Hello friends! As I update y’all on my life I am in a coffee shop in Skopje, Macedonia called the Stop Caffe. If you were wondering if the coffee is good let me just go ahead and say YES. The coffee is AMAZING, and the contrasts between a coffee shop in the States and here are very dramatic; but I’ll get into that in a little bit. First I want to tell you all about how we got to this super cool city known as Skopje, and about the ministry we will be doing here*.
*To protect the identity of our ministry and our host I will not be stating the name of our host, our ministry, or its location.
Tuesday, September 5th:
On Tuesday morning we woke up at 4:30 and cleaned up, and then traveled to the airport at 7:30am. It took us close to two and a half hours to get to the airport (Atlanta traffic is a pain y’all) and then my team and I proceeded to spend about 13 hours there *shudder*. Despite common belief, 13 hours in the airport actually isn’t thatbad when you have a group of people to keep you entertained (or you pull a Maddie and take an hour and a half nap on the floor of the airport, sorry mom.)
About half way through our venture at the airport–or as I was sleepily waking up from my nap, I noticed that almost all of my team had left our area and gathered around the piano that was in the atrium (it’s casual, I know) and they were singing worship. In the middle of the airport. Not gonna lie at first I was like…wait what; but then after a small while I had an internal moment where my conscience was like “alright Madeline it’s time to be bold and step out in your faith; it’s time to be a witness for Christ,” and so I went.
The outcome?
You guys. It was the coolest experience. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something so fundamentally beautiful (and for those of you who are wondering, yes, my teammates did convince me to break out my guitar). Post-worship our airport stay was not as exciting. We made it to our 10:25pm flight on time, got on, and flew the 9 hours and 50 minutes to Istanbul, Turkey.
Wednesday, September 6th:
We landed in Turkey at 3:50pm, and got off of the plane.
The time difference between California and Turkey is 10 hours. I was exhausted and hungry, but ready to stretch out my legs and do a little bit of wandering; and the airport in Istanbul is gigantic so that definitely helped. My two teammates Cynthia and Liz were walking around with me searching for food, and we stumbled across the best thing ever (at the time): Turkish. Ice cream. And because I’m a foodie I took a picture (duh).
In addition to trying Turkish ice cream, we also had the opportunity to try stuffed pizza, and Turkish Delight (what Edmund tries in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). It has the texture of the outer part of mochi ice cream, and comes in a bunch of different flavors. I tried pistachio and rose while we were there, and then decided that in my opinion, rose flavoring should be reserved for bubble tea, and I’ve never really been a huge fan of pistachio but this was actually very good.
The thing that stood out the most to me while we were in the airport was the strange looks that we got from people while we were sitting on the floor waiting for our flight. I promise we would have acted like normal humans but there literally are no places to sit in the airport in Istanbul, and it’s so crowded. The other thing that was particularly cool was the amount of culture that was available at the airport. There were shops with a ton of different cultural pieces like tea cups, purses, plates, and the food went all over the spectrum as well. Needless to say it was pretty dang cool.
From Istanbul, we took a flight to Sofia, Bulgaria, and went through customs. It was only after this that we started the final leg of our trip to Skopje, and it was not by air or train, but via eight-person van. When we loaded up into the van it was almost 10pm, and we had been traveling for around 24 hours. The drive from Sofia to Skopje is three and a half hours, and then we had to take a 40-minute bus ride into the city.
I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t something different about this bus ride (and no it wasn’t because we were in Macedonia and not in California, Dad.) I was having one of those cliche moments where you’re staring out the window listening to worship music and you just feel something change inside you. This happened when I saw the Millenium Cross glowing on the top of the mountain as we approached Skopje.
The song I was listening to was Passion’s version of “Build My Life,” and despite the feeling of my eyes feeling like they were going to fall out of my head, what I experienced was hope. The kind of hope that you feel when the Holy Spirit is present. There is so much that my team has yet to learn about this people and this culture, but what I know for sure is that God has placed us here for a specific reason, and knowing that brings me so much inexplicable joy.
By this point it was almost 2 o’clock in the morning, and our ministry host was late to pick us up.
(key side note: there is always grace for situations and the team had a very very positive attitude about the slight delay in plans #props).
We arrived at our ministry location at 2:45 am on Thursday, September 7th. I went to bed that morning at 4 am. Was I tired? Yes; but the overwhelming amount of joy I felt when I met my new home for the next three months outweighed the exhaustion. We had finally completed our 40 hour, 5,405 mile trek across the world.
