Busy, Busy, Busy...

              Hello everyone and anyone who reads this page! ;) It has been a long time since I wrote anything at all and A LOT has happened since then, I just hope I can remember it all! lol!

             As you all know by now, some friends of ours were having appartment toubles, so my dad and some of the guys from our church were helping to repair it. They just finished it on Saturday and the family was able to move out of the appartment the church rented and move back into their new and improved appartment! They were so excited!

            My mom is happy now too because that is where we have been keeping our boxes since we have no room for them. Now she can start to unpack and we can get our winter clothing because it is getting COLD here! Frost is everywhere and most of the leaves are off the trees! At least most of the trees that have turned to their autumn colors, that is! (Yes we got our boxes...I don't remember if we told anyone...)

           I had my 19th birthday last week and have already had so many congratulations that I don't know what to do! Lol! But I do really appreciate it more than you know. It is always nice to know that people are thinking about you! Especially when you are away from home!

           Our church is approaching its third anniversary, which is exciting! We hope and pray that God will bless us as we seek Him in all that we do! May we grow according to His will. I am trying to think of a skit for our anniversary, so, any ideas could be good! I have a few, but I am not sure that they will work exactly...

          We are still living in the appartment and we are not sure if and when we are moving. It is a cozy place and we are greatful for it, but we are constantly reminded of the need for a larger place so we can have more people in our home for prayer meetings and youth meetings and such!

         We are having our first youth mystery dinner. (something unheard of in these parts!) Everyone is all excited about it, so we'll have to see how it goes! And no, I am not saying who did it! Not till later, but oh, it's a doozy! lol!

         For saying that there was a lot going on...I really didn't write a lot! I do have trouble remembering sometimes, so I guess it will have to wait for another time!

         God bless all of you!

              In Christ,

               Alyssa

Camp and a Lot of Other Randomness!

   Hello everyone!

   Camp went very well. We had a great time studying God's word, playing great games, and eating great food! (food might come before games) Everyday we woke up by 8 (the first day most people actually got up at 8:30) and had a devotional. We ate breakfast and, after dishes and clean up, we dived into Bible study until lunch. The first day we had 18 questions that we had to answer from the Bible chapter we had read in devotions. Then we played Zonk with our answers. We had a penalty hat that you had to draw from if you drew a Zonk. The penalties consisted of things such as "Do a cartwheel" "Die dramatically" "Pat your head, rub your belly, and jump up and down." It was great fun to watch Kenneth do a cartwheel everytime he had to draw a penalty, except the last day when we removed it from the hat. :) He is just that special. 

  Most everyday it rained in the morning and the sun came out towards lunch and stayed for most of the afternoon before raining all night long. Some days it was extremely cold, while we had a day when it was nice and warm. We taught them how to play ultimate frisbee and wounded soldier (which they absolutely loved!). Do you know how hard it is to play wounded soldier in a field?! No trees and only a few haystacks for protection?  It makes it more fun...it is possible, but quite a challenge.  (We did have a few trees, but not enough to really be effective.) We had a little friend come and visit us everyday. Her grandparents were farming to field next to our camp all week, so, she would come with them to the field. When she saw that we had finished eating lunch, she came over and played cards and things all afternoon. Hopefully we were a godly influence in her life. She has a little brother too, but he spent most of his time with his other little friends.  

   Kenneth and Rebecca started taking tennis lessons yesterday. I would have too, but I need to focus on finishing school before Christmas...it is starting to sort of look possible! lol! My parents figured that we needed an outlet for our energy, and learning tennis is a good way! Rebecca and Kenneth have interesting stories about their tennis instructor, he keeps them laughing, so that is good.

   We are still looking for a bigger place to live and are so far unsuccessful. It seems to me that in a city this size we should be able to find something. Oh well, God has His plans and I am sure all will work out!

   Mom wants to start going out to the farm every week and sorting through all of our things so that we can see what is there and organize it. It sounds like a good idea, but I know that I am very busy and not likely to be much help.

Well, I hope this finds you all well!

In Christ,

Alyssa

Life is life na, na, na, na, na...

   Hey everyone!

   Well, exciting things are always happening, so I hope that this blog thing will never become too boring for anyone...anyone who reads it anyway!

   Mom's birthday was on Friday and, since we have been preparing for camp, we really had no time to shop at all. It makes me feel bad when Mom is so prepared for all of our birthdays and we have short-sightedness when it comes to hers. We did take her out to pizza, though, so all was forgiven! It had been two years since I had a potatoe pizza. It was SOOO good! It sounds really weird, but it is amazing. Romanians have some pretty weird pizza combinations, some of them including things like boiled eggs, peas, corn, tuna. (Definitely not on the top of my list!) That night we had prayer meeting at our house and the place was packed. We had brownies to celebrate and had a great laugh at the young men's antics over Rebecca's brownies. They really are good for a laugh!

  Tomorrow we leave for a four day camp, please pray for us because it is up in the mountains and it will be cold. It is already starting to cool down fast and it has been raining off and on for the past week or so. A few boys as well as my dad, Kenneth, and Mr. Sava went up to build the outhouse yesterday while Mom, Rebecca, and I stayed home to prepare as much of the food as we could. They got the hole dug (and from what it sounds like, it is almost big enought to live in) and the walls built and part of the roof on. My dad says that he still has some work to do when we go up tomorrow. My mom thought it was funny that he said that they "got so much done" since having doors, a floor, and a seat were kind of necessary items when it comes to outhouses. It does sound like they had fun working hard, though.

  We got our car fixed, finally, so we can make the trip up the mountain the Negoi (the place where we are holding camp). That was a HUGE answer to prayer, seeing as if it had not been fixed we would not have been able to do camp. So, thank you to all of you who have been praying diligently for us, it really makes a difference! Don't stop now, keep on praying!

  One way you could pray for us is the "Homesickness Factor". So far I don't think it has hit any of us full force, but it will. It always does. That moment when you realize it will be a LONG time before you see your friends and family across the pond-that is when you get tempted to become depressed and all that blah blah. So, pray that we do not let ourselves think about how "good" we had it when we were at home and all that. Although it is nice to be home around family and such, God has us here, and that is where we need to be, nowhere else. Homesickeness tends to make us think we are worse off where we are, but there is no better place to be than in God's will....so we are so much better off here! And we are making new friends all the time, so, we have nothing to complain about! We have it so "good" here and sometimes we are tempted to forget about that, so pray for good memories! Homesickness happens everywhere, it happened to me when I was in America. I got homesick for Romania, and it happened when I came to Romania the first time...I was so homesick for America that I cried often. I hope that we remain content with where we are, that should definitely help with homesickness! So pray for that too!  

 I have to go now, but I wish you all the best! I hope to be back on soon to write about camp. It is a hassle to get on the internet, but just for y'all, I'll do my best!

Love in Christ,

Alyssa

Romania, Romania...

Well, hello everyone! 

It has been a very long time since I wrote last (as is evidenced by the count down thing up top)! For all of you who have no idea, I am back in Romania and am enjoying myself as much I can. There are a lot of new people in the church here that I am getting to know and am loving it! I have taken several pictures, but because of no internet at home (I am over at a friend's house right now) I have not been able to upload them to Facebook.

Well, my friends, I guess I will start at the beginning. We left Ohio around 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday the 3rd, exactly one year after the first date we set for out departure (August 3rd 2009). We arrived in Chicago after an hour and forty-five minute flight. We made it to our gate just fine and just in time for me to stop off and get one last (or so I thought) Starbuck's coffee (we all have to have our necessities, right?). We were supposed to be there for two hours, I think, and we ended up being there an hour longer because our plan had no electricity (kind of a necessity) and had some other problem. That meant that we were almost sure to miss our flight in Munich, Germany because we only had an hour layover there. Well, we got on and made good time. I didn't sleep the entire time, but I was VERY tired. (I just can't sleep on airplanes!) But all was forgiven when I received my last Starbuck's coffee for breakfast. :) We made it there about a half hour before our other plane to Romania was going to take off. I had my passport holder in my hand when I left my seat. I made a point of getting it out of the seat pocket....When I left the plane I realized...it was no longer in my hand!!!! Talk about panic...we were in hurry and I lost my passport. (not to mention that the day before when we left Ohio I forgot my water bottle, my jacket, something else and my camera tripod!) I have never been so forgetful in my entire life! Well, after you leave the plane, apparently, you can't get right back on...soooo....they sent like three people to look for it before they found it, but they finally did about five minutes later. ( That could be a slight stretch of the truth, it might have been 10 or more) Well, now we were in a real rush...we made it to customs and they checked out bags...all went through just fine until......Mom's bag! We got held up until our plane took off because they could not find the thing they were looking for. They scanned it again only to find that they had been looking for a pair of toenail clippers that they had previously discarded. ARGH! So we missed out flight and waited for three hours to see if the next one had enough room for us. If they didn't we would have had to wait a total of seven hours to catch the next flight! But thankfully after three hours of waiting and snoozing...we got the flight. We made it to Timisoara Romania just fine...well, almost. We got through the passport check and then we made it to the baggage check. The guy at the customs thought that we were bringing in "donations for humanitarian works" so we couldn't bring the stuff in without some sort of papers. We kept trying to reason with him, telling him that we were not tourists...we came to live and these things were our own personal things. He opened one bag and found CD's and DVD's and said something to the effect of, "See, we are just lying to one another...you people have come with donations and are tourists!" He eventually got tired of arguing with us and had us open up the other bags. When he saw the clothing and books that were obviously ours he was amazed that we didn't lie to him! And he just let us through! Talk about a total God moment! And Mr. Sava drove up right after we exited customs! :D 

Our apartment is small, but nice. Rebecca and I share a room and Kenneth gets his own. (Mom and Dad obviously share a room as well) I took a lot of work moving stuff from the Pestis Farm into the city, but we made it. A lot of the stuff was covered in mold. A lot of the bed sheets and wooden things, that is. We are pretty much moved in and are just doing some minor things right now. We are not looking fervently for a larger place, but we are looking around and hope at some point in time to have a larger place to have lots of people over at one time! :)

We participated in another Deo Gloria baptism. I took the "official pictures" (which is kind of funny because there were sooo many cameras there!). It was wonderful to see all four of the candidates be baptized! :D 

The Thursday before the baptism (the baptism was on Saturday the 14) all of the youth got together and passed out invitations around the city. We definitely got varied responses! But it was great being able to share and fellowship in that way.

For the past two Sundays we have been going up to the woods outside of Hunedoara at 4 to play volley ball and just have fun. We taught the teens how to play Ninja and we have a blast!!! They absolutely LOVE that game! (They are really good too!) 

Well, I hope this finds you all well! 

Until next time! 

In Christ,

Alyssa

Currently Watching Get Smart (Single-Disc Fullscreen Edition) By Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway see related

Wow, talk about long time no post! AHH! Ok, so being in America has been crazy some of the time and not so much a lot of the time... We went to the Master's Mission and spent some quality time there. I drove for the first time and so did Rebecca and Kenneth. Nikitah didn't drive till we got back to Ohio.

I started Driver's Ed last week and so far have had a lot of fun and learned some valuable stuff, so that't cool. Ummmm.......Church is great, it is wonderful to be with people I haven't seen in awhile and to hang out with them. Last Saturday we had our Rake n' Roll and raked like 10 yards of leaves. There were lots of people, so that's good! It went a lot faster than it probably sounds! The food was good afterward, that is probably why most came. lol! They also played football. I wanted to play, but my legs were hurting and it was freezing outside! So I stayed inside and played hangman. Rebecca had already went home, so I went home soon after her.

Next Saturday we are supposed to help someone pick their corn that they can't get with their combine, so we get to pick corn by hand. *fun times on the farm in Romania* yeah, so that should be cool! We've got a Thanksgiving skit coming up and we have  been practicing for it....so hopefully it will turn out great, Lord willing! We also have a Christmas skit that we have to start practicing for, so life is getting busier seeing as we have a long trip coming up in December through January and then another one March through who knows when! So busy busy busy! Well, I gotta go!