Collard Wanderings

A few weeks ago we attended part of a conference in the small village of Fuzine, which is up in the mountains about 2 hours away. It is called "ROM" (which stands for Renewing Our Minds), and it is a leadership conference for young people in this region. We went to observe because our church in Seattle has been involved in the conference for many years and we know the people who run it. Although it is a leadership conference, it focuses a lot on reconciliation -- especially between ethnic groups, which is still a big need in this part of the world. It also focuses on introducing young people to the person of Jesus.

It was really neat to see this in action, even though we were only there for three and 1/2 days, and the whole conference is 3 weeks long. They bring together young people from all over this region--Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, etc. There were even people there from Cyprus and one girl from Israel. It was interesting to see kids (well, mostly they were college age, some high school) from countries who have fought wars against each other get together and make really close friendships with each other. They return home determined to make a positive difference in their own countries and communities.

We really enjoyed meeting lots of great people, and catching up with several people that we knew who were there for the conference as well. There was only one other family there with children, so Emma got to make some new friends. They were an Albanian family from Kosovo with a baby girl and an older boy.

Here are a few pictures:

This summer we've been busy with various things like the kids' camp we helped with, several short trips, and continuing our language study. Since the university is out for the summer, we were able to find a tutor to help us keep working on our Croatian. This has been a great help, even though progress sometimes seems very s-l-o-w.

Our tutor is a woman we met while helping with the kid's camp, and she also goes to our church. So far it's been a great arrangement, because she comes over to our apartment right when Emma goes down for her morning nap. Then we are able to have an hour and 1/2 block of time for language tutoring where both Greg and I can actually pay attention and focus (unlike when Emma is awake, which is near impossible). We do this 3 times a week.

Because the tutor doesn't really speak much English, it forces us to do the whole 1 1/2 hours completely in Croatian without being able to resort to English. Needless to say, there is much flipping through the dictionary, and our brains are pretty fried by the end of each session. But little by little, we're getting there.

Since we've been so bad about blogging for the last month or two, I'll try to take the next week or so to update you on the various things we've been up to lately. Many of you probably already got our e-mail we sent out awhile ago, letting you know how the kids' camp went in July. But if not, here are a few pics:

We were happy with the success of the kids' camp, despite getting rained out several days. It was fun to see all the kids enjoying the games, crafts and bible stories. It was also a great opportunity for the group of leaders, who came from several different churches within Zagreb (Many of them were Croatians, with some Americans like us helping too). We hope that bringing different churches and denominations together like this in order to reach out to the community can set a great example for unity among Christians here.

Thanks for keeping us in your prayers. More updates to come soon!