Iasi now has two malls and we went to both on Saturday. The first is a reconfigured Soviet era department store called Moldova. On previous visits we had visited the store and it was reminiscent of the Grace Brothers Department Store viewed on PBS' Are You Being Served? Now the departments are all gone and small shops dot the internal landscape. The other mall, Julius is so western that it even has a food court. It is replete with all the things that make malls your boon or bane. I bought a small power supply to eliminate the batteries on my radio. I looked at several books for children inside a bookstore but they were not very colorful. A few currently popular titles have made it into translation, but they are very expensive.



Lana has helped tp make sauerkraut this past week. We have eaten lots of bread (poieni), and cabbage, (varza). She has also planned some workshops to be conducted with women in a Gypsy village and planned a retreat for women. How many times have you heard of hygiene being on the agenda of a retreat? It is certainly a different world for the women who live in the village. Many have never seen a shower, let alone used one. We all know how difficult it is when we visit a hotel and try for the first ten minutes to figure out how to get the hot water to work in the shower.



Sunday brought us to 3rd Baptist in Iasi where we conducted morning services in the absence of the pastor. I preached from Luke 5: 12-26 about the controversy that Jesus can cause in your life. The remainder of the day we napped in between scenes of Joseph with Ben Kingsley. It's a really great movie despite its length. It is well done. We finished the day by reinstalling Windows XP and waiting 2 hours to download a driver for a scanner.



Hopefully we will be uploading some pictures this week. The weather continues to be seasonally mild and should last throughout the week. Temperatures are expected to drop to highs in the 30s by the weekend.



Pray for David and Rody as they are running a race with time to renew their visas. We were expected to have a meeting on the 22nd and it is postponed till this coming weekend. That critical first step must be endorsed before the ball can continue. Although the process began earlier it depends on others to continue.



Part of our role here continues to be in helping to organize for the future. That includes stuff as much as people. With only David and Rody on site to do that most of the time it can become complicated and rushed. Pray for us that we would use the insight and gifts God has given us to streamline and schedule the tasks in a manageable way so that they may be managed more efficiently.