Early Reflections on Macedonia

Macedonia is a very unique place. Moving to a foreign country that you have never been to was an interesting process. As we left the United States on that plane to Austria, we just looked at each other with a look like, “Are we really doing this?” We had absolutely no idea what to expect. We’d seen pictures and a couple of short video clips, but we knew that wasn’t enough to really get a feel for what it would be like. Stepping off of the plane, and driving around the city, however gave us a strange feeling that we were home.

Eddie drove us through one of the gypsy neighborhoods here. He said he admires them because they are very hardworking people. The men spend much of their time traveling around Skopje, looking through dumpsters to find anything remotely usable. They bring it home and try to clean it up or fix it, and the neighborhood has community yard sales to sell it to the other locals. They cannot get jobs because the gypsies are the lowest in the society. They speak their own language (Roma), have their own government, and keep to themselves.

Racial conflict is strong here. There are neighborhoods with only Macedonians on one side of the river, sections of town for Albanians only on the other side and very few sections that are “mixed”. There was a civil war between the two groups just a few years ago. Even though peace has been somewhat established, each group keeps to themselves except for an occasional business deal.

It is actually very hot here. We expected it to be colder. It felt like Florida, which was a nice surprise for me (Dustin) after staying in chilly Ohio for six weeks. We have had a lot of first time experiences. Yesterday, I went to an ATM and exchanged U.S. dollars for Denari, which we found out is the preferred currency here. Euros are mostly used in Greece and many of the surrounding countries. We went to church yesterday morning and tried to sing along with the Macedonian songs. The people were great there. The pastor was very welcoming. It was very nice to be in fellowship with other believers in a country with less than a half a percent of Christ followers. Eddie turned to me after service and said, "Now you've met more than 3% of the Christians in the country".

We are anticipating starting ministry here, but are still recovering from jetlag. One of us wakes up sometime around 2:00 AM and lies in bed wide awake for about two hours each night. They said that we should be back to normal within a week. We started hunting for somewhere to live yesterday and will continue throughout the week. (written Monday May 18th)