Balti

After spending a couple of weeks staying in Chisinau, I have finally arrived here in Balti. The time in Chisinau wasn't planned, but God's plans often aren't ours, and it was good to have sometime to get used to being in Moldova and also I was able to get a medical certificate done (something obligatory for foreigners who want to live or work in Moldova. Yesterday, I arrived in Balti and we had our first planning meeting for the student work here. The team here consists of Zina who works full time for CSC and who is the leader, plus there are three female graduates who have expressed interest in helping out part time and me. From the 20th September we will be renting an apartment, which will be used for student meetings plus it will be where I will live. The first activities will be to go to the university to try and contact new students with the aim of inviting them to the opening student evening which will be in the week after we move into the apartment!

Extreme Camp

The first activity with the students here in Moldova for this academic year was a camp entitled 'tabara extrem' (Extreme Camp). The camp was attended by just over 20 students from Chisinau and Balti. The extreme part of the camp consisted mainly in sleeping in tents in a forest, eating some special delicacies cooked on an open fire and getting told off by an angry monk from a local monastry for swimming in a nearby lake. The theme of the camp was investigating Jesus. On the first evening we were introduced to Luke, someone who investigated Jesus in great depth. Then, for the next two mornings we studied two passages from his gospel to see what he had found out about Jesus. Each afternoon, the students also had an opportunity to search in the forest for Bible verses telling them more information about this Jesus. On the final morning, each group of students presented what they had discovered about Jesus and I made a brief conclusion, pointing out that there is a lot of evidence and good arguments for the truth of what says in the Bible about Jesus, and emphasizing what is possibly the best evidence i.e. that of changed lives! I was able to do this by giving a brief testimony. A number of students gave positive feedback after the camp and hopefully in the coming months, both in Chisinau and Balti we will be able to build on the relationships formed at the camp.