reynaldomartell - Isolation in Romania

I wish I could say that after a few days of being in Romania that the ministry has already been amazing and we were joining our ministry partner in building deeper relationships with the community. However, I can’t because immediately after arriving we had to isolate ourselves.

On Friday, August 13th my squad and I arrived at the place we are staying at in Craiova, Romania at around 9 p.m. after 29 hours of travel. That was an hour and a half drive from the Adventures base to the Atlanta airport, an 8-hour flight from Atlanta to Paris, then a 3-hour layover there before a 3-hour flight to Bucharest, Romania, finally a 6-hour drive from the airport to where we are staying. We had a meeting about what the next day would look like and at the end of the meeting we found out a few of my squadmates weren’t feeling well and had fevers. So the next morning they got tested and they were positive for covid. So our whole squad is isolating at the place we are staying until at least the 27th.

The day after more people started getting sick with right now a total of 9 people out of 34 of us being positive, and most of those people who were positive are vaccinated. I even thought I might have had it yesterday since I wasn’t feeling the best but my test came back negative. So please keep my squad in your prayers. Prayers that they will be healed, and no one else gets covid. That we will be able to get started with ministry right as the two weeks are up. But more importantly that the community stays safe, so if that means being isolated longer so be it. Prayers for our ministry partner so that we won’t have any negative impact on him because of covid. Whether that be his ministry or him and his family's health.

Despite the fact that we are stuck in this building for two weeks there are so many things to be grateful for. One is that this happened the day we arrived in Romania and so we didn’t have a chance to do ministry yet and spread it to the community around us. To my knowledge, our host and the other people he got to drive us from the airport to where we are staying all don’t have covid. We have time to get to know the people that we are stuck with since we are only interacting with those in our rooms to stop the spread. We can get to know each other better and grow closer together. And we just barely made it into Romania during one of our flights. The U.S. went from being a yellow country to a red country so if we had left just a few hours later we wouldn’t have gotten into Romania, period. God wasn't surprised by this, He knew it would happen. As my squadmate, April loves to say, "Jesus is still on the throne!" Covid won’t stop God moving in Romania while we are here and long after my squad leaves. Just as covid hasn't stopped God from moving in the U.S. We might not have the full month to do ministry in Romania but we will still get to do ministry. I’m so excited to share what Romania will look like after this isolation.