Crazier than usual ...

Christmas time is always busy ... when others are winding down and taking time off, we find ourselves getting busier. After our joint trip to Scotland we arrived home to visitors and during their stay Kenneth left again to go and work in Scotland. Malcolm and Jan, our visitors from France (though they're English) helped us with a variety of tasks including partitioning off our bedroom to make a room for Rosie. Jan impressed all the street kids with her practical abilities at the day centre - they're not used to seeing a woman fitting door handles and plumbing in a washing machine!

When Malcolm and Jan left a small team from the UK arrived, primarily to help us distribute shoe boxes. Andrew from PCF charity in Wolverhampton came with his son, Richard and Tom, a youth worker from Liverpool came with two of his young people. They were a lovely group and as always we enjoyed having them around. They helped clear up the day centre courtyard which was a total disaster and they managed to check out a few bars in the evenings and have a couple of wild snowball fights!
While they were with us Kenneth arrived back from Scotland, complete with new hairdo. Just kidding, he bought a crazy hairpiece for a laugh ... it certainly made us laugh! The problem is, how can the rest of us be expected to take him seriously?

Now all the visitors have gone and we are still left with around a thousand shoe boxes and no help to deliver them. They will have to wait now until the new year. We have nothing prepared for our own family Christmas and we have at least 8 visitors coming on Christmas day. Not to mention our Christmas eve at the day centre when we will be expecting anything up to 50 street people and visitors ... help!

Rosie

Rosie is our wee girl we took in a year and a half ago after the death of her grandmother. Her mother had died when she was four and then her granny when she was six, leaving her pretty much alone in the world. She had extended family but none of them wanted the responsibility of taking on yet another child. She's pictured here with Daniela,Irina's daughter and a real cutie. The two of them are now like cousins and most of the time play well together, just occasionally falling out, usually when one is jealous of the other getting too much attention from our many visitors! While we're away in Scotland Amy will be looking after Rosie, not an easy task! Amy loves her new wee sister but is also driven crazy by her (fairly normal, I'd say) and Rosie can be a handful when the mood takes her. Amy has to balance looking after Rosie with school and extra tuition for Romanian and German, not to mention travelling back and forward from town and also looking after granny's apartment and budgie's while granny is visiting family in England. (Oh, almost forgot to mention feeding our two dogs, two cats, three guinea pigs, one rabbit and fish!)

Visit to Scotland

We have finally found a gap of two weeks without teams or other visitors and so we are flying over to Scotland to do some visiting, speak at a few meetings and discuss future plans with our Scottish committee. We also hope to do some supply teaching to help with finances. Needless to say we are as always pretty tired but we are really looking forward to seeing family and friends ... as many as we can fit in. We apologise in advance to the folk we don't manage to see but hope that they will understand! Amy will be looking after Rosie which will be challenging to say the least!

The strangest things ...

On Saturday evening we went to McDonald's to use their free wireless Internet access - as far as we're concerned it's their best innovation to date! While there we bumped into a Scottish friend, Tom who works in the textile business and had a coffee with him. Irina joined us as well and we were having a laugh, Tom entertaining us with his repertoire of songs! Imagine our surprise, when in the middle of all the amusement a bride walked in and started serving a customer. It appears that she used to work there and thought it would be fun to visit on her wedding day. One thing's for sure, life's never boring for the inhabitants of the crazy casa!

More celebrations!

Having spent most of the day at the Primaria (Town hall) listening to speeches, the second part of the celebrations definitely livened things up! There was a reception at the Best Western hotel in Arad with children and young people performing traditional folk dances and singing ... and the food was amazing! There was a buffet with both hot and cold food, which was great as we hadn't eaten all day and we only had sandwiches yesterday. It was really good to be there with all our colleagues from Child Protection, from various children's homes and day centres and it was lovely to meet a few new faces.

10th anniversary of Child Protection

Yesterday and today see the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Arad Child Protection. We have spent most of today at the Primaria (Town Hall) listening to speeches from various parties, most interesting of which were those of young people formerly in Care who have moved on in life and are doing well, for example a young man who is now an actor and two young women, one with physical disabilities who are now social workers. Another week has gone by and we haven't stopped but between a three day conference and two days of 10th anniversary celebrations we have got none of our "normal" work done! On Saturday I help run an English club at a high school, on Sunday 8 visitors arrive from the UK and we have beds and bed linen to sort out before then as well as trying to find a bit of time for family over the weekend. Johanna, Philip and Kenny are all coming home this evening and we try to spend either Friday or Saturday evening all together watching a film and eating popcorn and chocolate! At the moment it's not looking as though we'll manage time for that this weekend but we'll see ...

bathroom delayed ...

Work on the new bathroom work has ground to a halt ... well, what a surprise! Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week have been taken up with a conference in Lipova (about an hour away from Arad) about child protection services, so we haven't been at home at all for Kenneth to work on the bathroom. Tomorrow and Friday we're invited to attend the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Arad Child Protection Agency, so that's the week gone with none of our work done. Oh well, never mind, it's all "par for the course" as our golfing friends like to say (never really understood the phrase, what does it mean anyway?) Besides, we got to know some interesting people and made new friends, so the conference was well worth it.

A bathroom at last!

Having finally moved upstairs into our own family apartment, the only problem was that the bathroom was still downstairs. Still, we've been so happy to have our own space after seven years of living in with all the visitors, teams, mothers and babies and whoever we've had living with us that the lack of a bathroom seemed a very minor problem. Now that the main rush of visitors is over Kenneth has been managing to work on the house in the evenings and he's now working on the bathroom. We went all around Arad looking for a cheap door with windows in it to let the light through because the windows are small upstairs and we don't want to lose any of the light. We found one at the right price at last and then took it round the corner to a wee shop to get the glass put in! Talk about good service ... the guy did it there and then, literally as we watched! That's another of the things we like about Romania - in the UK almost everything is mass produced and there's no room for small craftsmen like this. Sadly, now that Romania is in the EU we'll probably go the same way eventually ... shame!

Apartment hunting ...

This is the cathedral in Timisoara where Johanna is in final year of Medicine and Kenny has just started Economic Sciences. Kenny was one of the 3000 students who failed to get a place in the halls of residence (!) so we had to search for an apartment for him to share with three friends. Having finally found one and moved the boys in we discovered to our horror that the owners were having to sell the apartment and the boys could be given notice any day, depending on whether or not the new owners wanted to rent it out! So ... the search began again and today we finally found a new place. It's not quite as handy for him but it's bigger (the other was tiny) and very nice though unfurnished so we need to find some furniture for them.

While I was doing the rental contract with Kenny, the owner and the agent Kenneth went to the airport to collect Fiona, the daughter of good friends of ours in Glasgow who has come to volunteer for a week.

This has been a very expensive month and we're going to have to go back to Scotland to work next month ... if we can fit it in between all the visitors who have suddenly decided that November is a good month for Romania!

country life!

This is a common scene in Romania and one of the things we like about living here. Sure when you go into town you could be in any European city (though personally we think it's nicer than most!) but outside the city it's still a mainly rural society and most people grow all their own vegetables, keep a few pigs and chickens or even a few sheep which they leave in the care of a local shepherd. We do manage to grow our own veg, albeit with the help of our good friend Mariana - she's a total expert, her garden has to be seen to be believed! We haven't ventured into keeping pigs (too smelly) although we did have chickens, ducks and geese for a couple of years. We enjoyed the fresh eggs but never quite had the heart to actually eat the birds ... our neighbours clearly thought we were crazy and one even asked us "what are you going to do with them then, keep then until they draw a pension?"

A brief history

The milennium for us was the year in which our family's life changed completely. In September 2000 we moved to Arad in Romania where we have lived for the past 7 years, adapting to the language and culture and working on the streets of the city and in poor communities, doing what little we can to make a difference. Our children all had to adapt to the Romanian education system ... not an easy task. As Scottish secondary teachers we were embarrassed to find out how good the Romanian system is and how advanced in some subjects compared to the UK.

Johanna is now in her 6th and final year of Medicine (in the future she plans to set up a basic health care programme with our charity), Kenny has just started first year university studying Economic Sciences and Amy is in 11th grade at high school.

Over the years we have had various needy children and young people live with us, including young single mothers and several children. Our latest (and, we hope) permanent addition is Rosanna, a 7 year old orphan. In December last year my mother, Rose came to live in Romania as during her many visits she had come to love the country and our Romanian friends. It's been great for us all, especially the children to have their granny close by and wee Rosie loves her to bits.

We have a husky called Roxi, two cats, Kesara, a beautiful Burmaneze and Tigerlily, a moggie but also beautiful despite recently having to have one of her front legs amputated due to an accident. We also have three guinea pigs and a rabbit ... well, they're really Rosie's and she is generally quite good about feeding them!