The Pizza Was Great!

Kim has not adequately conveyed the challenges involved in making Chicago-style pizza (from scratch!) in Romania.

Last trip, after several days of effort and 2 dictionaries, we finally found out how to say "basil" in Romanian (we were walking by a store and finally spotted a picture of basil on a package).

She already mentioned the oven temperatures, but she didn't mention how much fun it was trying to light the gas ovens. We finally got some help from the B&G guy at the church (who didn't really know, but figured it out). Part of the problem was that there are two "burners" in the oven, one on top and one on bottom, and the dial only controls one at a time. I figured out how to light the burner in the top, but that is for broiling (and it doesn't have any temperature adjustment at all). The B&G guy (I think his name is "Marcel") showed me how to light the hidden bottom burner.

To open the cans of tomatoes, we tried a can opener we found (made in the 1800's?) with no luck, but no lost fingers. Marcel grabbed a really big knife and cut the cans open. Important safety tip: never let a cook (like Kim) see you use a knife to cut open a can!

There's more, but the important thing is, it tasted wonderful! Of course, we had the usual lunch here earlier (large, high calorie, excellent food), so I'm afraid I may actually be gaining weight. I spend my days working on computer and network issues here at the church, not hauling away large buckets of rock and concrete like everyone else. Happily, the only scale I've seen doesn't have any numbers on it (not even kilograms, just a blank dial) so I can't tell for sure.

Someone tell Steve Lopez I can use his help, if he can catch a plane over. FCC can survive without both of us for a few weeks, right? :)

They have a really nice video setup in their production room. They only have 1 video camera, but rather than the type of switch we have at FCC, they have a computer-based switch. It has 16 inputs, and a USB physical switch to control it. I'm taking notes -- we could use something like that some day.

We are experimenting with live webcasts of the Sunday morning services. We can stream them over the LAN (that is, within the chuch), and I've re-configured the internet connection so that we can make them available over the internet, but the upload speed is too slow to support more than 2-3 viewers at a time (it's actually about the same as our upload speed at FCC), so it's just an experiment for now.

The ministry here is so "outward bound", with so many challenges, it's hard to know where to look next. Radu told me his vision is for there to be NO young people in the church here in Sibiu on Sunday -- instead, they are all out ministering in the villages. Kim got to listen to them practice singing while she was making the pizza.

The difference between Sibiu and the villages is even greater than it was two years ago. Romania is showing signs of greatly increasing prosperity (although not fast enough for, especially, the young people), and you can really see it in Sibiu. Being the "Capital of Culture for Europe for 2007" has been an obvious boost to the economy. But, although it looks like there are some improvements in the villages, leaving Sibiu for Slimnic is like stepping back in time a few hundred years. And, while most people in Sibiu seem to have their eyes turned outward to what they hope to acquire (not necessarily in a bad way), the people we've met here at the church have their eyes on those still in the greatest need, both for material things (which here means medicine, etc.) and for the gospel. Keep them in your prayers.