Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 August 2005 14:35:45
At the beginning of 1995 my temping agency told me they had a longish-term job for me at Amnesty International. Just as I started to get excited about that, they phoned me back and said it had fallen through, but there was another charity that needed someone for 3 weeks between the previous postholder leaving and the new one starting. This charity was London-based but its work was focussed in Romania, so I jumped at the chance. After I'd been there a couple of days it was clear to them that a. I wasn't thick, and b. I knew and understood a bit about Romania and its culture. So they created a job for me, and I stayed there till autumn 1996, nearly 2 years later. Without going into identifying details, their focus was much more on development (as opposed to aid, which I had got increasingly disillusioned with during my time in Romania, heightened by one of my hosts asking me why Brits kept sending them out of date medicines - if it wasn't good enough for us why should they have to put up with it? And he was absolutely right, of course) and I learnt absolutely loads there. I also had the chance, at Easter 1996, to do an exploratory trip to Moldova.
I remember lots of things about that trip. One, I have never ever been so cold in all my life. Two, my Romanian came on leaps and bounds, as the people we were working with only had quite limited English. I was really pleased about that, as during my time in Romania when I was teaching the vast majority of the people I lived and worked with were Hungarian, so I ended up just having to use English, which was really frustrating! Hungarian is the most impossible language ever (or so I thought at the time - having now done a term of Russian language I'm changing my view on that!). Three, I thought it was the most miserable, God-forsaken place ever and absolutely hated it. Four, on the bus on the way back to Romania, literally as soon as we crossed the River Prut (the border) the sun came out and all of a sudden Romania felt like Florida in comparison with where I'd just come from. And five, I remember praying. Praying that I'd go anywhere in the world that God wanted to send me, but I wasn't going to go to Moldova. Definitely not. No way.
Later that year I started my nurse training. I was glad to be out of that charity job by then - without going into details, the workplace politics that had always shocked me in my other voluntary sector jobs were small fry compared to the politics there, and I still curl up in horror when I think of some of the things that went on in terms of how people were treated, and how the actual programmes we were involved in seemed to take a backseat to the fundraising. But more seeds had been sown - and I started to pray that I would come across a charity that worked in eastern Europe but had a development rather than an aid focus, and which was Christian.
In summer 1997 I saw an ad in my church's bulletin advertising a "Poverty Conference", looking at a Christian response to poverty, something that I always felt very strongly about despite not really knowing what that might mean in practice. More interestingly, the conference was being put on by a charity whose strapline was "Serving the poor in Eastern Europe". So I sent off for details, and as well as stuff about the conference I also received details of the charity itself, which from even a cursory glance was obviously everything I'd been praying for. On a whim, I decided to write to the Director, and ended up writing several sides of A4 on who I was, my previous experience in eastern Europe, where I felt God might be leading me, etc etc, and I posted it convinced that he would think I was a nutter. He phoned me the day he received it to tell me he was sure that this was from God, and after the conference we kept up a correspondence of sorts and I became a supporter of the charity, although because of my training I couldn't really do much more than that at the time. What became clear from their newsletters was that as well as Romania, some very exciting work was going on in Moldova, and over the months and years I found that I couldn't get Moldova out of my head.