Today marks three weeks since our departure, Laura’s and my meeting, and our last blog post. Perhaps it is time to brief you all on our time here.
The Monday after our arrival, way back in the days of June, we loaded onto buses headed for the coast and a week long camp. The camp was put on by the local Brethren church but half the students were from the Roma and Ashkali community we are working with this summer. At the camp we led small groups through translators but primarily we were there in relational capacities. People from the church ran the camp while we were set free to play games, exchange butchered Serbian and English and get accidentally engaged. All three of those have remained fixtures in the two weeks since. The camp proved an easy and expedient way to forge through alienating difference and forge friendships with the Roma youth.
The day before we left for the coast we attended church in the Roma camp; while we did not necessarily feel uncomfortable, all three of us certainly felt that we did not belong. Surely, we did not: we did not know anyone there, besides Sinisa, the pastor, whom we had met two days before, and we spoke none of the three languages present. We were highly conspicuous observers, and deaf ones at that. That experience contrasts polarly with the one a week later when we had returned from camp, with newly made friends and acquired jokes. (To think a month of friendship can be founded on repeated giggly accusations of who you like is baffling, but then perhaps also not that different than the rest of adolescent life.)
Besides hour long walks to the river, bridge jumps into the river, and frenzied and frigid swimming in the river, we have also begun English lessons with our new Roma friends, most of whom are Sinisa’s church. These lessons have been our first activities that are not strictly relational, but even here the goal is to develop friendships with the additional bonus of a little language acquisition. In the fall two other volunteers are coming with a more serious task of English instruction. We are still determining just how serious and formal to each night’s class, but are encouraged by the definite enthusiasm everyone has to learn English. It is not at all Ms. Coats’ seventh grade introductory Spanish–and that is not at all to our credit for Ms. Coats was far more exciting than our certainly boring lessons.
Tomorrow another two Americans arrive, from a Baptist church in Virginia that provides nearly all of the funding for Sinisa’s ministry with the Roma. They, and a couple of Russians who arrive later in the week, are putting on a vacation Bible school (a wee-bee-ess in the local pronunciation of English, which seems to universally hypercorrect their v’s) with the younger children in the Roma camp. We will again be taking supportive roles as we assist in the activities the other Americans have planned.
As we not quite yet approach half way we are looking forward to continuing friendships, developing our English teaching, and receiving Nigel on the 15th. Nigel, I’m excited to meeting you.