I have a story I'd like to share from the other night while out on the streets of Belfast. We were volunteering for a ministry called "Beautiful Feet" and it is a homeless ministry in the city centre. We showed up around 7:30pm and had a very funny chat with a character of a man sporting a giant sombrero, scraggly long beard, and brandishing protest signs all over his person and bicycle. Never quite figured out what he was really protesting or maybe more to the point - what he was not protesting against. Anyways, we met at a caf� in town and met some other people we would be hitting the streets with.

It was all just some friendly chatting and a prayer before we rocked out in small groups to find homeless people out on the streets. We were armed with sandwiches and juice and some other small items that we might be able to offer people. Truthfully I didn't know what to expect and didn't really expect that we would be able to offer much more than some sustenance and maybe a word of encouragement to get them through another day on the street.

The first few encounters we had were a bit rough and one guy was in pretty bad shape with dried blood all around the edge of his mouth and was so smashed drunk the bus stop wall was the only thing holding him on his feet. The cops stopped and said they already tried to help him the night before and that same day but he wouldn't take help or an ambulance. The cops stayed with him and we had to move on so we carried on down the street to a park. In my group was Brittany Cox (from L.Chaim) and a father and daughter from Bangor (a city just northeast of Belfast) who had only one week prior experience with this organization. We arrived at the park and saw a group of three people sitting on a park bench. We introduced ourselves and began assessing the situation. The man sitting on the ground was finishing up a two liter bottle of hard cider and was slightly out of his mind. The other two however were sitting orderly on the park bench and we began talking with them. The woman was very regretful of her situation and explained the physical abuse she suffered from her husband and that he kicked her out of the house and she fled to Belfast. It turned out she was from Bangor as well and they began to question her on where she lived. It turned out the woman lived just a few streets down from their house and the girl knew this woman's daughter from school. In that moment the situation began very personal for the father and daughter with us and an indescribable connection started to occur. She prayed with the woman and both of them wept the whole time.

The woman agreed to go back to Bangor as her husband had left the house already and she was just trying to get back there. We gave her bus fare back and they asked that she come to their church to begin getting her back on her feet. She agreed to do so and she gave all of us a hug and thanked us for what we were doing. We walked away from that time all a little shocked by the experience. We were all new at this and really didn't know what to expect - much less we couldn't have expected our encounters to have such an personal connection. It was confirmation for me and I hope much more so for this father/daughter team that this work is very important and not just for trying to brighten a day or feed someone a sandwich, but that this can actually change lives. That these are people who need help and who need to know not everyone has forgotten them.

Hey everyone, wanted to give a quick update. My team and team Glow are currently in one of the most beautiful places I�fve ever seen! I can�ft even begin to describe it with any accuracy. We spent 5 days in Targu Mures (which is also a very beautiful city) and drove to the far eastern side of Transylvania for the next 12 days. We are up in the Carpathian mountains in a beautiful village surrounded by rolling hills of wheat fields and fruit trees. The beauty is stunning each time I catch a view of the countryside folding into the mountain peaks. As always I am awed by the beautiful hand carved gates lining the streets, the ridiculously meticulous detail in their architecture and the canopies of grape vines stretching over passageways.

The beauty however is somewhat tainted once you begin to dig deeper into the people and life in the village. Although this a wealthier area than many in Romania there exist plenty of issues with alcoholism, hopelessness and even some witchcraft which we encountered today in a gypsy village. Today I had the privilege to see both sides of the village spectrum. In the morning we went out into a wealthier area going door to door (actually gate to gate) and talking with people about a concert the church is putting on tomorrow. The people were friendly and listened and a few let us pray with them. It was good, but the people were more reserved and mostly thanked us for stopping by. In the afternoon we went to a gypsy village on the outskirts of town that was much poorer than any of the village we had seen so far. We stopped at one house and soon the whole court yard within the gate was full of people who had come to see what was happening. We were able to give testimonies and preach and pray with them and the people were incredibly grateful and excited about what they heard. We went to another house further down the road and had the same response. I was amazed at the spectrum of response.

We will be hitting the streets again tomorrow and inviting people to a huge concert the church is putting on tomorrow night. Pray for a large crowd and that lives are changed and the beauty of this village can be complete! Thanks for all of your comments, keep them coming!

-Jeremiah

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Well we made it to Transylvania! Funny story though, we missed our train... We showed up hours early to buy train tickets at the Bucharest train station, a place our first hostel owner warned us was a trouble spot, and bought thirteen tickets to Targu Mures on the night train. We were told before it only leaves out twice a day and the 10:30pm train was the cheapest, so we went for that one. About 9:30 I took a look at our tickets to check the exact time and realized it said 20:40 (8:40pm)... Uh oh. So, after quite a bit of confusion and discussing the next available train was 7:30am the next morning. We attempted to get back to our hostel but it was too late and bus tickets were no longer being sold. We looked at hostels around the train station but it wasn't feasible in our budget... so we decided to sleep in the train station! Why not?!

So, twelve hours in an old Soviet style train station with thirteen people, thirteen backpacks, and nothing much productive to do makes for a good time! So we "circled the wagons" and prepared ourselves for a wild night! We knew first off at least half of us had to stay up on guard at a time (the train station is completely accessible to the general public) and we had already seen some characters of interest. Some of us hadn't slept hardly at all the night before because of other train situations and so they passed out pretty quickly on the old tile floor. The night slowly ticked by and we got more and more ridiculous and basically laughing at anything and everything! McDonalds closed at 1:00am and we began to lament the loss of a toilet. 2:00 rolled around and we began buying rounds of coffee at the NesCafe machine (only 1 lei each - thirty cents USD, not too shabby!).

About 3:00am I as I was started to drift off I awoke to the craziest sound I've ever heard - people speaking English to us with an American accent. I opened my eyes to see a guy and a girl asking if we were World Racers?... sure enough there was a group from another squad (L squad I believe) that happened to be jumping a train to Moldova after some time in Greece (yeah, roughin' it eh?). They gave us some words of encouragement as they had just been to Targu Mures and loved it. Soon enough they were swept away by a train and I was left wondering if that had actually just happened. Everyone else saw it too so I figure it did.

The rest of the night ticked by slowly and we got crazier and crazier. The hours will filled with us guys ushering away the few lingering drunk guys who were keen to chat up a group of 9 stranded girls, and kept tabs on a set of two girls and a guy who were busy scouting out our goods for a few hours. About 5:00am I lost the battle and crashed on someone's sleeping pad (we share just about anything at this point) and woke up at 6:00am to start the process of boarding the train. Overall it went pretty well, we laughed, we bonded with team Glow (who we'll be spending the month in Romania with and who are awesome) and had our first exciting/sketchy adventure together!

After 24 hours of traveling: two buses, and two trains (the last a worker's commuter train which I originally thought had likely been out of commission for the better part of the last century and was left to rot on the far track) we arrived at Targu Mures. I wasn't getting my expectations up for the actually city, but one day in the place is absolutely beautiful! We took a walking tour of the main part of downtown and it is an amazing beautiful place full of Hungarian and German architecture and looking nothing of Bucharest. Very interesting history in this area of the world with different empires conquering the region of Transylvania and leaving their influence.

Tomorrow we will get busy about our work of hitting the streets to invite people to an event the church here is putting on soon and to a Friday night service they do every week. An update of that will be to come.