First Impressions: Albania!
After a long two days of traveling and one overnight stay in Tirana, Albania, the team is finally in Korce! We arrived at our final destination on Saturday, and we are settling here in Korce nicely. We all live together in a rented house inside Korce. It's a nice gated house to the street (gated houses are incredibly common in Albania), and we are enjoying living here. The team has taken advantage of Saturday and Sunday to bond through playing games such as "Catchphrase" and exploring Korce.
On Sunday we all went to the church we were going to be helping. The church has about three hundred people attending regularly, which is considered a mega church in Albania. We are working with Amos who is one of the local missionaries and a Northwestern graduate. He told the team that there are about 12,000-14,000 believers (not even 1% of the country) in Albania, and most of the churches here are house churches. Before communism fell, the state was declared an Atheistic state, and all religion was banned in the country. When communism eventually fell, only five people in all of Korce, the second city in the country, were believers.
After church we had orientation, where a few of the local missionaries were able to tell us about the culture and what to expect during our stay in Albania. For instance, Albania stresses relationships more important than time. The team discovered this on Sunday, when Amos was talking with a friend downstairs and we waited to start orientation upstairs in one of the upstairs rooms. During orientation, one of the missionaries told us that beggars are a common sight, but cautioned us that money is perhaps not the best way to show compassion. Many times they are working for someone else, and they don't receive much of the money. Instead, Amos suggested to pack a few snacks and to give food to them if we didn't have the heart to simply ignore them.
Amos also talked about what we would be doing while we are here. There will be three teams. Two of them are working in Sheqeras, Albania, a village outside of Korce. One team is building a wall around the property of a one-room church to help protect the building and mark the boundaries. The people working on the wall are: Michelle, Torsten, Allie, Meagan, and Isaac S. The second team is English teaching, or ESL. Those who are in that team will be using a coffee house and the church building to teach English to the students for a week. They are teaching to Middle School students and High School students. The students teaching English are: Ruth (team leader), Brynne, Selana, Alison, Dandan, Alex. In the afternoon, Allie, Meagan, and Michelle will join them to help teach English.
The third group is working at a day-center inside of Korce serving the needs of the poor. This group will be helping kids who have been abused, neglected, and often unloved. Those who are working with the day-center would be: Becca, Moriah, Isaac G, and Nathanial.
Please pray for:
1) Health. We have a few members on the team who are coming down with the cold and who would love to get better.
2) Team Unity as we do our work. Please pray that we would all be become even closer as we head out to do God's work.
3) An effective ministry. Please pray that the hearts of the Albanian people we come in contact with would start to see God's light and the work of the Holy Spirit as we work.
4) Saturday meeting. This week we worked in a small village and taught 60+ children English (English as Second Language). Please pray for our final community meeting today for families in the village through song, testimony (Dandan and Ruth) and an evangelistic message.
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