The Drought and The Donkeys

Last night we played football against some of the guys from the Tirana. I think we gave a good accounting of ourselves, especially as none of us had played for at least 3 years - and some not for 15! We scored three goals. They stopped counting their goals after 30!

We got back to our house to try to have a shower and discovered we had no water. However showering became the least of our problems - as eight guys all with healthy appetites came to the realisation that the toilet wouldn't flush either!

This morning we woke up to the same problem - but the situation was even more pressurised! I won't go into any more details, but the problem was finally solved at 10:30 when Genti came and was able to pump water up from his house to fill our tank!

We started this morning with team time, worshipping and praying together. Simon did a bible study which included his telling us about his dream last night - so we had the extra bonus of a psychological insight into how his subconscious works (or doesn't!)

At 10:45 (after the queue for the toilet had died down) we went to help a poor family mend a wall that had broken down. It was damaged three years ago when a nearby ammunitions dump exploded.

Some of the money we raised before coming out has paid for the materials and now we were acting as labourers. I guess we all had different pictures of what this work would look like, but no one expected what we found!

We arrived at the bottom of a hill, where a muddy track wound it's way up between steep sides and pomegranate trees. In front of us were our materials - large piles of sand and aggregate - and our machinery to get it all up the track… two donkeys!




We spent the morning loading bags, heaving them onto the donkeys and leading the donkeys up the steep and slippery path. This went on for a few hours until we stopped at the families house for a rest. It was a single story building with 3 rooms and a porch. We sat on the porch and the mother of the family gave us glasses of raki - a home-brewed spirit made from the grapes growing in their garden - and pancakes. The raki, in my humble opinion, was more akin to wallpaper stripper than a beverage, but the pancakes were delicious - served with sugar and fig jam.

The whole family were so hospitable to us. The grandmother took a shine to Don and sat with her hand on his knee. The father said he thought Simon's hair looked like his donkey's! Grandad sat in the corner smiling. Mother plied us with raki, pancakes and Turkish coffee. Their son, who was about 7 didn't seem able to talk normally, just to shout excitedly!



This morning our Bible passage was from James chapter 2. In verse 17 it says, "In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."

There is a whole tension between faith and deeds. We can't do anything to make God love us more (or less). There is no deed that can earn us anything from God. It's important that we don't get the idea that our good deeds are the way we get into God's good books.

But conversely, to sit around believing but doing nothing about it is equally as redundant. All mouth and no trousers is a modern way of putting it.

This verse came back to me as I was walking up the track alongside a donkey, trying to support a bag of sand to stop it tipping and knowing I will wake up aching tomorrow. I had been calculating in my head about how much a few Albanian labourers might cost and how much I'd like to be relaxing at home.

Supporting this family by buying them the materials was easy to do. It showed them that a bunch of strangers cared about them simply because we believed that God cared about them.

But the deed we were doing - working alongside them, getting muddy and sore - perhaps showed God's love for them more profoundly than throwing money at a problem. Or I hope so anyway.


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