he’s albanian…albanian…that’s for sure…(part 3)
day two…
monday…april 5th, 2004…got to sleep in a little bit longer this day…the whole group was to meet at the church in durres before heading out to the streets…so since derrick and i were staying in durres we didn’t have to get up as early…staying in durres was proving to have it’s advantages…however, the nite before we came home to find out that they were out of water so we couldn’t take a shower…i woke up praying that i could take one in the morning but they informed us that they were still out of water…yummy…see i enjoy being clean…i could be as dirty as all get out during the day and give me that shower at the end of the day and i’m golden…but here they learn to live without running water and electricity as they both go out quite frequently…something we’re not quite used to here in america…it was at this point that i could tell God was really trying to beat all these “american comforts” out of me…i wasn’t there to live like an american in albania…i was there to get a sampling of albanian culture…and running out of water and electricity falls right in with that…so as soon as i got dressed i went out only to find out that sazan and laura had went to their neighbors and got a few buckets full of hot water for us to rinse down with…how stinkin’ kool…these people were doing a real good job of making me feel like a punk…and that’s definitely a good thing…so after we rinsed down (and made sure we saved plenty of water for laura and sazan to use) we all sat down for a wonderful breakfast once again…
we then took off on our 15 min. walk down to where the church was to meet the rest of the group and get our instructions for the day…this day we were going out to the different high school’s and seeing what kids responses were to the gospel and seeing if they’d be interested in attending the new church…we were then split up into several smaller teams consisting of around three people from our group and a few albanian people…i was paired up with derrick (we just couldn’t get away from each other on this trip…) and sheena…we had two albanians with us as well, drina (pronounced dreena…don’t forget to roll those r’s) and ervin (air-veen)…
we set out for our particular high school at around 11am…this school was on the west side of the town…very close to the adriatic…it was only a few blocks away…so the deal w/ high school there is the kids go from 8am until 1pm…if they don’t have to be in a particular class they don’t have go to study hall they can just go stand around outside…there are iron fences that they can’t go past though…however there is about a one hour “free” period where they can leave and do whatever they want…this is the time we were targeting to get to talk w/ the kids…however we just missed it by the time we walked there (about a 30 min. walk from the church)…so we just went around and talked with different groups of kids standing around the school yard…we got alot of different responses from kids…most were more than happy to listen to what we had to say…girls were generally more excepting than the guys were…overall it was a kool experience just shooting the breeze w/ them…we had the chance to share the gospel and our testimonies with a few groups but not all…then we almost had the chance to actually go in the school and talk in front of a classroom…two of the girls drina and sheena were talking to suggested it…so drina and i went in to find the headmaster’s office and see if we could pull it off…that is something that i will definitely never forget…walking through the halls of that school…the building reminded me of a prison…very bleak…very broken down…definitely not up to code for an “american” high school…there were kids everywhere…alot of them smoking…in the halls of high school…crazy…i guess the reason walking through the halls like that was so incredible is because i was reminded of how in Mt. 9:36 it says Jesus was moved with compassion when he saw the people ”as sheep having no shepherd”…and that’s how i felt right then…so then we made it into the headmasters office and drina and the headmaster duked it out in albanian for a good 10 minutes while i just stood there and smiled really wishing i knew what was going on…turns out i couldn’t talk in the class because i wasn’t licensed to do so…yeah like that really means alot in albania anyways…it was kool though…just to even have that chance was kool enough for me…
so after the school let out at 1pm, our little group decided to go do a lil “unofficial” sightseeing…we went and saw this really old colliseum from way back in the roman empire days (it’s probably around 3,000 years old…i’ll allude back to this colliseum later)…then we went down by the sea…it really wasn’t that much to see…ha! the sea wasn’t that much to see!…much like the rest of albania, they haven’t taken real good care of the seaside…but like all humans…we just naturally flock to large bodies of water…while we were there we met back up w/ sazan…he had just been walking around the streets passing out tracks and witnessing to people…derrick and i were finding out more and more that this guy was the real deal…this was the town he lived in…these people were his neighbors…he was not ashamed of the gospel…what a guy…as we kept walking he spotted two guys sitting by the water’s edge and walked up and just started talking to them…we decided to wait up for him and sat around this nearby historical monument…it was a kool time of fellowship w/ ervin and drina…drina told me that since she is learning english at the university she would love to have an english bible…i told her i’d love to give her mine but it was a graduation gift n whatnot…it was then i remembered that i had a little new testament in my backpack so that i could read n stuff down at school…sheena and i both wrote notes to her in the covers and i gave it to her…in america, we have a constant supply of those annoying little gideon bibles…but it just absolutely made drina’s day to receive one…wow, the things we take for granted…
after sazan got done praying with those two guys (yeah they ended up getting saved…how kool) we headed back to the center of town to meet up w/ the rest of the group…ends up that we were gonna do some sightseeing anyways so we went back to that same colliseum we were just at…this time we got to go inside the gates…turns out this was a colliseum that they had gladiators, lions and the whole deal in…then one of the albanian guys shared with us that legend has it that it’s the colliseum that titus was martyed in…wow…how incredible that we were there…another crazy thing about durres…there’s a strong possibility that paul may have journeyed there at some point…albania is right next to macedonia and paul went there and talks about it quite frequently in his epistles…durres was a bustling port city back in that day…how kool to think that paul, titus and maybe some of our other spiritual forefathers may have walked the same streets that we were walking…and that christianity really hasn’t been there since those days until just these past few years…to think that we could be the ones taking the baton from the apostle paul in bringing the gospel to that city just flat out blows my mind…how incredible…
we then took a couple vans back into tirana w/ the rest of the group…the lost luggage came in so the guys who didn’t have their’s were happy campers…this night we were having dinner provided by our families…so derrick and i then made the trek back to durres with flori (a member at the church in tirana and sazan’s business partner)…sazan had stayed in durres…we arrived at the house and sazan had a young guy and girl from the church in durres (i forget their names..i think it was samir and adriola…so i’ll just refer to them as such…) over there as well…so while laura was still preparing dinner we all had an awesome conversation…flori was a little more fluent in english than laura so sazan, derrick and i got to talk to each other a little more extensively…we got to find out alot more about him and his testimony, etc. as he found out the same about us…it was a great time of fellowship…samir kept typing in words on sazan’s computer and helping flori find words to translate…here they had an albanian/english translating program…it was hilarious hearing him sound out the english words…sazan made me a copy of the program so that i could have it at home…we then all sat down for dinner at their very small kitchen table…i don’t think i’ve ever felt more welcomed or at home that far away from my real home…after dinner derrick and i gave sazan and laura our gifts we brought them from the states…derrick got them a tin w/ dominoes inside (we wanted to teach them how to play but never got time)…and i got them some good ol’ amish buttermilk cookies and choc. covered pretzels from the swiss village bulk food store…i also got them a little magnet of ohio to put on their fridge…my mom had got a little dish towel for me to give to them so i told laura that it was “from the woman of my house to the woman of their house” haha…the gifts seemed to go over really well and they really liked the pretzels…it was the perfect cap to an amazing day…leaving in two days was going to be very hard after a night like this…
tune in for more exciting adventures with ryan and the rest of team albania….part 4 comes at yah tomorrow…
######Note: This post is from a very old Xanga blog of mine. A very, very old blog. In fact, it’s practically a museum. Be sure not to touch any old references or links. You won’t break them, they are most certainly already broken.