Bucket Brigade

I guess it's time I filled you in on what's been going on around here. These past two weeks there's been a lot of focus on the new ministry centre that we are building.

Last week when our students were here, part of the practical service component of their course involved helping with the construction of the new building. In fact, everyone on our team was scheduled to help out at least once in the course of last week and again this week. Part of missionary life is being ready to help out at any number of types of things. Last week it was the bucket brigade.
You see, they were pouring the concrete floor of the third floor of the mission centre. We have no elevator. So how to get the buckets of cement up the stairs? Bucket brigade, of coure! So while our esteemed field leader, Matthew, helped to fill the buckets with the cement, the rest of the team passed the buckets up the two flights of stairs. The work became easier in the afternoon when it was 'only' sand that was being passed up. But what a great thing it was to watch the young people working so hard and so willingly together, seeing this as part of their service for the Lord. (My job was taking pictures, by the way.)
The group of students from our missions course consists mostly of Moldovans but our new foreign recruits were also participating. In this photo you can see the guy from Denmark passing the bucket to the girl from the USA, who passes it to the guy from Germany. And Stephanie, the American girl, kept the people near her entertained by reciting stories such as Dr. Seuss' 'Green Eggs and Ham'.
Of course one of the important duties is for someone to come over with tea for the break time. As well as taking pictures and being a gopher, my job was to drive the people with the tea and treats over to the construction site from the OM base. In this photo you can see the ministry centre in the background, through the fog that surrounded us last week....


I am excited to know that before too long I will be able to occupy my new office (pictured here as it is now), and we will be able to conduct our training courses in a larger space with more suitable and adequate accomodation space for the students. At the end of the week (Friday night) enough had been done that we were able to hold the farewell party for Rafael in the new building. This is the room where we had the party, and as soon as I have a picture of the room as it looked last night, I will post that too.
You may be interested also to see the picture of the hole that was dug (much of it by manual labour) for the septic tank. We go deep here in Moldova!