Oltenita bound

Today we spent the morning with Marcel and Ionela Ene.  They have a neat family and live in Calarasi.  He is one of the interpreters so he either makes me sound good in Romanian or he could be making fun of me but either way if it brings joy to the people it is okay.  :)  He is very musical and was one of the guys that was in our carolling group.  He also does a lot of our driving.  The driving here is much different in our country.  We like lots of space but in this country everyone is on the road, dogs, walkers, scooters, pedal bikes and vehicles.  The streets are narrow and in winter there are no shoulders so people walk in the street and we drive by them at street speed a foot of two away.  The vehicles use a combination of horn beeps and signal lights to communicate with each other and the whole thing runs very well.  They also fed us "CRAP" for lunch

Actually the food was awesome and the company was very welcoming.  They have the ability to invite total strangers into their homes and make us feel like family.
The crap is some kind of fish spread.



Later we drove to Oltenita a village near the border of Bulgaria.  We could see Bulgaria in the distance just across the Danube.  They call it a village but we were told it is closer to 30,000 people.  The group we met with here were working with many youth.  They had 130 youth but only 50 of the Samaritan purse boxes so they had to do some sharing.  The people here are extremely grateful and for most of those kids these would have been the only Christmas gifts they would receive.

This is a picture of some of the homes.  I would have more but I forgot my camera today.








The unemployment rate here is massive.  People consider themselves lucky to have jobs, something I have always taken for granted.