Now I wrote this last week and wanted to upload it then but wordpress for some reason has been having some issues with me. For some reason or another it doesn’t want to upload any of my pictures, I’m not sure why it is, maybe I forgot its birthday or something I don’t know. However I decided now to upload the blog again without pictures so please forgive me for this being rather late and with a lack of photos.
We just wrapped up a fantastic week at camp in Zlatibor. I can’t believe how much happened in just a week, and how many relationships we were able to make. We were interviewed on local television, saw about four people come to faith, watched some soccer, hiked up a mountain, taught some Serbians how to play American football, and much, much more. It will probably take at least another week to process all of it.
We’ve arrived here in Croatia to prepare for the upcoming ROM conference (Renewing Our Minds). After spending a little more than six hours of traveling from Belgrade we’ve arrived in Fužine, Croatia (pronounced Fu-zhin-ay). ROM will be one part leadership training, one part reconciliation and one part Christian camp trying to show young adults who Jesus is, what he said, and how that affects our lives especially when it comes to reconciliation and leadership.
Before we arrived we were warned that we were going to work like dogs from Samuil Petrovski (our local contact in Belgrade), which was something I’ve been really looking forward to. So far each day, while busy (and I’m not sure if we could technically add anything to our days), they have always felt like they’ve been missing something, specifically, the element of hard labor. Whether that hard work is either physical or mental labor, it has been missing from the camps we’ve been working at. So this opportunity to actually “work” and not just do relational work/ministry, where at the end of the day you can pat yourself on the back and say, “good job, we worked hard and got a lot done today,” is really exciting for me.
After a good night’s sleep, two good meals, and a solid devotional, we jumped right into our work. I was handed another spreadsheet for camp attendance and meals. It was also a good day for my other spreadsheet as well, seeing as I got to add another currency to our expense spreadsheet: the Croatian Kuna. So I’m now tracking expenses in four different currencies, technically four languages (though lets be honest, they’re really all the same language), two alphabets, and a partridge in a pear tree.
It wasn’t until after our first day of hard work that things got really funny and at the same a little unsettling. When we came into town the prior night, we made note of how relatively isolated Fužine is. I joked that it could be the perfect location for a horror film. I didn’t exactly realize how right I was until the next day. After spending the better part of the morning working on spreadsheet, which for some is already a horror film in its own right, we took a short walk around town to familiarize ourselves with our surroundings and to exchange some money into the Croatian Kuna.
We walked down to the center of town we saw a few old abandoned houses. The windows were shattered or completely missing, and nature was already starting to reclaim the land the property sat on. I walked up closer to get a better look and to take a few pictures, because how cool is that? We never have creepy old abandoned houses in Seattle. However, just being close to them gave me this deep unsettling feeling. It wasn’t until then I actually started to count all of the horror film tropes we’ve been apart of.
So lets see: we had creepy abandoned houses, a camp overlooking a lake, small (but cute) town isolated from most of the outside world, we are in the mountains of Eastern Europe, and we are relatively young and naïve college kids, and we have some less than ideal weather coming in so there might be more to come. Well at least I am neither blond nor pretty, and have basic common sense so I stand a fighting chance at surviving this horror flick. I’ll just have to pay close attention to the soundtrack and the audience for any other helpful insights.
The remaining week is devoted to preparing for everyone’s arrival, making welcome cards, posters and administrative paperwork. Now of all the camps so far between Montenegro, Zlatibor or just our time in Belgrade I think we were all the most excited for ROM. Mostly cause we knew the most about it going in, as well as it is the climax of our Deputation. But we were all excited for what it meant at what it represents. UPC (the church that sent us) has been involved with ROM since its inception and has been sending us Deputees here for the last 10 years.
Now as a side note, we already knew that there are a lot of tensions here in the Balkans between most of the former Yugoslav Republics, but we didn’t really know what those looked like until after we got here. Just listening to everyone’s stories so far just has given us a glimpse at what those tensions actually look like. In my own research prior to the trip I did my own research on the Balkan war, what happened, what caused it, and what was the final outcome. Though it was all technically correct, it’s nowhere nearly as black and white as my research presented.