Reformations Day

Happy Reformations Day! Im gonna try to catch everyone up with what all’s been going on since September.  Im doing an FSJ- Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr (I think most of you can translate that pretty easily), with the local Methodist Church here in Zeitz, Germany.  Zeitz is in east Germany and has really gone downhill since the fall of the DDR.  The church is called the Lighthouse congregation and they have several outreach programs like a children’s afternoon two days a week and a soup kitchen once a month.  Zeitz is kind of a rough city.  The first few weeks I was here it was really depressing.  The city is a mess.  The people in the church told me that 50000 people used to live her and now only 20000 live here.  There are empty buildings, shops and apartments, all over the city.  Many of the buildings look way out of date and run down with broken glass or chipped walls and there is trash all over the city.  I have had to walk over glass shards on the way to work every day for the last two months and that is when I am walking through the nicer city center.  They told me that many films come to shoot war scenes here because all the buildings already looked like they were recently bombed.  I think the environment here has a pretty big effect on the people too.  I have met a few other people and seen some different things now, but as recently as a few weeks ago I still would’ve sworn that almost everyone in Zeitz had some kind of problem, or was not quite so normal.  It was almost like the buildings reflected the people of the city, and I thought to myself that this was a kind of city where the rundown and outcast must come.  I see a lot of people with physical problems on the street and there is a ton of alcoholism in this city.  There are barely any young people around my age here.  I am pretty sure once they got old enough, they left for a nicer place.  It seems like just about everyone has a rather negative view of their city.  When asked how I liked it here, everyone was surprised or would tell me I could tell the truth when I answered it was nice… I was mostly just saying that to not offend, although now I have found some parts of Zeitz that are actually nice.  The people here seem to always be making a joke or a comment about how dysfunctional or messed up it is here.  There are also many people without work here.  I have talked with several of them at the soup kitchen and they all miss the DDR and say it was much better times then.  There are also several assisted living senior citizens homes here and also several different children’s homes.  It is hard to imagine in a city this size that there could be so many children’s homes, but I think so many of the parents here have lost hope and turned to drinking and drugs.  It is really sad, but also an amazing opportunity to be able to bring Gods love and some hope back into the lives of the people here. 

There are 3 or 4 churches here in Zeitz, but I don’t think any of them have more than 50 people or so.  That means there are about 200 Christians or at least people that attend a church in a city of 20000.  I suppose the numbers could be worse, but that’s a huge difference from what you would see in Trussville, for example.  The church I am working for has about 20 or 30 people each Sunday. 

That’s kind of the background for where I am now.  It is good to know to better understand what I’ve been doing here since September.  The first few weeks were pretty long for me and boring, which also meant more time to think about people and places that I missed.  Luckily I have a really awesome mom that got online as much as she could to keep me company in that time.  I was not entirely certain what the pastor had in mind for us( Matthias and I, the other guy doing the same work as me) when he signed up to have two FSJ-lers here in Zeitz.  The church does have a few outreach programs, like I said before, but there was still a lot of free time in our weeks when there was really nothing to do.  The first few weeks looked like this:  Monday- our day off… although sometimes we were asked to go to a meeting or pick up donations from a nearby city, Tuesday and Wednesday- Childrens program in the afternoons and preparing for the program or taking care of visa/bank/insurance stuff in the mornings.  Thursday morning we really didn’t have much at all to do and afternoons we go to a Book Coffee or one time a month a Bible Coffee.  The book coffee is kind of dead.  The two ladies who work in the Lighthouse programs would make tea and coffee and have a few cookies out or something and then one of them would read a book to whoever would come, usually only one older lady and at most three older ladies.  The Bible Coffees were better attended because they would serve homemade pastries or cakes so a lot of people from the Soup Kitchen would be there for that.  After eating then we read a Bible passage and the pastor says a few words about it, which is usually pretty good.  Fridays we didn’t have anything except at night we have a prayer evening.  The first time surprised me a little because the first hour was praying for Israel and they had a menorah out and Israeli flags out, at one time the pastor picked one up and started waving it around as we sang a Jewish song together.  They are very big into Israel and I have not had the right time to ask too many questions about it just yet, but I think it has something to do with their history here as well.  Saturdays we don’t usually have anything except for youth group at night and then Sundays we just have one worship service in the morning.  Reading all that may seem like a lot, but it really is not much at all.  The children’s program is only one and a half hours and we always eat and sing some songs to begin which takes up at least 30 minutes usually.  That means we only have to prepare a short devotion and maybe one or two games or something like that and then our time is over.  That also means it doesn’t take forever to prepare for it.  So those first few weeks I did not have much to do at all.  We did start talking about some different, new projects that Matthias and I could start on our own.  Now, we are finally beginning to really start some of those projects and I feel like my week is much more productive. 

We have several ideas for new projects and some of them are farther along than others.  One new thing that I am in charge of actually starts on Sunday for the first time.  I really stole the idea from Barry from Chemnitz, but I am starting an English Language Fellowship here in Zeitz, which is basically a worship service once a month in English.  There are clearly not as many people interested or that know English here in Zeitz as there were in Chemnitz, but I also went to the universities in Leipzig and advertised a little bit there so hopefully we will have a decent turnout.  A lot of the people that came to the service in Chemnitz I would not see at the regular Sunday morning service but they were interested in practicing their English and so Im hoping it will work out here too.   Another project that we have lined up is a sport afternoon for kids in the city.  We went yesterday and looked at a gym that I think will be perfect for it, and have a kind of test run one Friday in November.  We will start meeting regularly every Friday in January to just play sports and games with kids and then maybe have a little snack at the end.  We really just want to use this time to develop some relationships with different kids and have fun and provide a good place for some running around and staying fit.  We have also spoken with the mayor, who helped us with the gym, about two other projects that were waiting for a response about.  One of them is just a big trash clean up project.  I had actually envisioned a weekly kind of thing when I first got here, but it is evolved into hopefully sometime having one day where we recruit as many people as we can to come and help clean up a park in the city.  It is always covered in alcohol bottles and trash, but also has a nice playground and where we see many of our kids from the children’s program playing when were out and about.  The other idea is to go into the schools and help tutor kids in English or Matthias will help with German or Latin.  We really just want to develop some relationships with some of the teens in the area and hopefully we can slowly turn homework help into a real relationship and then maybe get them to come to youth group with us or at the very least let them know we are there to talk with or help them out whenever they need something.  We have also applied for some grant money so that we can buy some new toys for the children’s program as well as building a really cool tree house behind the church for the kids.  This past week we also had what I find to be an awesome opportunity that I think we should definitely take advantage of as soon as we get a schedule down for one or two of the other projects weve already been working on.  Last week I went to a big apartment complex where only foreigners live to pass out flyers and invited them to the English service since most of them do not speak any German but at least a little English.  While we were there the lady in charge of the place asked us if we would be interested in giving German lessons there at the house for whoever wanted them.  I think that would be great and its something that we actually know there is a need for.  Several of our ideas we came to this city with, and although I think they will be well received and helpful, we know beforehand that this is something that is really needed here, so hopefully we can get that started as well.

I think that’s about everything that I do here.  Ive found a few other things to fill my spare time which is good.  On Tuesday nights I go to a bible study at the church, although it is only old ladies, Matthias, and me.  On Wednesday nights I go to play volleyball with a group that is made up of people from several of the churches here in Zeitz.  It is really good to be able to play a little sport and we also have a short devotion to start off.  I guess that is really everything so far.  I have gotten to visit my friends in Chemnitz a few times which is always good and while in Leipzig handing out flyers for ELF I met an Australian guy that works for the English church there so I may try to go and visit them sometime or have some tea or something.  The only problem is it costs so much money to take the trains to either of those cities, so that’s kind of a bummer.  The Australian guy invited me to a bible study for international students on Thursday nights which I would love to go to, but Ill have to see if it works out with time and money and everything.  I finally got internet for my laptop last week too.  I felt bad for using Matthias’ internet the first two months and it was hard not being able to get online whenever I felt like it to chat or check an Alabama score.  Matthias and I live together as well and that has been tough, although it is getting better and better now.  He is 18 and just graduated high school but he is also really tall (that might seem insignificant, but for whatever reason, because he is so much taller, sometimes Id forget he was relative young still).  He also likes to talk a lot and will give his opinion even if no one asked for it.  He is super nice but at first I just found it annoying.  All of those things together made him really annoying to me for a while, although thankfully we have gotten to know each other a little better now and it doesn’t bother me as much now.  Its also been a good time for me to learn a lot too.  I have to learn to communicate better and realize that he doesn’t necessarily think like I do so its not always obvious that we should do this or that.  But yea… that’s basically what has been going on around here.  Now that I have internet I plan to blog much more often and so hopefully I won’t have to write long overviews that aren’t always very specific.  Also say a prayer for my uncle tomorrow, he is going for a biopsy on a tumor in his brain.  Thanks.