transylvania diary

Dear friends,

Thank you for your support, with your generous help and prayers we are sustained in our work .

This summer has been a busy time helping those who cannot help themselves. Part of this help is building wooden cabanas to replace ramshackle shelters and so far this year we have built 7 houses at Pata Rat, and 2 houses at Deus village near Cluj. A good start for this years building was the bulk purchase of wood made at the beginning of the year using the money which the East Church of Scotland in Inverness donated. This single purchase of wood has kept us building for 8 months and has transformed Pata Rat.

We had a boost from Scotland this year, with material help and with willing helpers from Scottish Churches from Saltcoats and from Inverness. It has been a real pleasure to work alongside our ain folk with no language problems and it has also been good to give our visitors a feel for Romania. Without exception we would be glad to welcome back any of this years Scottish volunteers, we hope we did not work you too hard and trust your return is sooner rather than later. Our visiting volunteer workers from Saltcoats were also a great blessing to Romania. This team built and painted a house, led a children's program for the Romi children at Pata and also brought with them a 40 foot container full of help goods. We now have tents and games for our summer camps and for local schools they brought, pens pencils, crayons and notebooks. The container was also filled with medical equipment, heart monitors, syringe pumps, hospital beds, gloves and other disposables. All of these are very sorely needed in the hospitals of Cluj. The container load was organized by Lachie Macleod through his charity "Something For Romania" * www.sfr.org.uk. Lachie has helped the health service of Romania with lots of medical equipment over the years, in fact as we were being shown the new intensive care unit in Cluj Surgical Hospital we were told by the head nurse that most of the equipment in the new unit had come from Scotland.

Pata Rat Romi community is where we spend much of our time, our Sunday school this week had 52 children. These 2 hours on Sunday are perhaps the only time in the week when many of these children receive some love and attention. We are glad to send them back to their families singing new songs of praise to Jesus. At Pata this month we were also able to celebrate the successful opening of our shower unit. This building with 4 shower cubicles and 2 toilets was built by us with money raised by Rotary Club members from Holland and America in collaboration with the Rotary Club of Cluj-Napoca. This building is the only freely available place to shower for the 700 or so residents of Pata. We heat the water with wood and this keeps our watchman Ioan busy every morning and evening. The unit is being well used and although cleanliness m may not be next to godliness, washing does help prevent the spread of many diseases.

Access to health services is a major problem for this camp and we help as much as we can. One example of how we try to help is Daniela who is 9 years old. Daniela fell from a horse drawn cart which then ran over her head. She was left with a large wound very close to her eye. This wound was stitched badly leaving her with a damaged eyelid which cannot close. As she cannot blink her eye it becomes irritated and causes her pain all the time. We took Daniella to see a surgeon who told us the eyelid can be and should be repaired. This surgeon referred us to the ophthalmic unit who were less helpful. We believe we will succeed in getting Daniela the treatment she needs but are disappointed to find how many obstacles are put in our path. We promise we will not give up, but please pray for our patience as we stay in line waiting to see yet another functionary whose paper is essential for us to proceed. We could go to the top of the queue if we were prepared to offer bribes but of course we refuse to be part of this continuing corruption.

There are many honest Christian medical staff who need our support and prayers, but they have to work alongside many who have spent a lifetime taking bribes and pretending to work. Please pray for Daniela and for the heath system of Romania.

The rest of our news is that we have a new house. It is a wooden cabana built mainly by ourselves. We have water pumped from a well which we dug, gas heating from a large LPG tank and it is quite cozy now. This house has no address so far we are "Pomet fara numer" that is Pomet no number, but we no longer pay rent only local ground taxes. With 4*4 on our Dacia we expect to be able to transit our dirt road but we will see how winter treats us. Unlike the rest of flooded Romania we are eager for rain to keep our well filled up for winter. When we can find time we will put some pics of our new home on the Internet for you all to see. Some of our Scottish visitors helped us to fit windows and our kitchen and this was a huge help for us. We are using one of the summer camp tents to store our belongings in the garden right now until we get the rooms in the cabana painted and with doors hung.

The other major news is that Kevin our son returns to Romania with his wife Mari to live and work with us. We expect them on the 19th November and will be very glad of their help.

Our work in the prisons is still going on it is now a full day program on Thursdays,. Please pray that the prison service has money to feed all the inmates this winter and also the money to heat the buildings.

We wish everyone a blessed Christmas and a New Year filled with the Love of Jesus,

Martin & Trish

Pomet fara numer

Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

e-mail robertson.martin@gmail.com

A taste of our ministry can be seen at www.faf.ro

Post Script

We returned home on Saturday night from a fellowship meeting for the Pata Rat team team to find our front door kicked in and some of our belongings missing. For Trish the most annoying is the loss of her spectacles, her passport and driving licence and all the medical papers and birth certificate for Daniela. We leave this business in the hands of the police, and would appreciate your prayers. Loss of passport means a 2 day trip to Bucharest to obtain a replacement.