We are very sad people right now.

Greetings from Vienna! We type with both enthusiastic hands and moist eyes. This has been such an intense experience, and though all of us are excited to go home, much of us is still in Kosova. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts God blessed us with this month is how much it hurts to go. We've come to love that country, and though we're excited to return to the States, it's a painful thing to leave.

We'll try and upload more pictures and perhaps videos over the next few days. Thanks for following along and praying for us. Many blessings to you.

A series of highly impersonal photographs.

Something like this is in every direction you look. Kosova is basically one huge valley.


This is the view from the apartment the girls live in. We're practically living on a playground. It's like every childhood dream come true.


Gjakova at night.


People jump off the bridge in the summer.


We hear the call to prayer five times a day. It's an absolutely beautiful song that has been used to distance millions of people from God.


We decided to spare Caitlin's mom and not show how close her feet are to the ledge of a massive cliff.


Chillin'.


A Serbian Orthodox church. During the 2004 riots, it was burned down. Now, the police have to guard it, and no one is allowed inside. We had to be escorted into the grounds just to take some pictures.


This is Adem Jashari*, or rather, it's a statue of his head. He's a cultural icon in Kosova. He's one of the major founding members of the Kosova Liberation Army. In March 1998, Serbian forces attacked and killed Jashari and the other KLA fighters in his compound Jashari's entire extended family, including women and children. Serbian forces hoped that killing Jashari would end the KLA, but the death of Jashari and his family is commonly recognized as the singular defining moment where many Kosovar Albanians became fully united.

* This is a very biased article on Jashari and the KLA. In nearly every article about Kosova on Wikipedia, there's a lot of Serbian influence. Read the Wikipedia discussion page on Kosovo War to get an idea about how heated many Serbs and Kosovars are about this.


The rows of memorial graves dedicated to the victims of Prekaz. There were more than fifty members of the Jashari family massacred, leaving behind only one eleven year old girl. The oldest victim was something like sixty-eight, the youngest was seven.


We took a day trip to Skopje, Macedonia. This is a ginormous Orthodox church near the center of the city. We caught the beginning of a wedding as we left.


Here's a view of the ceiling. It's hard not to feel the reverence toward God in something so grand.


Also in Skopje, the birthplace of Mother Teresa. She's perhaps the most universally beloved person in this region. She's Albanian, so in addition to being a humanitarian she's something of a cultural icon.


More soon!

Just a few kids.

The first two weeks.

(Sorry for destroying the margins with some of the pictures. I can't fix them because we need to turn the generator off. Click the picture for a better view.)

Mirë Dita! It's a little bit scary that two whole weeks have gone by already. Our trip is almost halfway over already! Sorry about the lack of a sooner update, we started one a week ago but have had consistent computer problems since then. There's a very real chance that we won't have power for the rest of the trip because too many people in Krushe e Vogel haven't paid their electric bill. Crazy stuff, no?

In our first two weeks here, we've done a variety of activities. We helped distribute medicine to a number of villages, servicing more than 350 people. We've started construction on a new outside wall for the daycare. We've attended and taught somewhere in the ballpark of twenty English school lessons. We've attended several men's youth groups, even leading one of them. One of us, Matt, has helped lead worship during three services at a church in Gjakova (pronounced “jakova” like it’s a Starbucks drink or something). We've helped facilitate the daily operations of the daycare by playing with the kids and cleaning up after them. We have played a truckload of soccer and volleyball. And finally, we have prayed prayed prayed.

This is the house that we are staying in. It belongs to Dave and Cindy Johnson, an American couple that have lived in the Kosova village of Krushe e Vogël since 2001.

Above are Dave and Cindy, who are absolute rockstars. They've helped establish both the daycare and school here in Krushe and have been instrumental in demonstrably showing God's love to the Kosovars in Krushe and in surrounding villages. Dave and Cindy have been working with Humedica, a German relief organization that has been distributing medicine to Kosovars in the area. We'll talk about Humedica in a minute.

PRAYER REQUEST: Dave and Cindy are actually in England this week attending a pastor's conference. Pray that they learn and grow in God and that their travels are very safe and that they are in good health. Right before they left, Cindy picked up a bug that has been circulating through our team. Pray that they return in full health.

Above you’ll see Matt working with the Humedica team. For the first week of our trip, we accompanied them to a different village every day, seeing people and distributing medicine and vitamins to anyone who needed it. In Zatriq, Dr. Stephen Wulf, the German doctor who saw all of the patients, noted one of the last women he saw. She had just turned thirty and had three children. Her blood pressure was something like 200 over 40. He prescribed her some medication to help and told her that she would likely suffer a stroke before the end of the year if she didn’t work to bring her blood pressure down. As we were leaving, Dr. Wulf noted that we could very well have saved her life that day.

PRAYER REQUEST: That every person we interacted with experiences full and complete healing and recognizes that healing comes from Christ in heaven.

That trench up there didn’t exist until this week. The daycare needs a new wall, and so for the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on putting in this wall. We’ve marked the trench, dug it and filled it with foundation. In addition, we rebricked a garden area in our first two days here.

There’s Toni laying bricks and mortar. We’ve done a number of miscellaneous work projects for the daycare these weeks. Though they’re menial, we’re saving Dave and the other contacts here a lot of time and energy that they can devote to other things. And speaking of the other contacts...

The above two guys are Alban Bytyqi (top photo, center) and Korab Lushi (bottom, left). These fine two Kosovar gentlemen speak perfect English and serve as our interpreters. More importantly, though, these are two of the few Christians that live in Kosova. Both of them are relatively young in the faith and both are absolutely wonderful men of God. They serve two major functions in the villages of Kosova: they run local youth groups ministering to men and they run several English schools in the surrounding villages. On a daily basis we travel with them (and another teacher who we'll talk about in the next update) to English school and help them teach.

Here is Caitlin teaching children how to say hello in American English. Way to go Caitlin! You teach the shoes off those kids! (No, but seriously, we have to take our shoes off, like, everywhere.)

This is a very tiny girl who sat in on one of our lessons.

These are the wonderful notes that she took.

PRAYER REQUEST: That we both become and remain accurate and compelling teachers of English, so we can show the love and attention that God wants to lavish on these children and that they would become receptive to the words of the Gospel.

In addition to the English schools, Korab and Alban also run several youth groups in the surrounding villages. Here are two of the regular attenders.

WE APOLOGIZE for the inconvenience here. There was a picture of two young men from the village--One was a believer, the other, his cousin--who attend the Bible study in Krushe. Unfortunately, we were gently informed by our contacts that having their pictures and names up alongside words about Jesus and Christianity could potentially hurt their reputations here without their being prepared for that. It is one thing if these young men believe and decide it's time to tell their family and friends, but for it to be done by us in a time they were not prepared for would be devastating in a number of ways. SO. Sorry for having to get rid of the pictures and the names, but pray for the young men attending the Bible study anyways! They need strength and courage to do what they're doing. Alrighty then... and on with the blog!

This is the front to Eternity Church, which we have been attending in Gjakova the past couple of weeks. It's an international church, with members from America, Canada, the UK, Albania, and a couple of other countries. The leadership, however, is entirely Kosovar, and we've received great insight into both Christian living and how to minister to the people in Kosova. Additionally, our team leader Matt has been able to greatly help them by playing the bass in two services each week.

PRAYER REQUEST: That we are a positive and life-giving influence to Eternity Church, that we can serve them and show them love, and that we learn what they have to impart to us.

Here's Elizabeth playing with the children of the daycare. We aren't able to do this everyday, but whenever we can we like to help out the women running the daycare. Usually we play with the kids during playtime, we clean up after them, and generally just to try to make the lives of these women easier. (There will be a picture of them in the next update.) However, almost every night we go out and play with a variety of kids, usually soccer for the boys and a combination of volleyball, duck-duck-goose, and various other games for the girls.

PRAYER REQUEST: That we show these children God's unconditional and accepting love. Though we can't tell them about Him directly, we want to show them His love in the hopes that when they hear about a loving and intimate God, they'll recognize that attitude by what they see in us and especially in Dave and Cindy.

And so that's our first two weeks have been like. We've done our best to serve the Kosovar people and show them Christ's love.

PRAYER REQUEST: That you have a blessed day!

Just checking in...

Hello! Just letting you all know that we are definitely not ignoring this blog or anything. We've had a combination of computer access issues and power outages to prevent us from fully updating this. Rest assured that we're working on a big update soon, and that we're excited to tell you everything that's been going on. We've been working with a few different English schools, building a wall for the daycare, playing a lot of soccer and duck-duck-goose.

We'll be uploading a lot of pictures and a pretty big update in the next couple of days. If you could pray for our health (we've had two team members and a contact catch some kind of sickness), our diligence, and that the hearts of the Kosova people would open up, that would be great. We've been working with a local youth group a lot lately, and there's a couple of kids who attend that aren't saved yet, but they're getting there.

Thank you for your support, attention and love. We appreciate you and as a team we are praying for you. Look out the next couple days: many words and pictures will be up detailing what we've been upto.

And here we go...

In the past twenty-four hours, we've been to three different countries, two different continents, traveled thousands of miles, spent almost fourteen hours in planes, and lost about six hours to the time changes, all with the intent of reaching Krushe e Vogel, Kosova. And we're not done yet.

In the past week, we've plowed through rain and mud, jumped into fifty feet of open air, climbed walls over sixty feet high, hauled canoes in the least efficient way possible, ate an absolutely delicious meal (5 cups uncooked rice, half a bottle of tabasco sauce, three spoonfulls of mayonnaise, 8 ounces of lemon juice, and a pinch of vomit you swallow back down), and led a church service, all in the name of getting closer to God. And we're not done yet.

In the past six months, we've humbly mailed out letters, sold toilet paper, wore embarrassingly noticeable shirts, took money out of savings and worked and trusted and worked and trusted that God would provide the money we need. All of this was done in the name of reaching the Kosovo people. And we're not done yet.

For the last hour, we've used a potent combination of broken English and Albanian to talk to a couple of Kosovar gentlemen. We've never said the name of Jesus, never told them that we're Christians, but just hoped that the love of God would shine through us to these men. We pray inside, we pray hard, and we're never done with that.

Matt and Isni Amehti in the Vienna airport.

ORU's first ever Team Kosova: Elizabeth Redemann, Toni Haynes, Caitlin Boewe, Grant Eisiminger, Matt Bittner