Magical Case: Moldova

In the summer of 2004, between finishing my A-levels and starting my degree in Leicester, I went on a 10 day mission with my youth group to Moldova. In hindsight, 10 days is a very short time to go on a mission, and if I were to do one again I would definitely want it to be longer. That said, this was a trip with the youth, and although I was 18 at the time, most of the group were a lot younger, so 10 days was a good length really.

We drove down to Heathrow on August 1st for out morning flight, arriving a couple of hours before we could board of course. Since we got there so early quite a few of us had breakfast in the airport and my lasting memory of the outward journey is that I bought myself a cup of coffee and then we had to board about 10 minutes later so I had to throw it away.

We flew to Vienna and then caught a second plane which took us to Bucharest, the capital of Romania. This would have been exciting, except that we were stuck in the same room for over an hour waiting for the second flight with very little to do. From Bucharest we were picked up by the guy who lead the church we were going out to help, and driven across to Moldova in a rickety old dodge van which we all fell madly in love with. The van had basically no suspension, and the roads in Romania and Moldova are far from flat, the journeys certainly weren’t comfortable, but they were rather good fun!

Getting ourselves into Moldova was an interesting experience. We had all already applied for visas and such, and had been given permission to enter the country, however this did not make it easy to do so. We had to spend the night on the border whilst we were checked out, which meant sleeping on the hard floor in an empty government building, not a very pleasant experience.

After an uncomfortable night we were finally allowed into Moldova in the morning, praise God! We drove from the border to a small village where the Church was based called Tîntareni, at this point we were all separated out and handed over to our host families spread around the village. Staying with a Moldovan family was an amazing and very humbling experience, Moldova is the poorest country in Europe and most of the families we were staying with earned somewhere in the region of a dollar a week, and yet they were some of the most loving a generous people I have met.

A couple of days after arriving a settling in (and getting started with the work we were doing), we had to go to a nearby town to the visa office (or something like that) and go through some more red tape to make sure we really were OK to stay in Moldova for a few more days. This all went smoothly and we managed to stay in the country with incident for the full time we had planned.

I think I shall save what we got up to whilst we were there for another time. There is so much I can say about the time we spent out there, and I have written quite a lot already. I have a whole bunch of photos from the trip somewhere too, so I shall seek them out and write a fuller entry about what we did out there in the future.

At the end of the week we travelled back across the border into Romania. We made our way to Bucharest where we had some free time before the flight so we popped into the city for some food. I discovered that in Romania (and apparently in other European countries) they serve beer in McDonalds, on tap no less! Then we flew back to London via Vienna again, and made our way back to Nottingham where I slept. It was an amazing week-and-a-bit, I learnt a great deal and was really encouraged by what I saw there, especially in some of the youth.

I’m not sure I would ever choose to go abroad on a mission again, it isn’t something I have ever felt strongly called too, and there is already so much to do in Britain! But as a life experience, I would recommend short term mission (although perhaps a little longer than 10 days!) to anyone and everyone!