What's Up

***A note before we begin...Bobby will write in one color, and Amanda will write in another.***

Since I haven’t written to lots of people who might be reading this in quite some time, I figure that I should give some sort of an update of what we’ve been doing since we left Moldova the first time, over 2.5 years ago. When we got done bumming off of our parents and grandparents in about November or December 2007, I got a job as a counselor at an alternative school in Newport News, VA and we moved in to Norfolk so that we could be half way between my grandparents in Virginia Beach and my job. Amanda got a job soon thereafter at Norfolk State University as a housing coordinator. As she puts it, she “made lifelong friends” by placing people in rooms together.

I describe my job as taking crap from kids, writing volumes upon volumes about the crap that they give me, going home and then doing it again the next day. Although I started out at the alternative school working with teenagers, I got set up with the little fellers (grades 1-3) at another alternative school and then they finally switched me again last September to a public elementary school where my former company provides services. Lots of people tell me how great and fulfilling this kind of work is but all of these people have never had this kind of job before. Although our experiences at our jobs and in VA weren’t altogether horrible, we definitely felt like we needed to go overseas again.

So… we saved some money and bought two one-way tickets to Bucharest.

The journey out here was quite interesting. We took a trip to Detroit for Christmas, came back and had 2 days to pack all of our junk and move out of the apartment. We finally made this all happen (staying up all night) just in time to leave New Years day for Hawaii. We stayed in Hawaii for about a week, came back and worked at our jobs for about another week while we stayed with one of Amanda’s friends. We headed down to Florida from my parents house out west of Charlottesville where my family had a nice going away party for us.

Our first stop was Amanda’s brother’s house in Durham, NC. Then we stayed with the “Twelve Tribes Community” in Savannah, GA. These guys are a total throw-back and “keep it real” by trying to live their lives like the original apostles in the book of acts. Amanda will tell you more about that. We finally got to Tampa, FL and after a week of sorting what we were going to take out to Eastern Europe with us for an indefinite amount of time we took off on the 27th of January.

This was not without its own problems and adventures. At first the airline people almost made us late for our plane because apparently they had never seen anyone buy one-way tickets to Romania before. After our lecture on only staying in the country for 90 days and almost missing our first plane we made it to New York where we “chilled out” for about 8hrs. When the plane was about to leave there still was no gate number for our plane and they called us on the loud speaker. Somehow everyone else leaving for Rome knew which gate to go to so we got “tisk tisk-ed” for not being able to read minds. We had to run to catch this flight as well.

Of course, I didn’t sleep at all on our 8-hour flight to Rome. But we did get fed twice which is twice more food than on the flight to Hawaii. We were in Rome’s surprisingly crappy airport for 4 hours before we got on the plane to Bucharest. Nobody had assigned seats and nobody was allowed to sit in the front 10 rows of seats which was strange because they put prisoners in the back rows right next to everyone else.

That’s right. Prisoners. These guys undoubtedly were Romanians caught working illegally in Italy and were being shipped back to the motherland. Still it was disconcerting that the pilot kept his door open the whole time with a bunch of surly Romanians with nothing to lose in handcuffs behind us. Why were the first 10 rows of seats open?

We got to Bucharest without any trouble but the city was covered in snow and I think we hit a stray dog when we landed on the runway. New York has birds, Romania has mutts. We got to our Pension without any problems, had some dinner and went to sleep. The next day we bought our train tickets to Chisinau and had some extra time so we decided to see the “peasant’s museum”. We shared a train cabin with a woman and her well-mannered child. The kid slept most of the time which was nice because I sure didn’t. I don’t know why.

We hitch-hiked with some guy down to the village and that’s where I’m writing now. We’ll stay here for about another 4 days before we go try and see the Superbowl in Chisinau. Then we’ll go see Moldova’s break-away region (I’ll write more about this later) before we head to Brasov, Romania to start our new lives. We have no idea what to expect. But it should be pretty awesome.

Amanda's Contribution....

A few more words on our stay with the Twelve Tribes in Savannah, Georgia… You might be wondering how we found ourselves as guests of such a unique group of people. We first learned about the Twelve Tribes in Plymouth, Massachusetts when we saw their house and their tall-ship, The Peacemaker. They’re a group of people who live communally and follow the way of life as described in the Book of Acts. Generally, they believe that God (Yahweh) is love and that in order to take care of one another, they must live together to properly do so. As we searched the “Couchsurfing” website for people to stay with in Savannah, we came across this family who was part of Twelve Tribes and thought this would be a great opportunity to see first-hand a different way of life.

Indeed, it was different in many ways, but also very similar to most people’s everyday life. There were probably fifteen people living in one house – families in their own rooms and single men and women sharing rooms with their own gender. Every night they all got together to sing & dance, share their thoughts as they related to their faith and then to pray. They invited us to observe their nightly meeting and told us we didn’t have to feel uncomfortable not participating. It didn’t appear as though there was one leader of the meeting; whoever thought of a song to sing began singing and everyone joined in, whoever wanted to share their thoughts waited until the person before them finished and then began speaking, whoever wanted to pray for something in particular simply added it to the group prayer. It seemed very open.

They also dealt with many of the same things that most people do. They were trying to open a deli around the corner and the project was taking longer than expected due to building codes and unforeseen obstacles. One of the three houses that they occupied was being foreclosed on in March because they purchased it at the height of the housing market and now couldn’t find the funds to keep it. One older woman with whom I shared a room had a painting of a garden hanging over her bed. I asked her about it and she told me that she used to live in North Carolina and was able to garden every day and that picture reminded her of it.

Before we met the Twelve Tribes community in Savannah, I was a little nervous that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about or that they would pressure us to believe what they did, but I was so pleasantly surprised to find that none of this was the case. Everyone was easy to talk to and only when we asked them about their faith did they share their beliefs. I would say that we came away with an appreciation for their way of life and also more than a few new friends.