Ok, this should be postdated a week or so, but I kept on forgetting to post this. Ah well...
People keep telling me to talk more in this language, but too often I give up before I even start by assuming that I won't know key words or that I'll just end up wasting their time and find myself in some awkward situation where I'm stumbling over words and tenses while the native speaker simply twiddles their thumbs and waits for the American to finally spit it out. Or I convince myself that I have nothing worthwhile to say.
Well, today I took the train back from Budapest, where I had spent the weekend with the Otternesses and saw other volunteers who are living in the city. It had been a good time and it felt great to be among people whose situations were similar to mine. For the first part of the train ride, I was alone in my cabin. But when we reached Debrecen (it's a big city south of Nyiregyhaza and definitely out of the way, I still have no idea how we got there, I thought I had bought a train ticket directly to Nyiregyhaza), another young guy joined me in my cabin. He seemed friendly, but I quickly told him that I was a foreigner and that my Hungarian was not very good (as he could obviously tell). Then I went back to reading my book.
Yet, something seemed to be pushing me to talk to him. The old excuses quickly came to mind, but the feeling wouldn't go away. New excuses cropped up: he's busy reading the paper, he's listening to music, he probably won't want to be bothered. But something else urged me, "Just ask how long it will be 'til we reach Nyiregyhaza." "I don't know how to say it grammatically correct!" I responded. A weak argument, I know. My eyes flitted back down to the book I was reading and landed on the title of the next chapter: "The Question Nobody Is Asking". Hmm. Maybe this wasn't a perfectly corresponding sign to my current circumstance, but it was close enough to convince me that God was pushing me to throw aside my self-doubt and take another step towards becoming the courageous man He's calling me to be. I stuttered and stammered my way through "Hany ora Nyiregyhaza-ig?", and he smiled, took a moment to digest what I had tried to say, and we started communicating!
The rest of the train ride was very fun! The guy turned out to be a college student in Nyiregyhaza. His name was Zoltan. His parents lived in Debrecen, an older sister worked at some sort of Christian mission in Budapest, and an older brother volunteered in Austria with youth and evidently had "a long beard and hair like Jesus". He himself was hoping to make big bucks working abroad in the insurance business. He and his girlfriend had also gotten engaged recently! I searched for the word for "Congratulations" in the dictionary and discovered that it was "Gratulalok"; it's always nice when English and Hungarian words are relatively similar!
We were chatting away when he suddenly pointed out the window and said that we were in Nyiregyhaza. I had been expecting the bigger buildings that I had seen on previous visits closer to the center of the city, so I probably would have been confused if Zoltan hadn't let me know that we had arrived. We got off the train and I immediately realized that I hadn't been in this part of the city at all before. But Zoltan asked me if I was heading for the bus station and told me that his place was right next to it, so he would walk me there. Phew! It ended up not to be so far away, so when we got there I said thanks and goodbye to my train friend, puzzled over bus schedules in Hungarian with unfamiliar place names for a while, asked a guy which bus headed to Nyirtelek and ended up boarding the bus with around 40 high school students who were headed home after the school day.
I've got to say that God is good, not only in the big things like salvation and purpose-giving, but also in the smaller, more mundane things, like helping us to get up the courage to speak and to find the way home through an unfamiliar place. He wants us to live our entire lives with Him, looking to Him for everything and trusting that we will find what we need in Him!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
The past couple of weeks...
Hello! Here's a quick update on things that I've been doing for the past couple of weeks:
I believe my visa situation is finally settled. It took four trips to the immigration office, but Pastor Misi tells me that that is to be expected. Additional taxes and paperwork had to be paid and gathered, and the last obstacle was to obtain a copy of the deed to the house I'm staying in with Zsuzsikaneni (Aunt Suzy). It turned out that her sister-in-law who lives in former Yugoslavia still owned part of the house, but that Zsuzsika had gotten a judge to grant her full control over it; however, the deed hadn't been modified to include this information. Once that was done and everything was in order, I was good to go. One side note: I was beginning to think that one particular man at the immigration office had something against me, because he kept telling us that we needed more documents and that my documentation wasn't right yet. But when all was said and done and I was signing the last of the forms, he told Misi and I that he thought it was great that I am here in Hungary and he hoped that my work with the Gypsies would go well! That experience was very encouraging, and sort of had a "don't judge a book by its cover" moral attached.
I've also been working at a site in the village of Gorogszallas which will eventually be a preschool. The building had been open to the community, but it was in quite bad shape. The church I work with applied for a grant from the "New Hungary" organization and is using the money they received to renovate the building. Both Gypsy and Hungarian people are contributing to the building process. Late last week we invited the members of the community in to answer some of their questions and discuss the use of the updated facilities. One possible issue of contention is that the building had once been used for parties celebrating Gypsy heritage, which included a lot of dancing and celebration, but also a lot of smoking and drinking and roughhousing. Obviously, a preschool is not a good place for events like this to continue in the same way they did before, so some new arrangements must be made. During the community meeting, the discussion on this topic actually got quite heated between a leader of the Gypsy community and a leader of the Hungarian community. It seems like they both want to work together, and they recognized that in earlier generations both groups worked well together, but it seems that grudges have arisen. It was really my first time seeing this level of distrust between the two different groups.
This past weekend, I spent two days with a chapter of a Hungarian environmental group catching and tagging birds at a nearby national park. Camping was very fun, the people were great, and it was really just a nice change of pace.
My tasks for the future are kind of up in the air at the moment. It looks like I will have the opportunity to help out at the new preschool when it is completed and work with the Gypsy and Hungarian children. I may also have the opportunity to work with Peter, a seminary student working at the church with me, as he teaches religion in a local school a couple of times a week. Both tasks sound very exciting and promising!
I believe my visa situation is finally settled. It took four trips to the immigration office, but Pastor Misi tells me that that is to be expected. Additional taxes and paperwork had to be paid and gathered, and the last obstacle was to obtain a copy of the deed to the house I'm staying in with Zsuzsikaneni (Aunt Suzy). It turned out that her sister-in-law who lives in former Yugoslavia still owned part of the house, but that Zsuzsika had gotten a judge to grant her full control over it; however, the deed hadn't been modified to include this information. Once that was done and everything was in order, I was good to go. One side note: I was beginning to think that one particular man at the immigration office had something against me, because he kept telling us that we needed more documents and that my documentation wasn't right yet. But when all was said and done and I was signing the last of the forms, he told Misi and I that he thought it was great that I am here in Hungary and he hoped that my work with the Gypsies would go well! That experience was very encouraging, and sort of had a "don't judge a book by its cover" moral attached.
I've also been working at a site in the village of Gorogszallas which will eventually be a preschool. The building had been open to the community, but it was in quite bad shape. The church I work with applied for a grant from the "New Hungary" organization and is using the money they received to renovate the building. Both Gypsy and Hungarian people are contributing to the building process. Late last week we invited the members of the community in to answer some of their questions and discuss the use of the updated facilities. One possible issue of contention is that the building had once been used for parties celebrating Gypsy heritage, which included a lot of dancing and celebration, but also a lot of smoking and drinking and roughhousing. Obviously, a preschool is not a good place for events like this to continue in the same way they did before, so some new arrangements must be made. During the community meeting, the discussion on this topic actually got quite heated between a leader of the Gypsy community and a leader of the Hungarian community. It seems like they both want to work together, and they recognized that in earlier generations both groups worked well together, but it seems that grudges have arisen. It was really my first time seeing this level of distrust between the two different groups.
This past weekend, I spent two days with a chapter of a Hungarian environmental group catching and tagging birds at a nearby national park. Camping was very fun, the people were great, and it was really just a nice change of pace.
My tasks for the future are kind of up in the air at the moment. It looks like I will have the opportunity to help out at the new preschool when it is completed and work with the Gypsy and Hungarian children. I may also have the opportunity to work with Peter, a seminary student working at the church with me, as he teaches religion in a local school a couple of times a week. Both tasks sound very exciting and promising!
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