Our first weekend here

On Thursday night, we had the opportunity to spend some time with Russell's baseball players here in Mikeperc. They're about 8-15 years old and called the "Mikeperc Mosquitos". Most Hungarians don't even know how to play baseball, nor is there a league for the kids, but the boys we met were very talented and enthusiastic to play. We started out by playing catch in pairs for awhile, which was followed by us five Americans and one Hungarian boy who pitched, named Thomas, against the boys in a game of baseball. Don't worry, we didn't make Americans look too bad and ended up winning.

Friday morning we taught English to the same 5th and 8th grade classes, but also taught a third class of 6th graders. The two younger classes were fun and really easy to entertain, but the 8th graders were a bit more challenging, as teenagers are too cool for most of the activities we had planned.

After this we had a lunch of leftover pizza and pasta fagioli at Rob and Carol Greathouse's place, an American couple who are involved in full-time Roma ministry in Hungary. There we were able to hear Carol and Rob's story about how God lead them to living and serving in Hungary after they were already over 50 years old. We followed up lunch with packing tons and tons of boxes of clothing from their attic. The clothing was donated to them from a church in Heidelberg, Germany, for the Romas and although it seemed like we had to go through a lot of clothing, it was only a third of what was originally sent over.

We headed over to Calvary Chapel Debrecen for Friday night "Youth Group". We were assuming we'd be hanging out with High Schoolers all night, but found out that in Hungary, Youth Group just means you're not married, so it was basically a group of college-aged students, many who spoke English, which was great.

On Saturday morning, the Handful and Russell took a 30 minute bus ride to catch a second bus in Debrecen which, after a 2 hour long bus ride, put us in Miskolcs, where we hopped on a tram to arrive at the orphanage where we had been on Wednesday. We got to spend time with the Capitan family, 12 orphaned brothers and sisters, most being under the age of 6. We had such a blast, having balloon swordfights and roughhousing with the kids, and the language barrier didn't have much of an impact because they enjoyed just making noises and playing around. The adults had lunch at a fun little burger place next to a local castle. The burgers weren't traditional but still very good, and it was interesting eating outside in negative degree weather. After we took the kids over to a nearby Sucrezda, a sweets shop, where everyone had hot chocolate and fantastic chocolate cookies. The shop had many different tasty-looking gellatos, even Whiskey flavored, apparently. We had to say goodbye to the kids after that, which wasn't a very fun experience, to then ride buses for 3 hours to get back to Mikperc.

This morning, we were picked up by Rob and Carol Greathouse and attended church at Calvary Chapel Debrecen. The service was fortunately translated into English. Now we are back at the Chun's home, where we'll be eating lunch and the girls will be planning English lessons for the coming week and nailing down details for their Girls' Conference next weekend.