my Valentine in the States, Hadley of course, and our dance party via skype made my day. :]

The foods I miss the most about now: Cheddar cheese & ranch

Our fancy chocolate milkshakes fro McD for dessert

      We didn't have school on Thursday, thus no art pictures of the week, and I missed my kids!  But we got a good chunk of the visa stuff done after running around to exchange shops, the notary, the bank, and the translators!  I also got in 3 Romanian lessons and lots of studying and homework.  My binder is almost filled already and I actually know a lot of stuff in Romanian, now it's working on speaking, adding to my vocab, and a few more grammar things along the way.  This past Sunday I just listened to Soterius preach at church and I knew exactly what he was talking about the whole time!  No, I didn't catch every word or anything, but I knew what he was trying to say.  It also helped that it was on relationship and the family and I'd heard all that stuff before.  Oh, and we also had a Christian Romanian rapper rap for us at church.  Definitely interesting, and he was pretty good if you're into rap.  

     This past weekend, Tom and Gela were in Azuga where Tom put on a Homiletics retreat and taught 7 guys from our church how to preach.  From what I hear, it went very well, except for the fact that Tom cracked some ribs and punctured a lung after tubing into a bench... If you know Tom at all, this won't surprise you!  Us girls had a great bum weekend and enjoyed using their tv and oven in their absence.  On Saturday, me, Jess, Hannah, and Jess Capota hung out at the Graef's all day watching When in Rome (WE'RE GOING THERE!) and A Walk to Remember, and cooking cheesecake, snitzel, and garlic mashed potatoes.  Who doesn't love staying inside and eating good food and watching movies when it's cold and rainy outside?  

Chocolate chunk cookies we made... it's kinda like the cloud game...what shape does it look like?

      I got to go back to the baby hospital this week! On Monday, I decided for sure which baby I'm stealing.  Her name is Katia and she could seriously be the next Gerber baby she's that adorable.  She's got fair skin and hair and I think she could pass for mine.  She cried every time I put her down and it just breaks my heart to know that those babies don't get the personal attention they need.  I'm pretty sure she was the one Cornelia told me that her mom just dropped her off there because she had a boy and liked boys better and didn't want both children.  I honestly don't know how anyone could just abandon their child like that, and especially into a screwed up system like they have here.  I'm about to head over there again in about an hour and I can't wait to love on those babies since their parents chose not to. 

      Yesterday, we had a meeting at BCA for anyone interesting in playing or coaching basketball and volleyball.  And it looks like I'll get to coach a girls or possibly co-ed volleyball team this spring!  We won't be competing against any other schools or anything this semester, but I'm so excited to get to teach and play my favorite sport, and to build relationships with some of the high school girls!  

      So I haven't been extremely busy lately, but still have plenty to do!  And when I'm not out and about, I have plenty of studying to do.  It's all going to start getting crazy next week though.  I'm going with the Graef's, Postema's and Kristie to the Ukraine to put on a one day camp where they put on a week-long camp this past summer.  I'm really excited to be put to work, learn how they run camp to prepare for this summer, and get to visit a new country!  My parents are coming to visit on the 10th, and will be in Romania until the 20th when we got to PARIS for 3 days!  Then a week after Paris is our girls' trip to ROME!  It still hasn't hit me that this is all real and I actually have tickets in my name to all these places!  

      And here's just something I've been learning on this trip, and Oswald Chambers just puts it so much better than I could.  "We should quit asking ourselves, 'Am I of any use?'  and accept the truth that we are really not of much use to Him.  The issue is never being of use, but of being of value to God Himself.  Once we are totally surrendered to God, He will work through us all the time."  (My Utmost for His Highest, Feb. 21st)  I have found myself asking the question, "Am I of any use here?"  and I know that I am, but at the same time, I'm just one small person.  But the stuff I do for God isn't what it's all about.  It's about my life being a love offering to Him.  Because I love Him, the "good works"  I do for Him just flow naturally from the love I have for Him.  But without the relationship with God, it's just "stuff."  I've been learning that although I'm on a missions trip and the purpose of me being here is to serve, my personal walk with God is still the most important thing.

Oh mono...

      So my roommate has mono... And I've probably been exposed too.  She's had the sore throat part of it really bad, and after pretty much being quarantined to the apartment for the past 2 weeks, it's almost over.  She's a little more tired, but still has a lot more energy than anyone I've seen with mono, so hopefully it's a lighter case.  Annd I've been pretty tired lately...like needed an afternoon nap after getting a full 8 hours of sleep at night.  I'm not sick, but I could still have the virus and the full-blown sickness part of it just hasn't shown up yet.  I'm praying I don't have it, and I'm taking every precaution like washing my hands, bleaching the apartment, gargling hydrogen peroxide, and downing the Vitamin C.  But until I either get a blood test or get the symptoms, I don't know if I have it or if I can pass it on to other, and thus my life kind of has to go on hold.  I can't go to the baby hospital or the orphanage for a while, and we can't have the BCA girls over to our infected apartment, but I'm still going to teach art unless I get some symptoms.  I can still go to church and Bible study and Romanian lessons, but that's about it.  
      
      One good thing I guess is that I can get a lot of studying and homework in while I'm stuck at the apartment.  Tutoring is still going well and I can literally understand more and more that I read and hear everyday.  I know a good chunk of the grammar now, and I'm only really missing the past tense and a couple other smaller things, which I've kind of already figured out from reading my Bible in Romanian.  I can say a whole lot now, I just need to practice listening and speaking a lot, which is the hardest part.  At church on Sunday, I didn't have anyone translate for me and I made myself focus on listening.  It was really exciting for me that although Lau preached and his spoke really fast and kind of quietly, I could pick out most all of the words and phrases I've been learning and could somewhat follow along!  I couldn't get every word or what he specifically was saying, but I got the general idea at least!  It's really just training my brain to listen and comprehend what I'm hearing, instead of automatically shutting off and thinking "Foreign language that I can't understand."


       And here's the weekly update from art class!  I had them draw an emotion from a bag, then look in a mirror and draw their facial expressions while acting out that emotion.  It was quite entertaining to watch them making faces to themselves in a mirror!  

      Today also marks 1 year of singleness for me!  It has definitely been the most difficult year of my life, not only with being single and working through a breakup, but many other situations with friends and family too.  It's been trying, but the Lord has used everything I've had to deal with to draw me closer to Himself and teach me to fully rely on Him.  He's reminded me (for the millionth time!) that He is all I need and the only One who can ever complete me and satisfy me.  I'm so thankful that God chose me to have a relationship with Him, and I truly don't understand how people can make it through life without Him and the hope He offers!  This Valentine's Day won't be as difficult as the last, but I still want to make sure I'm focusing on falling more and more in love with God, and not the fact that I'm very single and all my friends are married already! 

The Bucuresti mall all decked out for Valentine's Day!

One month down?!

     I honestly can't believe I've been here for an entire month now!  It's gone by so fast, but at the same time, I feel like I've lived here forever.  I've got a pretty consistent yet random schedule now, and there's not much time to sit at home and be bored anymore.
     
     So my language tutor, Delia, suggested that we try to have 3 2-hour lessons per week since I only have 4 months before camp and my goal is to be practically fluent by then.  I swore I wouldn't go back to school ever again, but now I'm loving learning the language and doing my homework and studying for hours.  Unlike organic chemistry, learning Romanian is very practical and useful for everyday life here, and that's a huge motivation.  It's awesome that everything that I read and hear is slowly unlocking in my brain and I actually can understand the basics of what's going on sometimes.  I'm so thankful that I studied Spanish and Latin in high school, and especially Latin because Romanian is the closest romance language to the original Latin.  It really helps just even knowing how to study a language and the background in grammar.  Delia apparently raves about me to Tom and Leah, saying how I'm a quick learner and a teacher's dream student! That's really encouraging, even though we're only going over the basics and I've only had 5 lessons so far.  I'm actually pushing her to teach me more concepts and give me more homework. She was kind of blown away yesterday when I told her I've been reading the Romanian Bible along with my English one, comparing the two and picking out the words I know and trying to pick up new ones along the way.  I asked her to go ahead and explain the genetive case to me, since I pretty much figured it out from my reading, I just needed to know the specific rules.  Me and Jess are going to go over my homework together to kind of teach each other.  She needs some review on the grammar and I need help with hearing and speaking it, and how the sentences actually go together. So it's great to have more practice when I'm at home!  


     Speaking of Jess, she's pretty sick and has had a bad sore throat for a couple days.  She went to the doctor yesterday and got some tests done today.  They said it could possibly be mono, which would really be awful.  Please pray that it's just a bacterial infection that can be treated and will go away soon, and that I don't get sick either!  We've been disinfecting everything and trying to be careful, because it would really suck to get something like mono for half of the time that I'm here!  


    On Monday, I got to go help out at the baby hospital, and I fell in love.  I just want to take them all home with me!  There's 26 babies, 6 newborn to about 3 months old, 12 four to 6 month olds, and 8 six month to year olds.  I don't know the whole story to why the babies are there, I know some are orphans, but one of the babies' mother came to visit her son, so I don't know why he is there.  There's only one girl, Cornelia, from Heart to Heart, and a couple nurses to take care of them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 3-6:30.  So I'm hopefully going to be helping out as much as I have time for there!  They really needed the extra hands to hold, feed, change, and play with the babies, and I absolutely loved it.  I think it's a great way that I can volunteer right now since I don't need to know how to speak Romanian to take care of babies!  It's also only a ten minute walk from my apartment!  We were told that we would have to take the metro to Victorei, switch lines, and go all the way to the end at Pipera, and then take a tram a couple stops to get there, which would take 45 min to an hour.  But last Saturday, after me, Jess, and Nora went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, Nora's mom drove us home and showed us how we could just walk there since it was so close!  It's literally the next main road over and you walk down the road practically right across from our apartment!  


      Art class also went really well this week, and although I was warned about some behavior problems with certain kids, they've always been great for me!  We pulled out the paints and they used foil as part of their picture.  Here's some pictures of them hard at work and the finished products!

      
      Bible study was really challenging last night and I always enjoy that time of digging deeper into the word with other believers.  We studied Luke 6:27-38, where Jesus gives a list of how to love our enemies and the Golden Rule.  He explains that even sinner can do "good" things and love those who love them, and that we shouldn't settle to just be like the sinners.  Tom explained that because we are Christians, we need to live at a standard that sinners can't because they don't have the Holy Spirit.  Our entire life should reflect Christ and be unexplainable to those who don't know Him.  My prayer is that I will not just lead a "good" life, but one that is completely sold out to Christ, out of my comfort zone, and that I will "turn the other cheek" in order to point others to Him.  Right now, I'm comfortable.  Yes, I'm in a foreign country on a missions trip, but my life is comfortable and I throughly enjoy the work that I'm doing here right now.  It's a scary prayer, but I want God to stretch me to teach me to be more like Him.  I know it won't be easy in any way, but He's promised me that He will give to me the measure that I give to Him, and that "God is able to make ALL grace abound to you, so that in ALL things at ALL times, having ALL that you need, you will abound in EVERY good work." (2 Corinthians 9:8)   :]