Clipă de Lumină

Once again I’m posting this a week late, but here it is!

I’m in Romania!! I arrived three days ago and I’m currently living with the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC) Romania Team Leader’s family. My time with their family has been wonderful; the Team Leader and his wife have three kids and I have really enjoyed living with them. Sometime next week I’ll be moving into an apartment at a church across the street from the office. It will be nice to have an apartment, but I’ll also miss living with a family.

I start language lessons next week, which will be good. I was so proud to announce that I could order a chicken salad on day 2, but yesterday—day 3—I tried to order a salad and the man behind the counter immediately switched to English! But my self-esteem returned slightly this morning when I took the Metro all by myself to the office and made it just fine. I only had to say three words in Romanian the entire time, though, “Zece, mulţumesc,” (ze-che, multz-oo-mesk) “Ten, thank you.” Not that I fooled anyone anyway—the blond hair gives me away before I even attempt to open my mouth.

I received a Romanian Bible yesterday and it’s so exciting to find passages that I have memorized in English, because I can pick out what a lot of the Romanian words mean. That’s one nice thing about the Bible—the same words appear over and over again so it’s actually not that hard to figure out.

For those of you in Arkansas (I love you), here’s an interesting bit of information: the population of Bucharest is not much smaller than the entire population of Arkansas! I was reminded of this when I was leaving the Metro station today and I felt like almost all of Bucharest was going up the escalator at the same time. Two million Romanians who know exactly what they’re doing and one pasty blond ignorant American!