Well been back a week now from Romania, It’s taking a while this time to settle in. There was so much happening, so many situations that my head is still back there, while I work away here.
So what was happening? Well the new enterprise business to make the charity self sufficient is going great. The charity has a huge glasshouse and this year this has produced tonnes of cucumbers, which have been bought by a huge supermarket chain from Europe. They also have four shops, one new one having just been purchased in the city of Oradea. These shops provide reasonably price clothes to be sold to the Romanian people and the money then supports the Smiles projects. The next phase is a coffee shop. I worked on the demolition of five walls there, so hopefully next year I can drink a coffee in the shop and read a book. It will soon be a Christian coffee and book shop. It’s exciting because the next phase after that is a care home for the elderly. Way back in 2007 i was shocked by the treatment of the elderly. Families abandoning their old folk, stealing their houses and land to build huge big house and making their parents homeless. Today this still goes on and we hope and pray that soon some will find a home in the new facility.
I visited families in the family care programme. I love the work of this programme. It is the cornerstone of the charities work and the first project to be started. I visited families in a setting like where I stay here in Scotland. It was a remote rural location. The roads were bad and access to the city was very limited. These folks lived hard lives. Yet there was community and family and just a happiness that they were together. Things i see becoming lost in our rural community. Hope for these people comes once a month when they get a visit from the Smiles social worker. He is a man with a great big heart. It’s like visiting with a celebrity when you go into villages as people shout at the van and come and see him. He has a tough job on who to help but the ones he does depend so much on the help they get.
A project very close to my heart is the Homeless project. Last year our group saw some horrific sights. It broke the hearts of some of my young people. This year I was so privileged to be involved with the opening of the Homeless container village. We laid a path and saw for ourselves these converted shipping containers which have been turned into lovely houses. There are toilets and shower blocks for the short term containers and toilets in the family homes. This is an amazing project. The city of Oradea is in partnership with Smiles for this and that in itself is an achievement.
I also visited homeless sleeping places. These vary from rough built house structures to plastic bags and boxes. These people are the bottom of society in Romania. They have nothing. There is no state help. They have no money, no food no hope really. That’s where the smiles social worker comes in. He finds their sleeping places takes food, tries to verify their stories and where possible they can go into the container village. For some this will not be possible as it is an alcohol free area and many use alcohol on the streets to block out their circumstances. So we moved a pregnant lady into a container. Her baby will be born in a warm dry place and not a cardboard shelter. There is hope and we continue to work towards the day when all God’s people will have basic needs met.
So still lots to process. It was great to be in a team of people of different ages, different backgrounds, different denominations and faith stages but when we came together and did God’s work for a week, what a difference that made, even if it was only for one person. I am reminded time and again of a conversation i had years ago with Kevin Hoy the CEO of smiles. I had been overwhelmed by the vastness of a situation and he said it’s when we do nothing that we fail God. Small things lead to big things. Each time I go back i reflect on this and see the small things that the charity have done, becoming big things. The school, the Church, the medical facility, the family care programme, the homless projects. It’s being faithful to God in small things, then he leads us to the heart of the problems.
So as I settle into life and ministry in Scotland. I wait and see where God leads me next who knows what or where that will be but God who knows all things.
Til Next time
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