October 2020: Restoring Families

It was the summer of 2017, God had been speaking to us about serving in Romania for almost two years. The process of purchasing our 85,000+ square foot building was a miraculous adventure with the Lord; our first day in the new facility was in the spring of 2018. 

While we were purchasing the building and remodeling part of the first floor, our team still wanted to serve the kids we’d come to Romania for. They were the “why” behind it all. With that, we decided to rent a small house in the middle of one of the most impoverished Roma [Gypsy] villages in the area. It had dirt floors, a small wood stove for heat and one semi functioning window. Despite the conditions and the challenge of navigating a completely different culture, our team put into practice the many parenting tools we have gathered over the past 32 years. We knew how to care for at-risk children and began with the basics.

One of the first things we realized was that the communities we wanted to serve in Romania, mostly Roma villages, spoke a language of violence.  In their nation, they were considered outcasts. Throughout the early history of Romania, the Roma people were enslaved; it wasn’t until 1856 that they were freed. The affects of hundreds of years of oppression are still very much present in their day to day lives; leaving them marginalized and under-resourced. This left the family structure shattered and undefined. Within the villages, violence was used in place of words. Education was a privilege that paled in comparison to the need to survive. These were the children we were saying yes to. 

In that little house, we began falling in love with the Roma children. Most of them were not enrolled in school and spent their day with us. We played with and fed them. The language barrier being ever present. The parenting tools we’d accumulated over the past 32 years came into practice but were not easily embraced by these children who were most often left to care for themselves. The consistency we brought, in that little house, began to build their trust for us.

Today those same children, with quite a few more added to the group, are completely unrecognizable. In the moment it isn’t always easy to believe that your consistency and perseverance are making a difference; but looking back you can see the mountains of change behind you.

Each day we see enormous growth compared to our “little house” days. Just last month we hosted our very first kindergarten graduation. It isn’t easy to describe how massive of a moment that was for us.

The kids were incredibly excited and proud of themselves; but not only that, their parents attended. That alone speaks volumes to the hard work of our team. These are the parents from those heavily oppressed villages who are raised to believe that violence works better than words and that education wasn’t attainable or needed. They were beaming. It was such a big step towards gaining more trust with the parents and in turn, towards our dream to restore not only children but their entire family. This is why we do what we do.