Stories of a Scrappy Missionary Kid (eBook)

Emmy Grace (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
150 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-1298-2 (ISBN)

Infos

'Stories of a Scrappy Missionary Kid' invites you to join in on the adventures of Emmy Grace who grew up as a third culture kid in Romania, became a travel nurse, and now continues to explore the world beyond her borders.

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"e;Stories of a Scrappy Missionary Kid"e; invites you to join in on the adventures of Emmy Grace who grew up as a third culture kid in Romania, became a travel nurse, and now continues to explore the world beyond her borders. She shares the humorous and heartwarming stories of faith, family, and friendships formed along the way. Emmy Grace retells her journey of growing from a shy child to a confident adult making friends, learning lots, and bringing hope to others on her many adventures and misadventures. In these pages, she recounts the places she has traveled to and the inspiring people she met along the way.

Textauszug

Chapter 3

Encore

After disembarking at the Arad train station, we quickly encountered several strange sites, smells, and sounds, but we found no trace of the local couple Ani and Adi who were supposed to be meeting us. They worked for Hopes for Others, the organization we were going to Romania with. Unsurprisingly, due to the language barrier, our little team was immensely lacking in communication. As I stood in the train station parking lot, culture shock settled over me as I took in my new surroundings, especially the crippled, wailing beggar woman. My dad trotted off to find a payphone so he could contact Ani and Adi. He returned triumphantly and within fifteen minutes the couple sped into the parking lot to pick us up. We were noticing many different and new things around us, and one of the differences was a dramatic contrast in car sizes. Romanian cars were built far more for efficiency than spaciousness, and most of the cars were easily half the size of the vehicles we were used to seeing in America. How we fit all of us and our bags into the vehicle they brought we have either forgotten or repressed, but we were happy to be picked up and brought back to the base.

The base consisted of Ani and Adi’s home, a small store, a tiny courtyard with a fenced off corner for their dog, Nero, and a large building built by the organization appropriately named “Servant’s House.” We set up our temporary home in Servant’s House and explored the neighborhood. It was different than any neighborhood I had seen before. The dirt road and dusty sidewalks were lined with tall fences and tired looking homes. At the end of the street was a large soccer field and along the road was an occasional mini market. These stores were barely larger than a closet and were a convenient amenity for the neighborhood to have. However, shopping in the minimarts was an uncomfortable experience as the Romanian stores used an old school and probably far more effective surveillance system whereby the employee would follow inches behind the customer wherever one would go in the store. Along the road, an occasional car or horse and cart would go by, but there was otherwise not much to see or do. That left us to find ways of our own to entertain ourselves.

For a while my siblings and I enjoyed exploring our way around Servant’s House and seeing the various donations that had flooded in after the Y2K panic had ended. Our personal favorites were the five gallon buckets of brownie mix someone had purchased in preparation for the anticipated disaster and then later passed along as a donation to Hopes for Others. Whoever sent that to Romania is still an honorary family member as that brought us much delight in an otherwise significant food slump we kids experienced during this transition. Ani kindly did some cooking for us, but the cold soup contained a variety of items we were all sure did not belong in soup and most of the other things she brought over seemed equally dubious. It was not that we were picky, the truth was even their dog would not brave sampling those meals when we tried to share some with him. My mom, who is a great cook, tried to make a family favorite—pizza; but with the lack of ingredients we usually used, even the pizza ended up being a disappointment.

It took us a while to adjust to the available ingredients and foods, but we learned a lot along the way. On one of our first trips to the open-air market we approached a little woman who was selling lettuce. They were some of the smallest heads of lettuce we had ever seen, but the price was right. As best as we could understand, we thought we could buy one head of lettuce for 4,000 lei (the Romanian currency), which was twelve cents, so my parents handed over the 4,000 lei. To our bewilderment the vendor began stuffing head after head of lettuce into bags for us. It was not until after the transaction was completed that we understood more clearly that it was actually 1,000 lei for four heads of lettuce. We ended up taking home sixteen heads of lettuce from the market that day. Our diet was not lacking in fiber at least.

Next to the outdoor market was a warehouse style building which we called the “branza barn.” “Branza” is the Romanian word for cheese. While in there, many of the village women who had brought their hand squeezed cheeses to sell would offer a slice of the spongy white cheese as a taster on an outstretched butcher knife that often ended up threateningly close to my neck. I missed orange cheddar cheese from home. In the branza barn would also be large pieces of meat hanging up, eggs for sale, and best of all- fresh bread. The fresh baked Romanian bread was wonderful and filling. It was always a unique shopping experience, but it showed us some glimpses into the culture of these reserved and hardworking people.

Many of those days at Servant’s House in our first few weeks felt slow and boring to us kids, so any opportunity for a change from the routine of wandering around seemed like a welcome adventure. We did not have to wait too long for our first opportunity to not only get out of Servant’s House, but to get to visit a Romanian village. On our previous Sundays, we had joined Ani and Adi at the large Baptist church they attended in their neighborhood. It was walking distance from Servant’s House, so that was an easy deciding factor in our choice to attend there for our first few weeks. It was a staunchly traditional Romanian Baptist church and everything in the service felt exceedingly formal. Though I do not remember all the details about the service, it seemed long, hot and stiff. The fact that we could not understand a word of what was being preached did not help us feel engaged in the service either. I consistently fell asleep during the church meetings, and I think my family was jealous.

However, after a few weeks, a sweet lady named Viorica invited us to attend her husband’s church. He was the pastor of the village church where they lived, and it was only a few miles away. We were eager to try out a different church, and it was our first adventure out of the city of Arad. There was a good bit of thrill on the Sunday morning they picked us up. We enjoyed the countryside as we went riding along the narrow Romanian roads passing all the diligently cultivated farmland until we reached their village. Though we had not known her long, we liked Viorica. She spoke English well, and we had gotten to have many nice conversations with her. She took on life in a very matter of fact style. We labeled her “the not my problem lady” because regularly we witnessed Viorica working on something at Servant’s House and when confronted with a problem, her simple response was always, “that is not my problem.” In her retelling of stories, at the point in which the story’s crisis moment would arise, Viorica would interject, “it was not my problem.” She had either mastered boundaries well before people were writing books about that topic or just knew how to be a professional at evading problems. Regardless, she was fun to be around. She did not have a whole lot of problems or drama and this fact was confirmed yet again on our Sunday morning ride over to her husband’s church.

The formalness of the Baptist churches of the city was lost in the much warmer, friendlier atmosphere of the small village churches. The surrounding chickens and farm animals near the small village church brought in not only a different smell to the church yard but added to the whole atmosphere feeling more humble and inviting. The service was well attended but also had more allowance for a family feel than the previous services we had attended. Unlike at larger churches, guests in this setting were noticed and welcomed. Viorica also explained to us that when guests came to the village churches the tradition was for them to sing a song. This was a problem. We tried to get out of it, but for Viorica, it was of course not her problem. We did not want to offend the gracious leaders who had invited us and taken the effort to pick us up and drive us out to the village, so we resigned oursevles to the fact that we were going to have to sing.

Memories loomed imminently in our minds of our recent and only attempt to ever sing in front of a church that had been nothing short of disastrous, and somehow our family had gotten signed up for this again. We tried our best to remain optimistic. We thought perhaps without my mom playing on the piano that would be the change we needed to turn our musical abilities from failure to success. We reasoned that this was a Romanian church, and we would be singing in English; perhaps they would not even understand us. The idea that this was going to go better or that many of the congregants did not speak English was largely based on daydreams. Deep down we knew that, but we did not want to be rude to this little village church that was warmly welcoming us, and we needed some false hope to get our nerve up before attempting another musical performance.

Eventually, the dreaded moment arrived. The pastor rose to the pulpit, introduced us to his church and asked us to share a song. The five of us and a girl named Adina, who was briefly visiting Hopes for Others, slowly rose and made our way to the stage and stood in a semicircle around my mom. My mom, who still had a love for music even though she was reluctant to show that publicly anymore, produced a single page with lyrics to the song we had chosen to sing. We had gone for ultra simple in hopes that our skill set could rise to the occasion. It was a children’s song about serving God. It was based off the passage in the Bible from the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.10.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-1298-2 / 9798350912982