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Date: Wednesday 2 March 2005

Life is staying pretty busy with us lately, my daily grind is to get up and leave at 7am, go to Jimbolia come back at 6-7pm and then do the team stuff, meet with the architects, engineers, clean house etc. It seems that I am finding it hard to sit down and catch up on my emails and updates!

The boys home is coming along quite quickly, we have the two guest rooms about finished and have built and sheet rocked the 4 upstairs bedrooms and the bath. If the money holds out we should be finished with the inside by this summer.

I don't know if you have heard or not but the Pumpkin has died! A combination of a broken water hose and a faulty temp gauge fried the motor beyond repair. We are looking for a replacement motor now and hope to have it back and running soon. It had about 420,000 km on it when the hose broke.

Other than that Milo [the dog] got hit by a car and just got back out of surgery, he must be feeling better now, he is back jumping up onto the furniture!

 

Date: Friday 4 March 2005

I was going to send you a separate note about Jake and Jacob, a tale of two Jakes... they were two boys who came from our church in San Antonio to work on the home for two weeks.

They both had loads of construction experience and worked pretty much 6 days a week in near freezing conditions (inside we could warm it up to about 10°C but most of the time it was around 5°C) and got the second floor plastic wrapped, insulated, and the four bed rooms and the upstairs bath built along with getting most of the down stairs "apartment" finished. At night they brought movies and had movie nights with the boys that are working there.

Date: Sunday 19 June 2005

Summer has arrived and the temperatures at the moment are in the high 70's to mid 80's [25-30°C]. This is just the beginning of summer!!!

We have been cruising right along with the work on the boys home. This past spring we have turned the upstairs from a giant open area to nearly finished, having built 4 bedrooms for the kids, bathrooms and a 2 bedroom apartment for the house parents. The nicest feature so far is a staircase! We had been using a rickety steep stair case for the upstairs; it is really nice now having one that you can run up and down on, especially when carrying heavy loads!

We are putting in the flooring now and have only the final trimming out and the finishing of the bathrooms to do to have it completed as well as the guest rooms downstairs.

Downstairs we have put in all the plumbing and electrical and need to finish the sheet rock, doors and flooring before it will be finished.

The last thing we will need to do is finish the exterior. Although we succeeded last winter in getting the home dried in we still need to finish the siding, trim and paint.

Please pray for the progress on the home. To help conserve funds we are working with just 3 people on the home (including Steve) but it is our desire to finish this summer!

Please pray for our future house parents. Deb and I have been really encouraged by the interest being shown. We have an organization who would like to provide the house parents for the home as well as an individual, Joe Ramirez, who has been working with boys near Cluj for many years and for health reasons needs to move to a warmer climate. Joe has had loads of success working with boys and even has two of his "graduates" becoming pastors of two villages.

Date: Sunday 19 June 2005

After searching across Europe for a motor (that we could afford, some cost more than the van!) we have finally found a used one here in Timisoara. In the past we have not had much luck with the auto salvages here so I was a bit leery about trusting the Pumpkin with Mr. Mike and his crew of junk yard mechanics!

Were we pleasantly surprised!

Not only did Mike replace many extra pieces (some quite expensive, and not part of the deal) that were broken/missing like the radiator fan, the glove box that was broken into and other little pieces ... and for FREE, but they cleaned the van as well! Please pray that the used motor will be a good one and praise for Mike's willingness to be generous.

Thanks for all of your prayers and support to get the Pumpkin back on the road!

In our last Newsletter Steve was rather incapacitated. We are happy to tell you that he has made a full recovery so thank you for your prayers. Summer is here and the madness begins!

Date: Sunday 19 June 2005

As most of you know this past year we had a lot of flooding in Romania. There were a lot of factors that brought this about; large amounts of snow during the winter, late freezes that slowed the melting of the snow and record rainfalls this past spring. No matter what the cause of the flooding, the result was devastating. Four people were killed, 5,467 homes damaged, 830 destroyed. Most of these homes were built out of mud brick or brick with mud mortar, normally these homes are quite water resistant but when they are submerged the mud simply dissolves causing the home to collapse. Farming was affected; over 160 hectares of crops were destroyed not to mention the damage done to the roads (already in need of repair).

In Jimbolia the water table rose to with in 6” of the surface, even though the weather and ground surface was dry you could stick a shovel into the ground and hit water! As you can imagine the weather slowed things down a bit at the home but we are praising God that despite the heavy rains the roof did not leak and the foundation stayed in place!

Date: Monday 29 August 2005

We will have 3 new team members next month, all Brits. That will put the Brit ratio at an all time high on the team. 5 out of 13 will be British, that is tied with the Romanians. The American ration is 2/13. But the guy/girl ratio is improving with 7 guys on the team now and in February we will add a 7th!

Steve.

Date: Monday 5 September 2005

The house next door continues its descent into the ground and the owner is now willing to sell cheap. We are getting close to opening the home but we will have to do something with the house next door. The owner cannot fix it and the options are getting fewer (buy it, tear it down). The good news is that they will probably sell it for less than 2,000 euros. The bad news is that we don't have the 2,000 euros!

Here is a picture of the house next door taken about a month ago. The center section is now completely down and some of the interior walls are going also. We can almost see straight through the building! The house should be worth it since we can sell off the bricks and tiles. The property is pretty big and has some nice large trees (some nut and fruit) and would make a nice front yard!

We have weathered the storm with the exception of some roof leaks, mostly around the top windows... I never was happy with the way they were installed! Oh well!

Steve. 

Date: Tuesday 6 September 2005

The Pumpkin died again, this time in Holland. Yep, Holland. It did fine on the way up but on the way back it just slowly lost power and stopped!

We took the head off to have a look-see and found a blown head gasket and eight (yes, 8) cracks in the head (not quite as durable as a Dacia head). The strange thing was that there was no smoke or steam and the motor was running cool when it happened. The good news is that the man who sold us the motor will give us another one, the bad news is that we were on a conference mission at the time and the van is still in Holland. The worst news is that we need to raise some money to take the motor there or bring the van here... we will keep you posted!

I attached a picture of the head, how many cracks can you find? It is pretty bad when cracks can show up on a picture!

Steve.

Date: Monday 7 November 2005

Praise the Lord we now have a boiler for the home!

Due to Romanian safety regulations we had to construct a separate building to house the boiler. (Hmm...keeping kids away from fire and hot scalding water, good idea!) Now we need to install it.

This will be quite a big task so please pray for Steve as he works on installing the heating system. - Deb.

“Today we bored holes in walls, fitted copper pipe together, measured, cut then measured again (and cut it right this time!) All in all it took the three of us, Tibi, Florin and myself to get one radiator installed!”

This is the first time I (Steve) have ever installed a heating system that circulates water, let alone with a wood burning boiler! Sometimes we have been using the blunder method and other times we are blessed by having someone who knows what we are supposed to do.

One struggle that I have been having lately is not having anything to report about the kids that I have been working with, that is because I am not! The work on the home has consumed most of my time (and energy). Please pray that God will open the door for me to be more involved in their lives while still keeping my commitments with the home.

Another hurdle is the fact that our neighbor's house is falling into our yard! We will not be able to open until this is fixed. Although he does want to sell the property we will have to see how God provides for this unforeseen development.

Steve.

Date: Monday 7 November 2005

In an earlier update, we said that the Pumpkin had been “resurrected”. Well... so we thought! Two months ago our team went to Holland for a European conference with International Teams. On the way back, our poor Pumpkin once again died. This time the motor is completely un-repairable. As a result we had to leave the Pumpkin in Holland and there it remains until we can find another motor for it.

But... the story of God’s provision just gets better! While the Pumpkin has been parked in Holland, a Christian Dutch group took an interest in it, “Stichting Hand” (“Hands that Serve”). They have taken the Pumpkin to their secret workshop and have offered to check it out and put it back into good working order. Part of the plans involve putting a new motor in it. The cost to us will be about 1400 Euros, the exact amount that the Romanian salvage yard refunded us on our old new motor! PTL!

Steve & Deb.