Greetings from Romania! And thank you again for your faithful prayer support. We're sorry for the delay in this letter. We normally wait to send this until after we've received our monthly letter from World Mission Prayer League, but this month's letter must be lost in the mail. We arrived back in Romania July 18, and have been busy ever since. We feel renewed, strengthened, and recommitted to serving our Lord and Savior here in Romania. We were pleasantly surprised by how much Romanian we have retained after 4 months in the States.
The first few days were spent getting organized and recovering from jet-lag, which wasn't bad at all. Then Mrs. Traistaru came in with Flori (the little boy with the feeding tube) and his brother, Marius. It was really good to see them again and that they are doing well. One evening a young couple was at our door. She is pregnant, and they had been sharing a one room apartment with his sister until she threw them out into the courtyard. We gave them food and some prenatal vitamins, etc., and told them that we would help them with three months rent if they could find a place that they could continue to afford on their own after three months, i.e. maximum rent $25/month. They found a place for that price, and so we were able to help them with a solution that they should be able to sustain on their own with some self-discipline. There is NO safety net in Romania.
We also hired Gabi Talabur to help us with the Open Door Clinic project. Gabi, who is one of the members of our foundation, just graduated from medical school and has a few months off before her internship begins. We have had several meetings with various members of the national and local Ministry of Health, the Sanitary Police, and the College of Doctors. They seem quite positive about our project, but of course there are always some more approvals to obtain. Gabi came out of our last meeting yesterday exclaiming, "Everyone says something different than the others said." We had a very good meeting with Dr. Restian who is in charge of the General Practice/Family Practice residency program in Bucharest, and he repeated his promise to take responsibility for our work if we don't obtain the right to practice independently. We are also working with a realtor to find the best possible building site at a reasonable price, and searching for a dependable and honest architect to help us. One needs 37 different approvals before actually starting to build a clinic.
We are already seeing lots of patients again in our unofficial office in our apartment. Milt made a house call to an orphanage run by the Adventists here in Bucharest. Our American missionary friends are a little dismayed by some of the strange ideas of the Romanian pediatrician who covers there (such as that the premature twins there are identical even though one is a boy and the other a girl). So now we will be the "consultants," for medical problems while the pediatrician will take responsibility for all the Romanian documents and records, etc. A "win/win" situation, we hope.
Last Wednesday we drove to Cluj to pick up several boxes of medicine, books and other supplies that we had shipped through Christian Aid Ministries. We stayed with friends from World Vision, and spent Thursday (our 15th wedding anniversary) driving to Debrecen, Hungary to buy a three month supply of boxed skim milk since there isn't any in Romania at least until October. The drive through Transylvania was wonderfully beautiful. Everything is so green, and we didn't have to hurry or fight heavy traffic. We thought we might have to pay a custom duty and were starting to calculate the amount for the customs agent, when he asked us if we were "Christian or Baptist or something," We said, "Yes, Lutheran." He thought for a moment and then waived us on through. The car was really packed for the trip back home to Bucharest on Friday.
Would a newsletter be complete without a car story? Shortly after we arrived back in Romania we took our car in for its every 2 year technical inspection. One of the things that Romanians do before the inspection is wash the engine to make it look nice and clean. Normally, they take it to a car wash which uses high pressure hoses. Don't do that! Right after the wash we had to dry all the plugs, and the two warning lights on the dashboard for the brakes and the battery were on. Well, it ran okay and the car passed the technical inspection, but that evening it stalled on the main street. There was a parking spot right there, so after trying for almost two hours to get it started again, we left it there for the night. The next day it was towed to one of the two Toyota service stations in town where they told us after a very brief look that it needed a new alternator, and that they could have it by Tuesday (6 days) for only $1480! So instead we bought a spare battery which would get us home and about 35 miles of driving in an emergency. Linda found a rebuilt alternator for less than $200 in the States on the Internet, and another returning missionary brought it here. We went to the other Toyota garage for the repairs. The good news is that instead of being so upset about doing a dumb thing like washing the engine, we are very thankful that we weren't ripped off for $1480 plus labor.
Its been hot here. Watching the news, where hasn't it been(!?) but now it's starting to get a little cooler. That's good because this weekend we lose our hot water for the annual cleaning of the central hot water system for approximately three weeks. We have a back up "thermo-instant" water heater for showering that works if we turn off all the other electricity in our apartment. So we are thankful.
We are also very thankful to you and our other prayer supporters. It makes all the difference in the world, knowing that we are being supported in prayer before the very throne of God, daily, by faithful fellow servants in His kingdom. It encourages us, and also makes us feel humble knowing that we have a great privilege of serving Him in Romania.