Well month 1 is done!! How can that be! I feel like we just started the Race last week! But now I only have 10 months left… Say what?!? How did that happen. Well anyways I decided to process through some things that happened during our first month in Albania.
Week 1: After flying to ATL for launch and saying goodbye to mom and dad we left at 2:00 am on Monday Aug 7 to drive to the airport to get on a plane at 7:45 am, that then flew us to Miami where we landed around 9:30 am. We then waited in the Miami airport until 8:00 pm that night where we got on an airplane and flew to Istanbul, Turkey. The flight was somewhere between 10-11 hours (I’m not quite sure how long since I hadn’t really slept since the night of Aug 5th-6th). When we landed it was 12:30 pm Istanbul time, we then waited in the Istanbul airport for another 4 hours, to then get on one last airplane to fly to Tirana!! We landed at 9:30 pm Albanian time. Then called our ministry hosts, loaded up in a van and drove to our home for the next month!!… This month my team is also going to be with another team from my squad. There is 11 of us girls!
Our ministry hosts this month is the Church of the Nazarene, it is east of Tirana in Kombinat. This month we are helping them set up their kindergarten for school to start on Sep. 3. They bought a house and they converted it to a preschool/daycare type place. They needed our help rearranging furniture, moving things around, and painting the walls to make them look more colorful. Attached are some pictures that show what we did. https://quik.gopro.com/v/9gyocYAPxJ/
End of week 1: We went into the city center, as our first real adventure day! We were a little scared to use the public transportation by ourselves so we asked someone who attends the church for directions and instead of just writing out the instructions he decided to meet us at the church and walk us to the bus stations. But he just didn’t stop their he decided to come all of the way downtown with us and give us a tour of the city. It was the first real example of Albania hospitality and was much appreciated. Included our pictures of what we saw. https://quik.gopro.com/v/sqFgR3J8o9/ The dude is Kliton who is the guy from the church who gave us the tour. The pyramid in Tirana is a monument built in honor of Enver Hoxh, the long-time leader of Communist Albania, and it’s almost as ugly as his regime was. It’s now in a state of disrepair, almost a perfect metaphor for post-communist Albania. Kids (and the occasional tourist) are known for climbing the pyramid and sliding down.
Week 2: Was a lot like week 1 more painting, more living in community but on Monday a group of 10 joined us from Holland. They had a lot more boys then we did so they did a lot of physical labor of plastering and sanding the walls while we are painting them. They also installed astro- turf onto the roof of the kindergarten so the kids have a place to play. (They also want to teach them about gardening and growing fruits and vegetables on the roof.) This week as also good because our SQL came to live with us. Once Maddie arrived some things started changing for the good. We were getting burned out and having trouble understanding how to make time to do everything we had to do. So, Maddie suggested that we charge the time that we work at the kindergarten to be less so that way we had more time in the day to do the other things we have to get done. This week was also fun because the Holland group brought their guitars and were always signing so we had some really great worship sessions.
End of Week 2: As the church headed to the beach for the week to attend camp/spiritual retreat my team rented a driver and went to the beach as well. Included are the pictures of my team and I. Our driver spoke no English. we also got to see a lot of ruins of these churches. We attempted to see some of the forts, bunkers, and castles but they were unreachable because of the high tide. Also on our drive to the beach you also got to see the poverty of the country. A lot of the buildings were left abandon and never finished. https://quik.gopro.com/v/vFEDwCYiAl/
Also at the end of week 2 we had to say goodbye to the Holland group. It was amazing to see how quickly we became attached to someone in such a short time and it was just a reminder to us of how we are going to have to do that in every country!! It’s a beautiful sad thing. Now I have friends all of the world but I also left a part of my heart in all of those places as well.
Week 3: This week since everyone from the church was at camp we kind of got to do whatever we wanted to do. So, we finish painting the kindergarten and then we also did a lot of prayer walks around our area of town. (I will be writing a separate blog about this!)
End of Week 3: We wanted to ride the cable car to the top of the tallest mountain in Tirana. So, on our adventure day we headed towards the mountain and put our team in the cable car and we rode the cable cars up the mountain. The best part of that day was that as we were riding the bus and trying to figure out how to get to the cable cars we also saw these two guys who looked like tourist, who also looked like they were trying to find the cable cars. So, we asked them and what do you know they are also trying to find the cable cars, plus one of them speaks Albanian. So, we asked if we could join their group. We ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the day!! One of the guys was from Malta and the other was from Albania but not Tirana. The guy from Malta was catholic and had done a 5-week mission in Kenya last summer!! They love American culture and had so much in common with us. We had such a blast hanging out with them. https://quik.gopro.com/v/xeeI0PsGcl/
We also went to hang out with our other team in Tirana one night as they did a community outreach night that was American themed! We ate popcorn, bbq chips, drank sweat tea and we played games with the children.
The beginning of week 4: This is our last week here in Tirana, Albania! We are doing VBS this week. And so far, it has been going really well! I was put in charge of games. So, we have been having a blast trying to figure out age appropriate games to play and how to describe some of the games without using words since we don’t know Albanian. Some days we are given a translator but some days we aren’t. we learned new versions of rock, paper, scissors, leap frog, and duck, duck, goose. I also learned a new game kind of like freeze or cartoon tag but it’s called banana tag! We also got to learn more about the children in the area and some of them have really sad stories (I will be writing a blog about this at a later time).
Things that have been hard about month 1:
- Living in community
- I thought I knew what living in community was like since that is what I did during college and my job at CH but this type of living in community is a whole lot different since everything is magnified by 100%.
- We have to schedule out our showers, cooking, and cleaning with 11 other girls!
- We also have to figure out how to bond as a team.
This one has probably been the toughest for my team. When we were first picked to be a team a lot of us weren’t sure how this was going to work. Most of my team are introverts and I’m an extrovert. Most of my team are internal processors and I’m an external processor. Most of my team are quite servant leaders and I’m a loud extroverted planning leader. Below I’m going to explain some things about my team and how it was hard for me:
WR has us hang out with our team at least once a day and that is called team time. Team time is supposed to be where we can hang out as just our team, play games, watch a movie, share how our day went, worship, and pray together.
At the end of team time we do this thing called feedback. Feedback is a time where we are encouraged to share truth with love to our team. Feedback is finding “blindspots” (parts of the fruit of the spirit that my teammates are not living out) in each other’s lives and working on bringing them to the light in truth and love. Holding up a mirror so the person can see their character, calling them higher, to be more like Christ. Feedback is a biblical principle found in Eph 4: 2, 15, 25.
The hardest part for me this month was the fact that my team doesn’t feel like family yet! To start off I didn’t want to be on an all-girls team. So, Jesus has been working in my heart with being ok with the team he gave me and that there is a reason he gave me the team he did. I also really wanted to be a TL. So, Jesus had been working in my heart with submitting to the authority that has been places over me. Also because of this I’m also struggling with comparing my team to other teams on my squad and to what I thought my expectation was going to be for my team. It’s hard to not get in the comparison mind set and that the grass is always greener thought process.
Even though I wasn’t picked to be a TL for this month God showed up big time with allowing me to be the team Treasurer. As the team Treasurer, your actually more involved with making decisions for the team. And also, since I was picked as the head Treasurer for our squad God has been showing me big time how since he trusted me with little he is blessing me with more.
Even though I didn’t want to be on an all-girls team. God has been showing me why he put me on an all-girls team.
The other things I have struggled with this month is that the first few weeks our team time was very strange and forced since they essentially made us forced family. None of us picked each other and we were all individually struggling with different things but didn’t feel comfortable enough to share it with the rest of the group. Team time became like a chore that we HAD to get done. During training, they really warned us not to have one foot in American and one foot in the country we are in! That balance of not cutting all of your relationships off back home and being present is hard. The first week I was really struggling with homesickness but I knew for me to get over it I couldn’t reach out to you all back home. That would only make me miss you worse. Because I only really had time to think about it when we had down time. So, if I used that time to reach out to you all it only reminded me of how much of your lives I am missing. If I didn’t reach out I didn’t have reminders of how your life is still moving on without me. However most of the girls on my team dealt with the homesickness by calling home. Since we have Wi-Fi where we sleep they can do this any time we have down time. This was a difficult thing for me to navigate.
So finally, at the end of week 1 I finally got enough courage to share with my team how homesick I was and how I didn’t want to reach out back home since that would only make it worse. My team responded really well and some of them shared that they were also homesick and that I should feel free to externally process with them about how I was feeling.
However, this didn’t fix everything. The first few days that we were struggling with team time feedback was as equally as hard since none of us knew how to really do it. No one knew that feedback wasn’t a place to list all of the things that someone does that is annoying. That if you have something that someone does that is annoying to you, you first need to take it to Jesus to see if your heart will change about it. Then you need to figure out if the thing they are doing has to do with a fruit of the spirit that they are struggling with. Then you need to take that thing to the person and share your heart in truth in love by saying like “Hey you do these fruits of the spirit really well but when you do this thing it shows how you’re not living up to your full potential. And you’re not living in this certain fruit of the spirit”, then have examples to tell this person. After you have told that person individual, one-on-one, then during team feedback you let the team know that you gave feedback to a certain person and here is the feedback I gave them. At first feedback was hard. I felt like every time I was given feedback they wanted me to stop doing everything that makes me me. It was hard to remember they are improving your character not trying to change your personality.
I’m still working on not feeling this way. It’s still hard to figure out how to decipher when someone does something that annoys or upsets me how to take my feelings to Jesus and then share with my team how I am feeling.
We leave Thursday Aug 31 for Serbia for month 1 debrief.
I am excited for debrief!! We will get a lot of time with the rest of our squad that we have been away from this month and I will have a lot of downtime to be able to call you all!!
