Future Planning

Gradually here the university, colleges and schools are approaching exam time. At the university and colleges exams are already beginning and the High schools will start with exams in June. Thus our activities for this semester are winding down and we are starting to plan for the summer and beyond. The main activity of the summer will be an English camp in July. Even though it's not long until then, as is often the way of things in this part of the world, we still don't know for sure what this camp will be. There is the possibility that a team will come from England to help or otherwise, there are a couple of other camps with American teams who we have been invited to join if the team from England doesn't come. Thus at the moment things are a bit uncertain, but in any case, we aim in the next few weeks to start inviting and looking for students for the camp. Another initiative, is that we are trying to form a student team for the coming academic year. One of the ideas that IFES groups work on, is that the group should be student lead. Thus we are trying to encourage as much as possible the students here to get actively involved in the student group. Yesterday, we had our first meeting and four students came. Slavic, who is currently the director of CSC came and spoke to the students about the vision of CSC and gave them an opportunity to suggest ideas of things that they would like us to do in the coming academic year. There were a few suggestions such as to try and organise an evangelistic concert, as we know a number of Christian students from the music college here. Before the start of the new academic year, we will meet again to try and make some of the ideas more concrete.

Conference Invitation

Sometimes God answers prayer in unexpected ways, often so that He shows that He's in charge and thus gets the glory! Before the recent conference we gave out invitations and put up posters in order to try and invite students. Nobody phoned as a result and so I assumed our efforts had been in vain. However, at the end of the conference a girl asked if she could travel back to Balti with us, as she said that she's a student there. She did indeed come with us and since has been to a couple of our meetings. It turned out to be an interesting story. She had been given one of the invitations that we passed out, but instead of phoning us here in Balti, she called a friend in Chisinau and they decided to come together to the conference. Her friend in Chisinau got in touch with the people from CSC and registered them at the conference. The girl from Balti (Aina) then must have gone to Chisinau and travelled to the conference together with the group from there, thus we only found out at the end of the conference that our efforts in passing out invitations weren't in vain! Below Aina (left) with her friend Lili and together with the group from Balti

Ruskii Iazik

Although, the Romanian language (technically Moldavian, but this is just a dialect of Romanian - similar to comparing English spoken with a strong Scottish accent to Oxford English) is the official language of Moldova, there is an extremely large Russian speaking community in the country. Indeed, in Balti the Russian speakers predominate and so in the city the main language of communication is Russian. Thus for example, if you go into a shop to buy something, almost certainly the person serving you will speak to you in Russian. If they see that you are not very comfortable in Russian they will often switch to Romanian, but not always, thus creating some awkward and indeed amusing moments. One time for example, the person serving me spoke only in Russian, but all of a sudden, when I nearly left the shop without paying 2 Lei for a plastic bag, she started speaking Romanian! The Russian language is interesting to learn, but quite tricky. Partly, because you need to get used to a new alphabet in order to be able to read the words, but also because the words are Slavic based thus if the languages that you are familiar with are Latin or Germanic based i.e. Romanian and English, it's very hard to recognize and work out what all the words mean. For example if you are familiar with the English word 'success' it doesn't take much effort to understand and get to grips with the Romanian word 'succes' but the Russian word 'успех' takes a bit more getting used to. Finally, Russian seems difficult as there are very many word endings. The Russian language uses six cases and often each case has different endings. As an example, in Russian there are six different types of masculine nouns. Each type can be plural or singular and be found in one of six different cases. Thus, by my calculations there are 6 times 2 times 6 i.e. 72 different possibly states in which a Russian masculine noun can be found for example an animate, singular noun in the dative case which would have the ending -у or an inanimate, plural noun in the instrumental case which would have the ending -ами. Admittedly, things are not quite that complicated as quite a few of the noun endings are the same. In the example above, an inanimate, singular noun in the dative case also has the ending -y and an animate plural noun in the instrumental case also has the ending -ами. Nevertheless, things are still tricky compared to English where the only change to noun endings is to add an -s (with a few exceptions) in order to show plural or Romanian where there are four different masculine noun endings depending on case and number (singular or plural).

University or college?

Here in Moldova alongside the university system, they have a very well developed further education college system. This means that at 16 years old young people here have the possibility to study for two more years at school to obtain Baccalaureate qualifications and then go onto university. Alternatively, they can go to a further education college where as well as studying standard subjects like maths, geography, science, languages etc. you also have a specialist subject, like electronics, music, car mechanics etc. After college people then have the possibility to go to work or to go onto university. The college system seems very popular, partly I think for financial reasons, as it means people can get out to work sooner than if they went onto study at university. The vision here at CSC is to work than not just with university students, but also further education college students and even high school students. Indeed, here in Balti the majority of the students involved in the ministry at the moment are from colleges as opposed to from the university.

construction

The Church I go to here in Balti is helping to refurbish a big house in the city, which has been purchased by the Baptist Union so that it can be used as a place for disadvantaged children to live. I've been there a few times to help with the work. It's been hard, but worth it as the house will be used for good once it's ready! Below a few photos:

Conference 'Cosmetica Personalitatii'

On the weekend of 5th to 7th April we participated in a conference for students organised jointly by CSC Moldova and OSCER, the IFES movement in Romania. The conference took place at a campsite by the Moldavian city of Calarasi and had an evangelistic aim. The theme of the conference was 'cosmetics' and so on the first evening we talked about how people use different cosmetics to try and hide from reality. Then on the Saturday morning we had a message about how whatever we do to make things look better on the outside, ultimately we all have an inner problem, that of sin. Saturday afternoon there was a message about God's solution for this problem of sin and then on the Sunday morning the final message was about our response to this. Each message was followed by a small group discussion time plus between messages there was also time for sport and on Saturday evening a 'grill a Christian session' followed by a camp fire. From Balti, 15 students came plus there were around 25 from Chisinau. Below top, everybody, below middle Students from Balti and below bottom, my small group.