Life in Romania: It’s No Sacrifice at All

by Laura Fuller

Laura Fuller, the daughter of via pacis editor Fran Fuller, has been in Romania for the past six months on a one-year mission assignment with Food for the Hungry International. She is seconded to a national organization called Blythswood, for whom she works in a Christian Daycare and Canteen Center, which reaches out to children from the poorest and most vulnerable families in Jimbolia, and also teaches English in the public school.

Laura Fuller and kids

Sitting with a fellow volunteer in the local pizzeria in Jimbolia, I was looking to relax and free my mind from the exhaustion I was feeling. It had been a long day of traveling around to areas in the outskirts of our town, and everywhere in between, to visit the homes of the first through fourth grade children in our after school program. The two of us had been stuffed sideways in the loose back seat of a rickety Dacia, with the front seat chairs pushed against our long legs, as we bounced down the bumpy, snow-covered roads.

Now, sitting inside the smokey warmness of the little restaurant, my toes were still a bit numb, my body a little sore, and my mind haunted by the sights of poverty I had witnessed in the lives of many children who have become so dear to me. The lack of doors, windows, electricity, toilets, running water, and sometimes even love.

My mind drifted on to all the work that was left to do over the next couple of days, as the staff prepared to join the school children on Christmas holiday. My colleagues and I faced several more days of staying up late and getting up early, more hours of paperwork on our children, more mornings of waiting for parents to come and pick up parcels, another evening unloading donations from a semi-truck and, for me, more moments of missing out on Christmas back home for the first time.

L to R: Miriam Weideger and Laura Fuller Center: Romanian street musician in traditional costume.

“But it’s no sacrifice. No sacrifice. It’s no sacrifice at all,” Elton John sang over the restaurant speakers. Clearly, these lines were written just for me, just for this moment. After all, I am often told by people, and perhaps I accidentally tell myself the same thing at times, that I have made an admirable sacrifice to come to Romania on this mission. “But it’s no sacrifice. No sacrifice. It’s no sacrifice at all.”

But, you’re putting your life on hold! You’re giving up convenience, health, safety, comfort, and familiarity! You’re giving up your friends, your family, your church, and your stuff! “But it’s no sacrifice. No sacrifice. It’s no sacrifice at all.” I think again the words I once spoke over the radio in a pre-departure interview: “I am not putting my life on hold; I am finally starting to figure out what it means to live!”

Yet, here I am. I am washing mold off my walls, eating chicken hearts and liver, unloading semi-trucks, living without running hot water, missing my family and friends, getting every cold that the children have, swatting hoards of mosquitoes in my living room, and sitting through a church service and understanding very little.

Yet, here I am. I am sitting at the kitchen table of a nice apartment (where I live with a fellow American volunteer), with my DELL laptop in front of me, my mind functioning well as I write, and food and water in my stomach and pumping through me. Heat flows from the radiator. The smell of soap lingers on my skin, hair, and clothes. I enjoy my hot cup of coffee. This is supposed to be sacrifice? Have I forgotten how many people in Romania, indeed around the world, would love to be sitting here in my place right now?

Two boys in front of their home near Cluj, Romania

I have come to share God’s love with some of these poorest of the poor in Romania. These are folks who do not have the most basic of necessities, let alone the luxuries that we often come to see as necessities. I have come, in particular, to help the young children in these families physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually. The needs of the world have been upon my heart, and my faith called me to do what I could to help them. Coming to Romania was a natural response for me to the call in 1 Peter that, “Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.”

It seems, though, that the struggle is found in the line that soon follows that verse, which says, “If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” There is often a great temptation on the “mission field” to start doing things by our own strength and for our own glory. We inadvertently begin to accept the compliments that focus more on us than on God. We soon forget that we are simply living out our faith and that this is something that all of us are called to do, albeit in various forms. In faithfully participating with God in such work, we do not experience sacrifice, we discover life.