Friday pictures

Here are some pictures from today. the first ones are some of the 15 kids from the one orphanage house. I really felt tall today. I was able to touch the top of the doorway.

This guys was so happy to have his teeth fixed.

Dr. Fred working on a patient.

Although we had 36 people come through today and more then half were kids, here is only one story from today. This is Stephanie she is 4 years old . She is smaller than most her age. When I first saw her I thought she was only around 1 years old. Her mother was only 15 when she was born. And then last year her mother after having another child decided that she couldn’t handle any of the kids any more gave them both up for adoption. Stephanie is behind in her speech development and also her physical development.

She went in to see the dentist today. When she came out she had a smile on her face. (Fred and Dave were just great guys!!! J) But I’m not sure she knows what’s going on in her mouth. She had less then the 20 baby teeth she should and every single one of her teeth were full of decay. Every ONE.

When Lyn came over she held up her arms for Lyn to pick her up.

My heart just ached for her. I had to go outside to breath in the air because I was so upset.

She was only one of 15 stories from this one house in the orphanage; she was only one of the many, many stories from all the orphanages in Romania: She was only one of the many, many stories from the gypsy’s that we met this week; She was only one of the many, many lost people of Romania; She was only one of the many, many lost people in the world, that Christ died for

Friday in Romania

I'm having some problems with my blogger account so I don't have much time now to download pictures. I'll try again tonight (Saturday) when we get back from the orphanage where we are going today. We will have about 50 people to see with pulling teeth and filling cavities.

Yesterday (Friday) we went to a half-way house for girls that were taken off the streets here in Oradea. They are in a house run by a non-profit that is registered with the government here. They receive no money from the government either.

i'll post a lot of pictures tonight (hopefully).

John

Starting from the first picture:

one of the gypsy families home in Nusfalu. it has one room, and everything is in that one room except for the outhouse.

the next three pictures are giving out the shoes. They measured each kids feet by taking a stick and then cutting it off. You can see the name of one of the children on a stick. They would call the child's name and then they would come up and take the shoes.

one of the many. many teeth that were pulled for the last three days. The doc's were great. It was so incredible to see these people come in get Novocaine, and then several minutes later they are walking away with 1,2,3,4,5,6

teeth less. Today someone had 5 teeth pulled at the same time.

The next two are of the houses that Andy and Remember the Children are putting up for gypsy families in the little town of Gheda. The second one shows one of the houses that they are living in now. The new houses will have two families each.

This women is 47 and in the middle of having a tooth pulled she got a cell phone call. Yes this is a gypsy's living in a house like in the picture before, but never the less, there is a cell phone in her hand.

This one shows us giving out some flour, oil, yeast and blankets to each of the families living there. There are 13 Gypsy families in this town.

This is Andy and one of his little friends Ramos.

Tuesday in Romania

Here is a Romanian woman getting her teeth worked on.

We started off today going to a Holocaust museum in the town here.

Here is a picture of an Hungarian man who was a soldier in WWII. he was told to shoot some Jews in his village. it was at that point that he deserted the army, because his family was hiding some Jews at the time. He later lead them to safety.

here is a picture of a gypsy child.

this is a picture of a man who's family the Hungarian man saved.

this like Triage. where we are taking blood pressure, and with children we fluoride their teeth.

I'm not sure these pictures will be in the right order as i'm having terrible problems with getting pictures and descriptions in the right order.

Romania trip

Since it's working so well tonight (10:35) i'll try and update you as to what has been happening.

This is the group of worship leaders that Roger and I taught on Friday night and Saturday afternoon-night

Here is Julie, Annie, Fred and Danielle. Annie is a Romanian who came to the Lord in her teens and went on to become a Doctor. She will be helping out most of the week

Danielle is putting fluoride on this girls teeth.

The last picture is of a gypsy family. the husband and wife both had work done. Just as an aside, several people had as many as 3 teeth pulled in one sitting. just Novocaine -

Monday in Romania

I’ll try and put a picture up tonight. It’s of a woman who is only 57 years old. You would not believe it by looking at her though; she looks like she’s around 65 or so. She came up for some teeth work, but when they took her blood pressure it was 260 over 140. no one could believe it! All the nurses were saying that she should be dead by now. We sent her home without doing anything. Tonight at our team time we prayed that God would do a miracle in her so that we could work on her teeth tomorrow.

when i have more time i'll catch up everyone on what happened the first several days.

Today is the first time the internet is working well enough to send this.

Saturday

Well, Pam and I are at the Vienna airport waiting for our flight to DC and then home. I went up to the desk to see if it was a full flight and if they needed any volunteers to be bumped. No such luck. Last time we fly Austrian, I asked and before we knew it we were flying 1st class from Vienna to DC ... very NICE.

This time it's coach. At least Pam has an aisle and I have a window.

Well they are calling our rows.

see ya later.

John

The cooks are preparing lunches that the students will take with them on their way home today.

We had 62 students, so that's a lot of bags with sandwiches in them.

Gwen. Such a dear sweet lady. But I almost gave her a heart attack the other day. Our room has a balcony above a setting area. There are some tables with umbrellas and under the balcony there are some benches. It was after dinner and everyone was just relaxing. It looked like it might start raining and everyone was talking about it. So I got a glass of water and started sprinkling water on one of the stw's. He started singing, "Rain drops keep falling on my head..." But he was the only one getting "rained on". Then I decided to get a little bucket. I filled it only half way and then dropped the water on a spot where there was no one sitting. Well when the water hit the ground it made a big splash and a big noise. I didn't know it at the time, but Gwen was sitting under our balcony. Well when the water hit the ground she jumped out of her seat. And yes, I later went down to make sure the heart defibrillator had worked correctly. No, no she was fine, is fine and so is our friendship.

This is the set up for our last dinner together with the students. it was very nice.

For the past two days it has been raining steadily. But at least it was the heat that we had several days ago.

It was really unbearable. so everyone is liking the rain and the cool air. No one is complaining about it at all.

Well, it's the last day and so... the final exam. One of the students is taking it in English, so that will be an easy test to grade. the 6 others will have to be translated.

Right after the final is over we'll have lunch. And then we will all gather together to pray for the students as they leave for home. Some are driving some will be taken to the airport and some to different train stations. All my Belarus students are driving back home. Take a look at a map of Europe and look at the distance. Also, something that Americans are not at all used to when we travel that distance is that as some of these students go through different countries they will need what is called a transit visa. That would be like a tax posted to allow them to travel though the country. My students traveling to Belarus will go through the Czech Republic and then through Poland and finally into their home land. They are the lucky ones, they will not need a transit visa for any of the countries.

We had our bonfire last night. It was a time for singing, and roasting marshmallows. A lot of the eastern European students have never had marshmallows before. It was a new treat for them.

This is Ion giving his testimony and Violeta translating for him. Ion's testimony is actually a continuance from last year. It's kind of like the sequel. Last year he told us that the Orthodox priest was after him and his family and that he (the priest) would make sure that Ion would be dead within the year. That year was up two weeks after we saw him last year. What follows is his account since then. He told us that the priest was in an accident and was in the hospital. Ion went to see him. When the priest saw him the priest had tears in his eyes. Ion told the priest he was there because he loved him and that God loved him. I thought that was very interesting. Here was this Baptist minister telling a priest of the Orthodox church that God loved him.

It was also at that time that the priests son started coming to the church. The son told Ion not to mention to anyone that he was coming to the church. Ion told him that he really needed to tell his father what was going on. and now that his father and Ion were talking with one another this might be a good time for him to tell his father. A couple of weeks went by and the son showed up at church with a huge smile on his face. He didn't have to tell Ion anything, because Ion knew what the reaction of the priest was with his son. Now that the accident is over he is no longer a priest. So there is hope that he might come to church now. In fact there is a new young priest at the orthodox church and he and Ion have already been talking with each other. This priest has invited Ion to preach at the orthodox church sometime. Ion mentioned that this will probably happen sometime soon.

onday

Rehearsal. We had Americans, Belarussians and Bulgarians on our worship team.

Lean who designed and put all the decorations in the room for that 'sacred place' for us to hold our communion worship service.

Jesus

Scripture reading in three different languages. English, Albanian and Russian.

All the songs we sang we encouraged the people to sing them in their own language if they knew them. We had English and Russian on the screen.

This is a student from Moldovia playing the Nai, the Moldovia national instrument. We know it as a Pan flute.

This was Sergie from Terhan. He gave a testimony.

This is Vidjai a gypsy student from Moldova. Lera is translating from Russian to English for him. When Sergie was speaking she was translating from English (which he said was not very good, but we did all understand him) into Russian.

This is my class around the communion table right after the worship service on Sunday.

This is a picture of all the people who were here for session 3. Actually that's not quite true. A group of Romanian's went to Vienna for worship in a Romanian church there.

Yes, it is that red. If that's really red. Her lipstick is anyway

Ken and Carol Cooper friends of ours from Nesconset NY came to visit us. Ken is a retired air traffic controller and he and Carol are in Germany right now. Ken is teaching new software to air traffic controllers from all over Europe. They've been here a year and have two more to go. We haven't seen them in about 7 years years. Pam and I were glad they had the chance to come down and visit even if it was for only two days.

We went to Baden on Sunday afternoon and heard a concert of Austria music. They were very good.

A statue of a young Strauss.

The class had prepared hard all week long for the worship service on Sunday. We took some time out of class to plan it all out. Everyone had different responsibilities assigned to them. We had to find people who were willing to give a testimony, Oleg's job. Someone to give the communion thought, Andrei's job. We asked a student from Poland, David and he did an outstanding job. People to make the power point slides and also for the two videos we used. Misha and Sergie M, did this for us. Someone to make sure that the communion was ready. Luda and Sergie T did this. Dmitry had to make sure that our special music was ready. But it was the class as a whole who planned it and we all put it into practice on Sunday morning. When everyone was there, we had over 100 people in the room. The singing was in .... I guess at least 4 languages if not more. We did have students from several different language groups. That day We all had a little taste of what it will sound like in Heaven. We may worship our God in different languages; we may worship our God with different worship music and styles, but one thing is clear, we worship ONE GOD and He is our audience of one.