Homestay in the Mountains

This weekend I had a Romanian homestay experience. I was very nervous going into it, but it ended up being great! My family was very kind. My family lives up in the mountains and in the winter they must “hike” up a steep road to their house. They live on a farm and have a horse, two cows, chickens, and a pig. They grow quite a bit of their own food and because the grandma used to be a cook we were fed very well, all the time! The small house has quite a few people living in it. There is the mom and dad, uncle and aunt, grandma and grandpa, 16 year old Peter, 16 year old Nico ( a cousin), and 10 year old Anna. Peter was the only one who knew English! Sometimes it was very odd when I was in the room with just the parents or cousin and we couldn’t really talk without using hand gestures. I learned a lot about Romanian culture through this homestay. For example, my family eats a lot of bread and they go through about three loaves a day. I also learned Romanian personal space is a lot smaller for people you have just met. It was also really neat meeting Peter’s friends and seeing what it is like to be a Romanian teenager. Lupeni, the city we are staying in, does not have a lot to do, so it is very common to just walk up and down the streets with friends and maybe go to a club or bar. It is also very common for different ages to all hang out together. Many of Peter's friends were 18. So, Saturday night we walked into Lupeni with some of his friends and looked at the lights and then went to Piano Bar. On Sunday we went for a hike up in the mountains. It was straight up the mountain and for parts of it I thought I was going to die. I think I would have died without Niko’s help! I think that will be one of my favorite memories of my homestay. It was so beautiful up there, I couldn't imagine looking at that every day! We built a fire and waited until it got dark so that we could see the lights of Lupeni and Urichani (the next city over). The homestay was a great experience, they had great hospitality and were an amazing family to stay with. I hope to visit them again someday.

Lessons in Hospitality

This Monday we finished up our homestays. Listening to everyone’s stories, it is clear that they will probably be one of the highlights of our trip for a lot of us. It is also safe to say, I think, that our host families taught us valuable lessons in hospitality. For example, some students were given the best room in the house while the families slept in the living room or crammed into one bedroom, most were not ever allowed to help with dishes or even clear the table, and we were all fed delicious Romanian food (and lots of it!!). In my case specifically, I was given my host sisters’ bed while they slept on hard couches in their living room. On my first day I mentioned that I really liked a certain type of juice they had given me. From that day on, almost everytime I sat down I was handed a full glass. I was never allowed to pay for my own drinks or taxi rides when we went out, and their was a constant stream of “do you need anything?” “do you want anything?” “if so, just ask!” I hope that one day I can offer my guests even half of the hospitality that I was shown this weekend. After all of this, imagine my surprise when my host sister Evelina offered ME a gift. We had become very close over the few day we spent together, but I was still taken aback when she told me she wanted me to have one of her scarfs and a necklace. Evelina’s gifts will be things I treasure forever, but I suspect that my homestay with her family offered me an even more important gift. Not only did it teach me clear lessons about the virtue of hospitality and offer me an inside glimpse at Romanian culture and family life, but the most important gift that I was given this weekend is the friendships that were created.

As my new sister and good friend Evelina quoted in a note to me, “Nothing makes the Earth seem so spacious as to have friendss at a distance”

Yes, I know this is a bit corny, but it's true! :)

Annie Chresand

Teamwork

Better late than never - the following is a reflection on our activities from Wednesday, January 9th:

01/9/2007 (Wed.)

Today we went up Straja road to the base of the mountain of where New Horizons does their high ropes and team building program during the summer. We got the chance to experience a bit of this by participating in a few organized games led by Vali and Ilie who have been a part of New Horizons since the beginning. It was cold and snowy but this didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves. The games we did included, the thumb game, flying tree, electric fence, Alaskan Football, and the square game. All these games had one thing in common and that is teamwork. None of these games would have ended in success without having the proper communication, trust, encouragement, patience, and participation, all things which make a team successful. So these games were good reminders that it isn’t just one person that brings the success, it is the contribution of all that are involved.

Lauren Bergstrom

Homestays and Hospitality

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ryan Kruis, and I work through the AmeriCorps program in Calvin’s Service-Learning Center for the instructor of this course, Jeff Bouman. I did a lot of the initial legwork back in Michigan to make this interim possible and was very fortunate to be invited to accompany the group on their adventures in Romania. As I am sure is true of the students, I have already learned so much this January.

This past weekend the students have been having a wide range of experiences here in the Jiu Valley, everything from watching American horror flicks with Romanian high schoolers to getting filled to the brim with traditional Romanian food, from attending choir practice at the local Pentecostal church to skiing down Straja mountain. The one thing all these experiences have in common is that all are taking place with the students’ Romanian host families. This weekend, each of the students is spending their time with local families, experiencing a bit of Romanian through the eyes of their Romanian hosts.

Thus far we have had so many amazing experiences to learn about the people and culture here in Romania and the different ways in which social entrepreneurship is being used to address this community’s needs. However, of all these experiences, I am sure that for many of the students their time with their host families will be one of the most impacting, as students will hopefully see first hand not only the needs of this community but also how families, young adults, and church communities are living here in the Jiu Valley, how they are finding joy and making beauty amidst the hardships of living in a post-communist, economically depressed context.

The students dispersed for their homestays early Friday evening, regathered for lunch yesterday afternoon, and will remain with their host families until tomorrow morning. It was great to hear some of their stories yesterday, and I look forward to hearing many more tomorrow.

On a personal note, I have enjoyed my own homestay with Daniel and Janelle, the two Calvin grads volunteering at New Horizons who have done much of the work in organizing this interim. They were and still are two of my dearest friends, and it has been so good to be here with them, catching up and seeing the work they are doing here in Lupeni, as they join in the social entrepreneurship working to transform both the Jiu Valley and Romania as a whole. They, along with the other New Horizons staff, have done an exceptional job in showing us hospitality and offering us amazing experiences from which we have already begun to learn and grow.

I am so grateful to be a part of this interim experience in Romania.

America in Romania

"I felt like I went to America today."  These were the words of our 18 year-old Romanian guide today after accompanying us to a monastery, church and castle in nearby Hunedoara.  Robbie is a particularly helpful young man who has been singled out for potential admission to a peer Christian liberal arts institution in Iowa (Northwestern) and who also speaks nearly flawless English (in addition to four other languages).  He made this comment after riding with us in our "maxi-taxi", a 19 passenger over-sized van,  sharing Starburst candies and Hershey's kisses, listening to English, and watching a few more episodes of "The Office."   So what felt to us like a day in a strange and foreign, even exotic land, was to Robbie a trip to America.

Robbie's comment was a reminder to me, and to all of us, of the nature of interim travel abroad.  Wherever we go, we carry with us a dual persona - on the one hand we are students (and a professor) and this is a teaching and learning opportunity with all sorts of experiential facets to it.  But on the other hand,  no matter how hard we try, we cannot avoid the fact that we are also tourists.  And being tourists, particularly American tourists, carries a variety of unavoidable baggage with it.  In Romania fortunately, most of this baggage is positive, but when you don't speak a language, and you don't understand customs or street signs, you are inherently "other" and thereby outside a culture.  

from the director of New Horizons Romania

Hi all,

Unfortunately I had to leave for a mandatory YL conference that is once every 4 years. Which is fortunately infrequent because we are living in the lap of luxury, and frankly I don't want to participate in this lap dance...considering the opportunity cost involved. But, "asta este" as they say in Romanian.

Anyway, we are honored to host you as students and guests in Bucharest, Lupeni, Timisoara, Straja and the other locations. Special thanks to Jeff Bouman, Janelle and Daniel and our Bucharest staff (Maria, Diana, George) for all that they put into it. And as I have heard, and is always the case here in Romania, there are unexpected surprises.

For my part, I hope you can catch a vision for how service learning/IMPACT can play a powerful role in grassroots development issues. Linked with this is the role of values for development and how adventure education can help surmount post-communist apathy. This is the praxis orientation of our work.

Now for theoria, or moral/ontological l vision The other main idea is the social doctrine of the Trinity and how this can provide an ontological, epistemological and ethical framework for community development. Here is the link to my paper if you did not find it http://www.new-horizons.ro/about_us/img/JournalOfTheYouth.pdf This is linking the Trinity with social capital development and fighting corruption.

Unlike Western theology, which tends to posit a linear direction to spiritual development from theoria to praxis, Eastern theology inverts this and argues that right living (asceticism) is necessary for right thinking. Orthopraxy is necessary for Orthodoxy.

2 things follow: First, If this is even partially so, service learning can play a positive role for the kingdom even when explicit faith language is not used. It is structuring human experience along Trinitarian, self-giving, kenotic experiences.

Secondly, service learning can be viewed as a form of positive asceticism, world transforming asceticism and not a form of flight from the world, as was often the case where the Greek philosophical anthropology (the body is a tomb, etc.) has influence.

Okay, I am still on jet-lag and am wandering probably dangerously close to the precipice of heresy! I look forward to seeing you again!

Much love,
Dana

Bucharest - Lupeni Road Trip

We woke up this morning with a big cross country road trip ahead of us.  We left the youth hostile in Bucharest at about 10 am and arrived in Lupeni at 7 pm.  Along the way we stopped at a few side adventures.  

One of these adventures was visit to a monastery set in the hills of Romania.  A steep road climbed from the surrounding village to the monastery.  At the monastery we got a peek inside of the church.  From the walls to the ceiling the inside of the church was covered with religious paintings.  The color was almost overwhelming, but with it brought a sense of awe and admiration.  This beautiful human art contained within the church along with the snow covered hills around gave glory to the creative God who made this all and also gave His creative gifts to humans.

A quick thirty minute shopping spree at roadside pottery shops was a highlight of the day for many on the trip.  Many of us bought all colors and shapes of pottery.  Hopefully it will all fit in our suitcases going home.  It turns out that the clay is collected locally.

One more stop before Lupeni was a tall tower.  It was pretty much a giant toothpick reaching to the sky, a fun stop to get out and take pictures.

All the way from Bucharest to Lupeni the snacks on the bus went round and round, but this did not ruin our appetite for pizza at Pizza Planet in Lupeni.  The entire menu was in Romanian, but luckily we were given translation cards for the pizza toppings on the menu so we knew somewhat what kind of pizza we were getting.  An interesting thing about the pizza was that it did not come with sauce on it, but rather we dipped our pizza in the sauce. 

The day concludes with our final resting place at the apartments and a house set in the hills of the city of Lupeni.  We are all looking forward to team building games tomorrow at the top of Straja peak.  We'll bundle up good and have some fun.  Go team!  Go!