Galatz of Fun!

Okay, I am safely home and want to finish out the blog for the trip...

On Wednesday (I'm still talking about Romania here) we loaded a fan with a driver named For Now (that obviously wasn't the spelling but it sure sounded like it!) and headed to 2 other towns in Romania, Galatz and Baraila. Galatz is home to a center for teen mothers where after they give birth they can live there for up to a year to take care of their baby. We stopped at Metro (which is Romanian style Costco) and loaded up on food, diapers, formula and toys for the center. (I have a funny story about Sorin telling Cary "You tell those girls SERIOUSLY. This is SERIOUS." but I need to add all my funny stories later. I have about 20 of Sorin!) We got to the center in Galatz (we have Galatz of jokes about Galatz.) and unloaded the food and then totally got our Santa on and went around handing out toys to all the kids. Most of the mothers there spoke English so we got to talk to them. One mom was really young and said she had a husband and a son living on the street so she was living in the center until she could get her baby strong enough to live on the streets with them. It was a really sad story! The center is really really nice. The have nice rooms and a great staff that helps them take care of the babies and gives them a lot of counseling. It's all funded from a Lutheran church in Tennessee and was a really nice place. I'm glad they have a place to go.

After that we all loaded back up the van and headed to Braila. It was a really sketchy situation and none of us really felt comfortable there. The guy who ran it was just really shady and we saw a center for a few kids to live in but we bailed pretty fast. None of us really liked this guy.

We all got back on the van and headed back to Barlad (insert funny story about Sorin sitting by Tricia on the van...). We ate at Happy Time (best.restaurant.ever) and Tricia and I walked back to the Hotel Moldova. We went out and did some good shopping again and then we found an internet cafe where I got EATEN ALIVE by mutant mosquitos. Not even kidding I look like I have leprosy or something. One of them swelled up to about the size of a quarter. I look gross.

The next day the two other girls (Brooke and April) left in the morning to head back to Bucharest and we had our last day of camp. We had all the kids that morning and it was so much fun. We traced their bodies on the sidewalk and let them draw for a while and it looked awesome! By the time we had done all of the kids the entire sidewalk was covered with all of their drawings of themselves. After that they made these really cute hands that they wrote on each finger 5 things they liked about themselves and then all of them read them to the whole group. They are so cute! We fed them pizza (from Alona's. Yummmmm) and then gave all of the foster mothers some flowers on the way out. They are seriously the nicest women. Every single one came up to me and thanked me on the way out and gave me hugs and kisses and rattled off things in Romanian (hopefully not telling me I screwed up their kids or something) and then had their kids give me hugs and kisses. It was so good to see them all again and the progress they're all making!

After that we cleaned things up and went back to the office and got things cleaned and organized. Marylin, Tricia and I went one last time to the Special Needs Orphanage and then Tricia and I, yet again, finished up some shopping (wait until you see my purple shoes!) and then the rest of the group (Jeff, Cary, Marylin, me and T) went to dinner at the restaurant at Hotel Moldova. It was maybe the funniest dinner of my entire life. We were laughing so hard that all of us were crying and the tables around us were moving out of the way! We made a list of all of the funny one liners we'd had during the week and we were dying. The other people were so easy to get along with and we laughed the entire night. Then we made Jeff carry all of our purses across town to put them in the extra suitcase to take home. He had about 6 of them! Then we spent the rest of the night packing.

We took the morning train out of Barlad (first class is the way to go! It was so nice!) and spent some time sight seeing in Bucharest and then had dinner with the Lundbergs in the mission home and then went back to the hotel and crashed. We woke up at about 3:30 to get to the airport and had an extremely non-eventful few flights home.

So I am back! I'll get some pictures up here soon!