by Peter McDowell

It has been 16 months. Before that time, I would never have imagined that my day-to-day life would involve as many interactions with people from a far away land. A land full of grape vines and honeycomb. A land that somehow became irreversibly imbedded into the streets that I grew up on. It’s not what I had in mind a couple years ago, but this is the way it is.  I kind of like it

Let me start off by saying that I thought my good friend Dan had made up an imaginary group of people called Moldovans that somewhat unnoticeably inhabit a growing segment of Western Massachusetts. They drive fancy cars, sing a lot, play volley ball and eat lots of “harbus” (pronounced har-boose). I remember hearing that the best part was that they were all Christians! They had left Moldova as refugees due to religious persecution. Where else should they end up but Western Massachusetts!

Lee, Andrei, and Dan eating harbus

Last year Dan invited me to join a group of about 15 Moldovans on a missions trip back to Moldova. They planned to spend three sessions in a youth camp. I then became the unofficial photojournalist. Our friend Lee was the other American to join our mostly Moldovan team. The three of us had the rather incredible experience of being the Americans in a team that could already speak the language and had grown up in the same culture where we would minister. When the plane landed, the three of us were foreigners.

How has this affected the rest of my life? Just ask my friends. I am sort of a linguistic enthusiast so when I came back from Moldova last year I began to learn the Romanian language which is, as it sounds, one of the Romance languages. I earned a minor in Spanish while in college, perhaps it came a little easier for me than Lee or Dan.

I also returned with a fierce determination to go back next year. The effect of being an American in Moldova was pretty powerful because there is no clear draw for Americans to visit this very poor country landlocked between Ukraine and Romania. I sometimes had the feeling that my own arrival there could only be explained as the pre-mature effect of the growing sub-culture of Moldovans in America and the factors in my life that pressured me to do something different. Although I know it wasn’t true, it felt like I was the first American to grace Moldovan ground.

The experience of going once was so incredible,  I had to top it by going again. I spent the year doing what I could to ensure that I would have an opportunity to return 2009. As summer drew near again, my Romanian improved and my financial situation got  worse. Still, I stayed resolute in my desire to go and I prayed very fervently for favor in this.

The second trip, for me, was about fulfilling a commitment. Our team had more Americans this year and a refined purpose to work with children. There was much less I experienced for the first time. Instead, my old experiences were enhanced by new perspective. I rarely used an interpreter and I spent more time working directly with the children in the camp. I still took thousands of photos, but not because I needed them to remember, rather because I wanted to bring back more for others to see of my time away.

Hopefully you enjoy some of the pictures here, and maybe they will inspire you to do something out of the ordinary.

I took this picture in 2008 of what I thought was a young boy and girl. I found out later that the girl on the right, "Alexandria" had donated her hair.

Here is Alexandria this year with Zina. Last summer, Zina was one of the first people to speak to me in broken English. She made a commitment last year to change her life, to be more of a witness. This year she came back as one of the youngest leaders in camp at 16.