Food and dreams.

For a while now, I have been nursing this dream of feeding people en masse.  Not Jesus-style, really, with the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes -- more in the style of a local food cafe where people can gather to eat good, fresh, delicious, nutritious meals while gathered around tables with friends.  A safe place, a welcoming place, a beautiful place, a warm place.  I have had this vision in my head -- little pots of basil and mint growing in windowsills; tables and booths and overstuffed armchairs; an eclectic menu of traditional Romanian favorites and American remixes; handwritten menus on chalkboards in a bunch of languages (Romanian, Hungarian, Romani, and English, if you're wondering); burlap curtains and light green stucco walls; photos of local farmers on a corkboard near the door so people can see where and who their food came from.  (Yes, my dream is ridiculously well-developed and hipster-sounding and may have absolutely no basis in market reality.  I know, I know.  But it's fun to dream...)

The catch is this: I already have a full-time job which I really like, which prevents me from diving into this project right now... and honestly, we haven't yet said yes to living in Romania long enough to see that dream come to fruition.  (Oh, there are plenty of other catches too, like my utter lack of business experience; the fact that I'm not actually Romanian; the many, many barriers to investment in the Jiu Valley right now, like corruption and brain drain and unclear local policies on business and economic development; oh yeah, and the ridiculous challenge of using local produce in a year-round restaurant when you live in an area that's covered in snow five months of the year.  But I digress.)

However, today I began to see the dream come true a little bit!  Let me tell you about it.

Many years ago, our church here in Lupeni (Betel) ran a daily soup kitchen for kids who might not get enough to eat at home.  Some of our friends at church grew up in this soup kitchen (called a "cantina" in Romanian), attending it daily, eventually drawn to the church not by its preaching or music but rather by its delicious soups and faithful presence.  Unfortunately, after years of a flawless record, someone got sick after eating there and the cantina got shut down.  It hasn't been open for at least a decade, but in the past few months a few members of the church have begun talking about reviving it.  The part of town where our church is located is the old town center, near the coal mine, and it's known for being a poor area where a lot of Roma people live.  And it's true -- there really is a lot of poverty there.  If it didn't feel voyeuristic and disrespectful, I'd take pictures, because some of the homes are almost unbelievable -- only a step or two away from shacks, these are ramshackle leaning constructions of wood and cement and sheet metal, surrounded by piles of garbage.  Not all of them are that way, of course, and there are plenty of nice homes and wealthy people in the neighborhood -- but there are also people living in extreme poverty, and it's undeniable.

So this week our friend Irina, who lives in the neighborhood near the church (Jack and I live on the other side of town), decided she'd waited long enough and she was ready to start.  And sure enough she did.  She made a huge pot of tocaniţa de cartofi (a meaty, potato-y stew) on her own tiny stove and slaved over it all day.  When I arrived mid-afternoon she'd already been at work for hours, chopping and stirring, measuring and tasting.  We carried the heavy pot between the two of us through her own wooden gate, down the street, and into her sister-in-law's empty house, where a large table with two benches had been set up.  There is no running water at that house, no sink, no stove, and no bathroom, but it was a clean, empty space, and Irina sent her daughter through the neighborhood to announce that dinner was served.

About 20 kids came, ranging in age from 3 to 13.  Irina realized as they entered that many of them had dirty hands, and sent a neighbor boy running for a bucket of water so they could wash up.  As I poured cupfuls of cold water over the fingers of one little girl, she looked up at me confused.  "Scrub," I said, pantomiming the action.  She just blinked at me.  So I took her hands and gently rubbed them together, and we slowly wiped off layers of dirt to reveal pink little palms.  Shortly thereafter, we realized that this little girl didn't know how to eat with a spoon, as her potatoes kept slipping onto the table instead of into her mouth.  Her plate emptied three times slower than anyone else's, and as the other kids slowly trickled out, satiated, I suddenly realized: she didn't know how to wash her hands.  She didn't know how to eat with a spoon.  When I chatted with the kids, asking them their birthdays, she didn't know when hers was.  She's five years old.  It made me want to cry.

And then I realized something else, as this little girl finally slipped out the door with a quiet "mersi."  Irina was sitting there exhausted, her blue apron limp around her waist, but she was smiling.  A stack of dirty dishes awaited us, ready to be washed and rinsed in two buckets of cold water.  But children were fed and loved, and their bodies and souls were nourished.  And it's only the beginning of a dream that's so much bigger, and so much more beautiful, than mine -- it's a dream that members of our church had, which they are welcoming me into, and together this cantina will become a place that feeds the masses.  I believe it.  Hopefully we can still use local food and ask for help from nearby farmers, and maybe we can even grow some pots of basil to use for seasoning.  But even if this dream never looks anything like the vision of a bustling cafe in my head, it's already beautiful -- because it's real, and it's full of love, and it's shared.