"Lord, it is good for us to be here" - St. Peter (Matthew 17:4)

I would like to first thank Ms. Pamela Barksdale for the article that she recently published about the visit of our mission team to the Roma/Gypsy camp on the outskirts of Tirana Albania. Pamela is a wonderful person and she is a long term missionary in Albania. Her article can be accessed on the OCMC website http://www.ocmc.org/resources/view_article.aspx?ArticleId=360. Please keep Pamela, all of the people on her team, and all of the people who they are ministering to in your prayers.

If any of you who are interested and would like help by donating to International Orthodox Christian Charities, or are interested in helping the efforts of OCMC missionaries such as Pamela and the other fourteen long-term missionaries, feel free to follow these two links:
https://www.iocc.org/giving/giving_donate1.aspx
http://www.ocmc.org/donate/index.aspx

While many of the details have been well documented in Pamela's article, I will mention a few key points before I continue with my reflections 1.) We did visit a Roma encampment at a certain point during our stay in Albania. 2.) I wish we could have spent more time there. 3.) This brief visit for me, although I have certainly seen similar things, or even worse things in my own experiences was very transfiguring for myself, the other people in our group, and I believe very strongly that it allowed us all to see how visiting our Roma brothers and sisters allowed us to fully realize the Greatest Commandments of our Lord which were summarized in the Law and Prophets and revealed on the Mountain of Transfiguration is to "love the LORD your God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind," and to "love our neighbors as ourselves." (Matthew 22:37-40)  

I suppose that each one person in group (as well as the Gypsies themselves) probably looked at this situation from their own perspectives. For many reasons I feel very comfortable meeting and talking to Indo-Aryan people with whom at first glance I would have almost nothing in common with. My time in Afghanistan where many Indo-Aryan peoples originate from broke me of the habit of what some people refer to as "culture shock" or "cross-cultural awkwardness."

This openness lead me to a particular family, and to a very fruitful conversation that I had with one of the older men of the encampment. God forgive me - I forget his name but he was a very dignified, sober, well dressed, and well spoken man. We were very blessed to have been able to understand each other on account that he could understand a little bit of Greek, and I could understand a little bit of muslim terminology (Most Gypsies in Albania are Muslim).

We spoke for about twenty minutes, and I just listened as he told me about his faith in God, and about how he is content with his life because he has God in his heart. After this, I expressed our wished and prayers of God's blessings on him and his family. After we spoke, the rest of our group caught up, and the man's daughter started teasing a few of the guys in our group as they came. I assume that this was the case because I think that she called one of our team members (Rob) a "German" which made everyone laugh.  

It was very good for us to be there! I suppose that one of the main differences between us and the disciples on Mount Tabor however was that there were already tents in place. Christ also wouldn't not have minded if we had stayed longer than an hour or so. We had to leave because we had a tentative schedule to follow. We had to go to a clergy meeting with His Beatitude Archbishop Anastasios and the rest of clergy of the Archdiocese.

As we left, I noticed how terribly my hands were burning from shaking hands with the gypsies and having other contact with them (slapping them on the shoulders, petting their dogs, horses,etc). When I was in Afghanistan my unit was often responsible for working with local people for a variety of reasons and it was never an issue for me to have personal contact with people. The reason why I was never afraid to touch anyone was because I was always wearing thin leather gloves whenever I went outside of our camp. This was in the event I had to touch anything such as an over-heated such as a gun barrel, expelled ammunition, anything that might be sharp, or whatever might be "unclean."

This trip to the Roma camp was the first time I had ever had "real" physical contact with people who are living in unsanitary conditions, might be diseased, and by our own standards are considered to be unclean. Since then I have thought to myself: How similar was the scene and the people that we had encountered to the biblical age? How many times have I overlooked situations like this in Afghanistan? Would these people have been considered the unclean gentiles that would have been scoffed at had it not been for God coming into the world and the Church's mission to the gentiles? What can we do to help these people from where we are right now? How soon can I get back over there?

Thank God that now these people are not untouchable gentiles. They are just people in need of Christ who need of help. By God's grace we can offer them both. For me this was truly a glimpse of what the Church's mission can be. Amen.