While missionaries serve to share the Gospel all year round, Christmas is one of those special opportunities we get each year to share the Good News of our Savior's coming to earth to a broader audience. To most of our friends and neighbors, the Christmas story has something to do with two people named Jozefi and Maria and that's about it. We have found that most are curious to know more of the story and we are eager to share it.
On Friday, the 21st we held a program for all the students and their parents who come to the center for English instruction. We were able to show the short film, The Shepherd, that shares the account of the first Christmas from the perspective of a shepherd. It's very moving and you can imagine our joy to be given permission to subtitle the film in Albanian and share it with our friends.
Below -- some of the refreshment plates we made for our approximately 70 guests, including some of the homemade Christmas tree cookies we made with the youth earlier in the week.
Following the program we got a big group photo...
About an hour after the English program concluded, we held our Christmas service for church. We had a packed house! (It was so full, I spent the service in the foyer to free up space for others).
The youth prepared and performed an original puppet show.
We showed The Shepherd again...
We gifted every family who came with a 2018 calendar of scripture verses in Albanian. These are always eagerly received!
Of course, the highlight for most is receiving their Christmas shoebox. Most of these kids do not ever get wrapped gifts like these and have been anticipating this box since early November (at least that was when they started asking us when they would get their "pako"). We were grateful for some colleagues in other parts of Albania who provided us extra boxes so we could supply one for all of the kids we serve (there was a big decline in donations of boxes to the organization that supplies our region in Albania -- so at first we were in a panic as to how we would decide who 'deserved' a box and who didn't).
On a side note -- if you participate in supplying boxes for projects like OCC, would you consider supplying more boxes for boys? The organization who gives out the shoe boxes can only give us what they are given and that was 4 girl boxes for every 1 box for boys. You can imagine the excitement of our boys to get a box only to find that it was filled with items for girls... A quick google search can send you to some excellent list ideas of things for boys. Thank you! These continue to be an excellent tool for us to bless our neighbors and share Truth.
When it was all over and the plates and cups cleared and the floors swept and mopped, we celebrated as a staff with a quick pic around our center's Christmas tree!
But the night was not yet over! From here, Eda, Luli, Endri, Nathan and I went to a wedding of an older sibling of one of our students in Met@lle.
As is tradition, the bride's family hosts three nights of dancing at their home to celebrate their daughter's marriage. We wanted to pay our respects to the family so we joined their neighbors on improvised benches in the courtyard to watch the dancing festivities on the third night. To be honest, we were quite surprised at the size of the crowd (we estimated more than 100). Given that we were unknown to a lot of the folks gathered (those over the age of 14, anyway), we garnered a lot of attention and I didn't feel like I could take photos like I would have liked to, so I apologize that I have just these two.
It was so cold (temps were hovering around freezing) that Luli was itching to dance, just to keep the blood moving, but given that it was the last night, the dances were reserved for various groups of family and friends closest to the bride.
After an acceptable amount of time, we got up to leave, but the father-of-the-bride insisted we get a chance to dance. Luli eagerly put in a request for a song from his native Kukes region (bordering Kosovo), while Nathan and I were secretly relieved to let Luli and Eda fulfill our obligations as guests.
I want to insert something here in case you don't know us well. While I appreciate dancing, it's not something I have much experience doing. The culture in which I was raised just didn't dance. On top of that, I utterly lack rhythm (which was sort of a challenge those years I studied piano -- not even a metronome could help me).
Albanian folk dancing is beautiful. I love watching our friends gather in a circle and move to all their traditional songs (which we can now hum along to with familiarity). But Albanian dancing is deceptively complicated. Remember when step aerobics were all the rage? I couldn't master that move called the grapevine. While the grapevine looks more sophisticated, it is tremendously EASY compared to Albanian dancing. There's a reason Albanians start learning the steps to their dances shortly after they learn to walk...
But back to the story -- just when we thought we were 'off the hook', the DJ announced the presence of some special "American guests." He then proceeded to play a song in Italian that repeatedly used the word "Americano". There was no question, they were playing that song for us and to NOT dance would be a huge insult. We gulped and stepped into the dance area. Immediately all 100 plus guests appeared to whip out their cell phones to record us dancing.
All of a sudden I was thinking how nice it would have been for our pre-field training to have included dancing lessons. The skill suddenly seemed right up there in importance after language acquisition. Here we were, being honored at a special community event and I never felt more foreign. I wanted to share in this occasion and express our shared joy but instead, I felt like an awkward, uptight huajt, layered up in my down vest under a down coat -- so thick my arms didn't even fall naturally at my sides -- with a camera around my neck, and feet that felt stuck in cement. It felt like a lose-lose situation. I could refuse to dance and insult them or I could try to dance and risk looking like I was mocking the entire occasion (we are really that bad). I felt like a giant black penguin who could only manage to rock from side-to-side.
Thankfully, the DJ sensed that this popular Italian song was unfamiliar to us and quickly switched over to "Hit the Road Jack". In my head I knew they didn't understand the lyrics, but I couldn't help laughing inside thinking that our dancing was so bad the song was a polite way to encourage us to leave the dance floor and turn it over to those who were more gifted than we. :-) It really was the oddest assortment of emotions -- my own sense of humility and discomfort mixed with the understanding of the honor they were showing us, virtual strangers.
Eventually, the 'foreigner' music ended and those familiar Albanian tunes returned and we were released. Maybe one of my new year's resolutions should be to try to learn Albanian dancing (or at least some kind of dancing)?
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