Yes, we're home again! Got home at approx. 10:30 Thursday evening...up for about 24 1/2 hours! Ready for bed!! Goodnight everyone, and thanks again for everything! Love from the Bezooyens! [View Full Entry]

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Ok! It’s Monday, May 5th now, and I haven’t updated this blog since Thursday! First of all, yes, Henriette, I have been receiving your messages. Thank you so much! It has been such an added blessing to take in this experience with so many of my nieces and nephews! I love them all more than ever! On Friday Els and I spoke to the group of women that have adopted Romanian or Gypsy children. I was struck by the fact that all of them could probably teach me so many of life’s lessons! What am I doing?! Well, God gives [View Full Entry]

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Hey everyone! Just a quick little note from Joni to say I'm having an awesome time...can't believe we're headed out of Romania tomorrow! What a wonderful experience...and so saddening! Just to see the sights and smells and to feel the poverty is an incredible experience. Houses that are falling apart. Families of seven living in a one room house. Walls made of straw and manure with some sort of plaster overtop. It's just increidible. Ministering to the Gypsy kids has been the highlight for me...their love for us is just amazing! They just grin at you and clutch your hand...just cling [View Full Entry]

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Good Evening! Another work day done! The whole crew left around 7:30 am - including Shauna and Mikayla. They are all such eager beavers and are working like crazy with the rest of them - moving bricks, getting tiles off of the roof, cleaning up wood, painting gas-line pipes, and helping with children's ministry. I got to go to the village Lodroman with two Romanian women and two kids (with very limited english!) to minister to them. Maria and Anna go to different homes, take women's blood pressure, and spend some time talking to them. What a neat experience! I had [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone! My message today is two-fold... to tell you about what's been going on, and to ask you to pray some more! :) What a great day today! Els and I did groceries and cooking for the whole crew again. We had such an experience in the grocery store! Several gypsy men and women came barreling down the very narrow isle and started pressing their carts against us for us to move! We weren't sure what to think, and were probably looking a little shocked at them... they just kept on barreling! I tried to move out of the way [View Full Entry]

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Buna seara! (Good evening!) We had such an interesting, full day! Els, Melissa and I, with Maria and Olympia (two Romanian ladies) went shopping for the ladies event. What an experience! A lot of actionary, some Dutch, some Romanian, and then throw some English in the mix... and we got it all figured! The long and the short of it is, we were able to spread a very attractive table of goodies for the ladies that came from three villages. Many of the women here have very difficult lives... not only very poor, but are also often in abusive situations. They [View Full Entry]

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Hi again! I would really appreciate your prayers for tomorrow... approx. 5:30 am to 7:30 am Tuesday (Alberta time) we are doing a women’s outreach in Lunca. We plan to have cake, coffee, tea, and snacks, and a small gift for all the ladies that come. After that we will be having a time of worship, a testimony by Melissa, and then I’ll be speaking to the women. I thought I’d introduce them to the Friend of all friends, tying in the story of Mary Magdalene, and mingling in some of my testimony. Please ask our Heavenly Father what you need [View Full Entry]

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Buna! Yes, that's the greeting in Romanian! We're here on site now, and eager to start our week...brushing up on a few Romanian phrases! Worshipped with a very small group in the village Lunca today, where we'll also be working this week. Terribly run down, tragically poor....it's impossible to imagine conditions like this unless you see it with your own eyes. On our way home from church, our leader suddenly stopped at a little old couples house. The little old lady was standing outside her fence waiting for us to drive by, holding a huge boquet of lilacs, which she then [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, April 23 Groetjes from the Bezooyens! We’re in Germany right now, and I actually miss the Dutch language all around me! It was so incredibly fun... I just yattered and yacked away in Dutch to whoever would listen. It was even more fun when a man told Els that she had really lost her Dutch(her being a true-blooded Dutch girl), and then the next day Gerrit and I were in a cell phone store and a man asked us how many years we had lived in Holland. I told him 1 day, and that we were born and raised [View Full Entry]

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Hello Friends... on behalf of the Bezooyen family...by Joni! So we decided that it would be easier to keep a blog than to send you all emails constantly...so here goes nothing! We flew out of Calgary at about 7:00 pm on Wednesday the sixteenth, and landed safely in London just over eight hours later...sometime on the seventeenth, when I turned seventeen, but kind of forgot that it was my birthday haha... all seemed to be going wonderfully, and we were super stoked, trying to catch our next flight to Amsterdam....until the unthinkable happened... As we were going through customs we found [View Full Entry]

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