Birthdays & Umbrellas

It has been a crazy week of bank acccounts, government offices, getting the right paperwork, but there have been some awesome highlights as well.

We celebrated Brittany’s birthday on Saturday. The family we are staying with did an awesome job of celebrating with us and of loving and caring about Brittany on her birthday. Jedranka made her a huge cake, that she decorated beautifully. It was awesome for Brittany to feel so loved and cared for on a day when she was not able to be with her family and friends from home.

Then Jay Sunberg came to town to be with us for a few days but we lost him in our attempt to get to and from the airport to meet him. Then we all got lost on our way to church yesterday (public transportation can be tricky) and arrived late. Following the service, which was entirely in Croatian, a girl came up to introduce herself to us and asked if we spoke Croatian or English. When we answered English she laughed and asked why we did not use the headsets that translate the service to English for us. We had sat through the entire service barely understand a word, when the translation was right beside us.

On our way home from church, Brittany, Emily, and I were waiting for the bus and it started to rain. While we stood in the rain, this little old lady who was also waiting from the bus came over and put her umbrella over our heads. She spoke to us in Croatian and we said say we do not understand Croatian but thank you. She just smiled and patted Brittany’s arm and then huddled under the umbrella with us until the bus came. And the three of us just took a deep breath and thought everything is okay.

So the whole weekend became a reminder of our inadequacy here with not knowing the language, an awareness of how much we are dependent on the people around us for help, even with even simple tasks, and how much we have been cared for by the people here since we arrived.