Old Updates: The One Where we Got Cats!!

Summer is officially in full swing here in Hungary. Just yesterday as I write this, the temperature here in Budapest reached 100 degrees with a heat index of almost 105! That heat has us feeling a bit sluggish, but we have a busy summer ahead so we are pushing on. The heat also reminds us how extra thankful we are to have air conditioning in our living room. Again and again, God is showing himself faithful to us in all of the little things, like a cool space to escape the heat.

In our discipleship time as a team, we just finished up reading through Job and I’m currently processing the wisdom from that book and hope to share that with you all soon. But for now, we have a lot of logistical updates for you all, so strap in!

Interns

Our two summer interns arrived on June 4 with no problems and were able to test out of the required 10-day quarantine early. Thank you for praying for their travels here! They have both jumped straight into work and life with our team and we are enjoying having them here! I’m working closely with Caleb, a fellow Hoosier, who is here to work on videography this summer. Daniel is also helping to manage scheduling and coaching for both of our interns, Caleb and Trevor. Rather than just putting them to work on grunt tasks, we want to give them a clear insight into what life is like working as a missionary here with OMS, so Daniel is using his coaching certification to guide them through the summer.
 

Summer Camps

With four camps this summer and COVID inhibiting teams coming from the States to help out, we have instituted a kind of “all hands on deck” policy for this summer. Because of that, a lot of Social Entrepreneurship projects have been put on hold for now (although the óvoda project is officially in the funding stage!) in order to help with summer camps.
 

Letenye

We had our first camp of the summer June 16-18 in a small town just on the border of Croatia called Letenye. Remember the little chapel Daniel helped build two years ago? This camp is an overflow from that relationship as the pastor asked our team to help minister to the children in the area. For the camp, we spent the mornings at a local school with the kids as they cycled through crafts, English lessons, and Bible study lessons. After lunch many of the kids traveled with us to the little chapel in order to help update some old paint and create a path to a prayer garden one of the congregants created.

Unfortunately, Daniel came down with a nasty sinus infection just before we left for camp and ended up having to stay home, but I was still able to go and teach bible lessons to the students each day. Thank you for praying, it was really a wonderful time as I got to teach students ranging from 7-years-old all the way up to 16-years-old about God’s love, what their identity looks like in Christ rather than culture, and what a relationship with God really looks like and how discipleship fits into that.

Foci

The Eurocup is currently taking place with matches being held here in Budapest. Daniel is a pretty big football fan, as many of you know, and we have found that attending matches is a really fun way to connect with a larger community here in Budapest. It’s hard to explain that feeling of connection, even across language barriers, when you are sitting beside someone in the heat cheering on your team! Unfortunately, Hungary was put out of contention by Germany late Wednesday night, but we enjoyed heading out to a local square to watch the matches with friends.
 

Kittens!

We saved the cutest for last. Right now is what we have chosen to call “kitten gettin’” season here in Budapest. Stray cats are a bit of a problem and our team members recently made a connection with a lady whose life work right now is to help abandoned cats and kittens. We had been thinking about some type of animal for a while, and for my birthday in January Daniel confirmed with our landlord that cats would be ok in our flat. So now we are the proud owners of two kittens, Hugo and Nacho (he came with the name Nacho, so of course we had to leave it!). Daniel is currently training them to do things like come on command and high five.

A brief side note and really cool “God-thing”: the lady from whom we got the cats was a random connection and she isn’t a believer, but through the kittens we have gotten to start a friendship with her. She is also a doctor and has endometriosis as well, so she has been incredibly kind and encouraging to me. If you could pray for us to reflect God’s love well to her as we build our friendship, we would appreciate it!