At home on the farm.

I currently live on a small family farm in the Transylvanian Alps.

That's so cool.

I've only been here for a day--we met our host families yesterday in the late afternoon--but I am excited for this place and this family to feel like home.  It doesn't yet, but I'm optimistic.  I'll write more about that in a second, but first some pictures, 'cause I'm excited to post them.  This is the most beautiful place I've ever lived.  (Sorry, Decorah.  Well, Seed Savers comes close... but no.  Lupeni has you beat.)

Home!

Well hello... chickens and dogs and cats and horses and cows...

Well, the farm is on the side of a mountain...

We can see all of Lupeni from the top of the plum orchard.

"Big Dog."  (There's also a little dog. The big one likes to sit on him.)

My host sister!

 We spent most of the day frolicking through the farm.  Seriously.

My first impression of my new home was one of utter joy.  I’m dead serious.  I could not have imagined a more beautiful place to live for six weeks.  Ah.  The honeymoon stage is wearing off a little, now that I’m sitting here shivering in a very, very cold room… but anyway.  Welcome to the farm!

So.  I met my host father and little sister at the Impact building yesterday; they were kinda shy since neither of them speaks much English.  We then drove out of Lupeni up the road to Straja in the car with our nearest neighbor (I don’t think my family owns one).  He dropped us off at a wooden gate, which my host father untied and swung open.  Carrying my stuff on our backs, we walked through a huge garden and small horse pasture, then through another gate and towards the house.  Picture Seed Savers or the Kraus farm or (for anybody who’s never been to Decorah), the most idyllic little European country farmstead you can imagine, and that’s my family’s home.  There are chickens running around outside, and haystacks, and apple and pear and plum trees, and horses and cows near the house and a bunch of sheep way up the mountain, and when my host mom hangs the laundry out to dry she uses a big branch to pull the clothesline down so she can reach it, and… aaahhh.  It’s awesome.  I like this type of agriculture a lot.  It makes me nostalgic for the days before Iowa turned into big mass-production agriculture… not that I ever experienced that… but anyway.

My family is small: my host father (Florien) and mother (Andreea) and a seven-year-old little sister (Madălina).  They live in the house Florien grew up in, which is small and square: a tiny little hallway connects an itty-bitty bathroom, a kitchen, a sitting room (which is my bedroom), and a living room (which is where everyone else sleeps).  I feel a bit guilty, to be honest, taking over a whole quarter of the house, and sleeping on the pull-out couch in a room all by myself while Madălina sleeps on a couch in the same room as her parents.  I’m keeping my clothes on two chairs and a little table in the corner of the room, and make and unmake my bed every morning and night; everything is a bit cramped and kitschy, but it’s cozy and I kinda like it.  I have internet access (hence the ability to post this), which is a totally-unexpected perk: I didn’t realize how nice it is to be able to contact people I love who aren’t here.  (If you’re reading this, that’s probably you!)

I’m tired, so that brings me to the end of this post, though I have tons of other stories I could share (like breakfast.  Guess what I had for breakfast?  This huge plate of cartofi (potatoes) and sausage and homemade sheep cheese… food is love here, and apparently I am well-loved, ‘cause my host mom just keeps feeding me, and feeding me, and feeding me… good thing Madălina and I climbed all the way up to the top of the farm three times today!).  But more of those another time.  Noapte buna.

Viaţa.

We’re back! We’ve spent the last week on top of Straja Mountain, working at a camp (Tabŭra Aventura Viaţa) run by New Horizons Foundation. And it has been awesome. Most of the week was spent bundled up in wool socks, hiking boots, pants (sometimes two pairs), at least four shirts, a raincoat, and a bandana, because it was freezing. The Jiu Valley has been covered by clouds for the last week, which means that in the mountains surrounding the valley, we’ve been living in clouds for a week. I loved it. I loved the high ropes course, rock-climbing the side of a mountain, playing all sorts of teambuilding games without being able to speak the language, and loving on thirteen-year-olds who could only understand a few of the words that I longed to say to them. But love is the same in any language.

Man. Viaţa. Awesome.

While I was there, I had this interesting thought. One day, we played a game where the girls had to choose three companions for a long train ride from a list of rather “undesirable” company. Among that list was a gypsy (Roma). When I asked the girls in my group why none of them chose to ride with a Roma person, their reactions were really striking—with pantomimes and Romanian and a little bit of broken English, they communicated thievery and violence, demonstrating their intense dislike of Roma really clearly. I was a bit taken aback, even though I’ve heard over and over again—both in Bosnia and Romania—about the Roma “problem.” As the game progressed and girls told their stories of encounters with these groups of oft-stereotyped people, I began to understand a little more. Many of them had had really frightening or troubling experiences. But I couldn’t help but wonder how many Roma they had met on the street who hadn’t tried to rob them, or if they realized that the way they treated the boy in their school with distrust is probably what made him live up (or down) to their expectations. The issue with how Roma are treated in Eastern Europe is really complicated. It would be easy to blame it on racism, or poverty, or lack of education, or some sort of moral character flaw. But those would all be incomplete (and sometimes really incorrect). The problem is multi-faceted—the Roma population in Eastern Europe often does live in illegal housing settlements; the children are often uneducated; the standard of living is sometimes well below the poverty level; and the group is notorious for criminality (much of it petty crime like pickpocketing, but sometimes it’s basically gang violence).

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about. Jesus calls us to love the least of these. And the models I’ve been seeing and experiencing at Viaţa and in Cambodia and Vietnam and Bosnia have all convinced me that if you’re going to change a society, it has to happen from the inside. And that change is not going to be quick. It’s generational. But oh, what better way to change a society than by reaching its youth? What if Roma youth were invited to camps like Viaţa and clubs like Impact? What if someone made a really intentional effort to create opportunities for education and vocational training for them, while also teaching and building character and showing them the love of Christ? What sort of youth would that create? And from those youth, what changes might be made in the culture of the Roma, and in the attitudes of the rest of Europe? I’m writing this too late at night to be really coherent, but the ideas that keep bubbling out of this experience make me really excited. I wonder. I wonder.

Snippets.

Every now and then I realize just how different life in Romania is from life in the States.  Most of the time I’m pretty comfortable here; most things are semi-familiar—pretty typical life, just Eastern European style.  But in thinking about the differences, I’m starting to realize that there are more than I originally thought.  I like that I don’t really notice them.  They aren’t really important.  But they are snippets of a culture, little glimpses of life across the ocean, so here goes a list of random things that keep surprising me about Romania.

1.  Cell phones.  In the States, it’s really embarrassing for your phone to ring in the middle of a meeting or something, so people keep them on silent or vibrate and try to be sneaky about texting, etc.  Here, everyone keeps their ringer on super-duper-loud (I think it’s a special setting in Romania) and no one seems to have any qualms about pulling it out of their purse in the midst of a meeting and starting to talk.  They’ll sometimes excuse themselves, but not before all of us have bobbed along to the first line of some Bob Dylan ringtone.  It’s strange to me, but I’m used to American etiquette, so…

2.  Caşcaval.  I can’t get over how delicious it is.  In the States, I don’t even really like cheese, unless it’s melted or fried or sprinkled over stuff.  Here, where they serve these really strong, stinky cheeses at almost every meal, I love it.  Mmmmm.

3.  Hot dogs for breakfast.  They pulled this one on us twice in a week at Viaţa, and I’m really hoping my host family isn’t into this Romanian tradition.  I can get used to slabs of salami and stuff (this morning I had bread with salami, cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes for breakfast), but when we were presented with a plate containing three tied-together hot dogs as our breakfast one morning, I was a little… taken aback.  I ate them, but… well, let’s just say I probably won’t adopt that tradition.

4.  Stray dogs.  They’re everywhere.  Romanians and foreigners alike admit they’re a problem.  Kadie has composed a list of the varieties you see, with the relative danger associated with each, and as funny as the list is, encounters with the scary-Lupeni-street-dog are not so amusing.  Every night we hear them howling (we call it choir practice), and during the day you pass them everywhere, sleeping under benches or prowling behind fences or wandering the streets aimlessly in packs.  Some are really cute, and a few are friendly, but I’m not really tempted to pet many of them.  (Except in Straja.  We kinda adopted one of those dogs.)

5.  Food sharing.  I love this.  In Romania, it’s really impolite to eat or drink anything in front of other people without offering to share.  (This includes tiny things, like an apple or a single piece of chocolate.)   And it doesn’t matter how big the group is.  Even if you have one banana and are in a group of 10 friends, you will pass that banana around and whoever wants will take a chomp.  It’s a fool-proof way to spread germs, I suppose, but I’ll take it.  Bonding.

6.  Kisses on the cheek.  In Romania, women generally greet women with a kiss on each cheek.  I love it.  Sometimes I feel like a mere hug or high-five isn’t sufficient to express the joy of seeing a dear friend, and in the States such affection would be deemed PDA and immediately dismissed.  At Viaţa, I received a lot of happy, sometimes-slurpy kisses on the cheek from overjoyed little girls, and it’s grown on me.  Watch out, my friends.  When I come back, y’all are getting smooched.

Good morning, Lupeni.

Sunday, August 29:

My body did not appreciate waking up this morning.  My alarm began beeping at 6:37, and I rolled over and groaned and smacked at it, almost knocking it off the bedpost onto Marit’s head below me.  But somehow I caught it and eventually got down from the top bunk.  I had promised to meet Kadie at her apartment at 7:00 to go running, which was good incentive.  Had it not been for that promise, I probably would have gone back to sleep.

But I am so glad I ran.  As soon as I figured out the building’s front door lock and stepped outside, I knew I’d enjoy the morning.  It’s still raining a bit here, just a drizzle, so everything is slightly soggy and there are clouds drifting along the tops of the mountains, shrouding the peaks.  We didn’t run far—just half an hour out of town, out and back, up and then down, on a gradually-winding road into the hills.  But the view was magnificent, and I loved the familiar feel of sweat trickling down my face, my feet pounding pavement, and the well-known rhythm of my body’s stride and breathing… I love running.

When I returned to the apartment, Marit and Julie were up.  We’re not going to church this morning because of timing issues I guess, but our apartment is right across the street from a Pentecostal church.  We’re on the top floor of our building, so our view is pretty great, and this morning we all stood in the kitchen and watched out the window as the congregation’s members showed up for the morning service.  An elderly gentleman stood at the door, shaking hands and ushering people inside (we started to call him the butler).  Slowly, alone and in pairs, the congregation arrived: mostly old ladies, hair covered with headscarves, walking slowly and gingerly up the stairs to the church, gripping their canes or the handrail tightly as they stepped carefully in their slightly-heeled church shoes.  Old men arrived next, most of them in little bowler hats and suit jackets, greeting each other and shuffling their way past the butler into the sanctuary.  But suddenly, after most of the rather-elderly congregation had arrived, a white van came squealing up to the corner and two young guys jumped out, one with a guitar strapped to his back; they bounded up the steps to the church and vanished inside as well.  Hmm… I’ve always wanted to go to a Pentecostal church, but now I’m even more curious to attend the Biserica Penticostăl in Lupeni...

Scattered thoughts.

Saturday, August 28:


It’s raining in Romania.  There’s thunder rumbling outside our apartment, and lightning cracks across the sky occasionally, briefly illuminating the mountain peaks across the street.  Lupeni is situated in the Jiu Valley of the Transylvanian Alps, so the city is narrow, strung out through the valley.  Behind our apartment building, there are a few more blocks of buildings, but then the land rises steeply into thickly-wooded mountains.  Across the street, there are two blocks of apartment buildings (and a Pentecostal church), but then the city runs into mountains again.  This is the Jiu Valley.  It’s one of the poorest areas in Romania: the last official figures put unemployment at 56 percent.  Crime is rare here, but rates of alcoholism and poverty are high.  Corruption is rampant.  All of Romania faces corruption, but in this area it’s especially virulent.  Communism has left a lot of legacies, but the culture of corruption seems to be one of the hardest to destroy—well, that and the big gray block apartments.  They stretch on for at least a kilometer down the valley, one huge cement box after another, each crumbling and worn down, with little glimpses of the life inside barely breaking through the foreboding exterior.  During the Communist era, the apartment buildings were government-owned; now, every tenant owns his or her own apartment.  As a result, walking through them is almost comical for the mishmash—if repairs have been made, they have been made by individuals on their own apartment only.  None of the doors in our building match.  Some people have put in beautiful wooden doors, which seem somehow out of place in this dank gloom of the stairwell (which no one maintains at all, so it smells of mold and crumbling plaster—tragedy of the commons, I guess).  Block apartments do little to build community.  I doubt we’ll meet our neighbors, even if we put forth the effort in our broken Romanian.  (I learned how to ask for things today, though, so maybe I can go ask to borrow sugar…)  I suppose that was also intentional during the Communist era, but it’s still rather sad.

On the whole, though, Romanians are really friendly.  The apartments may not embody that well, but every Romanian I’ve met so far has been wonderful—hospitable and helpful, willing to pantomime with me when I ask stupid questions like where to find the rice at the grocery store.  (Unde eşte orez?)  I am beginning to feel comfortable here, and have definitely fallen head-over-heels for the beauty of this place.  We went for a hike tonight, past the Bates’ house, up this dirt trail to a waterfall in the mountains.  It was a gorgeous evening and a beautiful walk.  We returned to Dana and Brandi’s place for dinner afterward, and it was lovely—their house is an old hunting bed and breakfast, sitting right next to the river and surrounded by gardens and pasture.  Everything is gently rustic and sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that I’m not just living inside a National Geographic article.  I love it.  Seriously, I’m quite content to sit in the grass as the breeze blows down the mountain and listen to the river and read Dana’s books (oh, so many good books!) and eat caşcaval.

Oh—caşcaval!  That reminds me!  Food!  Other than language class all morning, our day has been entirely taken up by eating, so this seems an appropriate time to write something about Romanian food.  This afternoon we learned how to prepare some traditional Romanian dishes with our language teacher, so we made soup and salad and bread and these awesome thin pancakes that we seasoned with herbs and salt and pepper and filled with caşcaval (it’s a cheese) and fried up… mm.  And tonight at the Bates’ we had sausage and chicken and some mysterious meatball-like thing from the grill (the English translation of the Romanian name is simply “meat,” so...), as well as an awesome cabbage-red wine salad and watermelon and bread (of course) and this great salad of tomatoes and onions and olives and cheese… mmm.  (Well, except for the olives.  I really dislike green olives.  Perhaps even loathe.  But I’m trying to learn to eat them anyway.)  Overall, the food is pretty good—right now, a lot of bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese.   Soup is the starter to every meal; bread is the staple of… everything.  Everything.  But I could get used to that.  :)

Catching our collective breath.

Friday, August 27:

Whew.

This is the first time we've had internet access since being in Romania, so Marit and Julie and I are all sitting around in our apartment in Lupeni, catching up on the outside world. To be honest, I find all this emailing a bit overwhelming. I don't really like being tied to my computer for long periods of time. But at the same time, there are so many people I love all over the world, whose lives I still long to be some part of and whose stories I still want to hear. So email me. After these first three weeks, I'll be able to contact you back much more quickly. :)

Let's see. I could fill this post with stories of what we've been up to for the past few days--there are certainly a lot of good stories to be told. But to be honest, I don't feel like typing right now, so I'll stick with the brief summary. We arrived in Bucharest Monday afternoon and immediately drove to a gorgeous little mountain town called Sinaia. We stayed on the grounds of the palace (crazy, eh?) for two nights, then drove for one very, very, very long day to get to Lupeni. We dropped off our stuff and grabbed dinner, then headed up the mountain late that night to arrive in the ski village of Straja. We've been staying in Straja since Wednesday night, at a little mountain cabana where some of the campers from Viata stay. Our two days in Straja have been filled with orientation to Viata and to our semester here in Lupeni; next week we're coming back up to Straja and working at Viata for the full week of camp. I really love it at Viata, and find myself dreaming dreams of coming back to Romania next summer to work at this camp--but for now I need to reign in all that enthusiasm and focus on the week ahead of me. Viata is beautiful, though: it's an outdoor adventure education camp which works to develop the social capital of Romania through the empowerment of youth, especially through character- and team-building. It's really awesome. The staff is great; the high ropes and climbing and orienteering and hiking are phenomenal; the kids are adorable; and I never, ever, ever thought I would hear the Tarzan morning exercise anywhere but Summer's Best Two Weeks... but I definitely heard it at Viata. (It's hard to mistake "Now Cheetah is Velveeta.") But I think I like it better in Romanian.

Much love to all of you--I'll try to post more interesting stories some other time. For now, a few pictures!

The palace and mountains in Sinaia.

The palace in Sinaia again.

Flowers!  Mountains!  Romania!

Welcome to Romania.

Tuesday, August 24:

From where I currently sit, I hear voices. Conversations flow below me on the terrace in languages I don’t understand—some Romanian, some French, some Spanish, some Italian… the sounds mix and melt in the hot late-summer air and float though the breeze up to our open window. My roommate Julie and I are taking naps in our little attic dormer room, each of us sleepy from jet lag. Our room is at the highest point of this mountain vila, with a little screenless window opening onto a meadow where, yesterday, two farmers cut and baled hay by hand onto a horse-drawn cart. A large tree obscures our view of the palace, which we visited this afternoon; in the distance, mountain peaks soar heavenward. Most of them are high enough to be bald above the treeline.

We’re currently in Sinaia, a beautiful Romanian mountain town full of tourists. The tourist part is a little unfortunate, but it’s charming and our rooms in the castle grounds are apparently extraordinarily cheap. I feel like I’ve been transported to the first Narnia movie, where Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy stay in their uncle’s rambling old house—the building’s hallways snake along, twisting all over the place and throwing in steep, curving sets of stairs at odd angles. The floors creak poetically, and it’s all quite charming: the Swiss ski chalet look of the building’s exterior, the slanted ceilings of our tiny attic room, the cobblestone streets, the bear warnings… oh yeah. Maybe those aren’t quite as charming. When we checked in, we were warned not to go walking outside past 11 pm; apparently bears here have become quite accustomed to tourists, who are too friendly and too well-fed for their own good. (I’m being glib, but it’s actually serious: I guess people have been killed by bears in recent years in Sinaia.)

Now, Mom and Dad, who I’m sure will read this and freak out—don’t worry, the bears around Lupeni are still wild and won’t come in to town to eat me. The stray dogs, however… just kidding. Sorta.

So, a word of explanation for anyone who happens to be reading this (kudos, by the way!). I’m spending the semester studying abroad in Romania with a group of four other students through a program of Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. (No, I don’t go to Northwestern; I go to Calvin.) We arrived in Bucharest on Monday, August 23rd to begin the semester, which I’ll now try to summarize quickly. The semester is hosted by New Horizons Foundation, a faith-based NGO which focuses on the development of civil society through youth programs and outdoor adventure education. Thus, we’ll be spending a good portion of our time in Romania working with the two branches of New Horizons (FNO): first, we’ll be spending a week up at Viata; youth from all over Romania come to spend a week doing high ropes/teambuilding/outdoor adventure stuff at this camp. Many of these youth come from the other part of FNO’s work: IMPACT clubs. These clubs are scattered all across Romania, and pull in youth to do community service projects and other fun activities. Since the end of communism twenty years ago, there have been very little development of civil society in Romania—communism’s legacy of social mistrust and corruption, as well as forced community service, has ensured that. IMPACT’s goal is to raise up a generation of Romanian youth who see the world differently and are willing to serve their communities and work with other people, in the hopes that the next generation will prove to be better leaders for Romania than the current political elite have been. It’s a fascinating—and highly successful—model of social development, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Besides those internship-like opportunities with FNO, we’ll also be taking three courses: Romanian History, Culture, and Language; Sustainable Development; and Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t think I could have imagined a better fit for my interests, so I’m really excited to dive in! Dana and Brandi Bates, the founders and leaders of New Horizons, are fantastic, so being under their tutelage for a few months is an amazing opportunity, and Romania is absolutely beautiful and so, so rich in culture and history. Mm. I’ll try to keep you posted on how life progresses, though internet access will be really sporadic the first few weeks here due to Viata and a week of backpacking in the Retezat, etc. (Oh, what a price to pay…)