For those of you who were following along via Instagram, Snapchat or random Facetimes from me when I was able to find some wifi, I recently(ish) returned from an extended European excursion that started as a 10-day mission trip to Greece and Cyprus and turned into a month abroad.
To keep track and bring everyone up to speed, on February 25, I left LA for DC. I spent three days exploring DC, meeting the mission team from National Community Church who I’d be traveling with and preparing for the trip.
On Tuesday, February 28, we boarded a plane for Greece, ten of us in total. We flew to Thessaloniki, where we served in the Northern Greece area for the first half of the trip, including spending time at the Nea Kavala refugee camp. From there, we continued on to Cyprus where our host family is expanding their ministry.
At the conclusion of the mission trip, with my friend Emily (the one who led and invited me on the trip), I extended my stay in Europe to further explore Cyprus and return to Greece where we visited Athens, Meteora and stopped to see our friends at the camp one last time.
Then, the day before I was scheduled to fly back to the states, I received a call asking me come to Budapest where a friend was filming a movie. An hour away via flight, I rerouted to Hungary, where a few days turned into a couple of weeks.
Despite half of my trip being unplanned, and the two halves being complete contrasts of one another, it was the most incredible, culturally comprehensive, educational month of my life and I’m so grateful for that. My eyes were peeled wide open and I came to find that once your soul encounters experiences such as these, you are transformed and enlightened indefinitely.
If you’re one of several people who has seen me since I returned home and upon asking me how my trip was received the generic answer of, “it was good! I’m still processing it…” I owe you a real answer. I apologize. It was good and I was still processing it, but I was also exhausted and kind of hit the ground running back in the U.S.
Furthermore, I owe a real answer to the people who supported and encouraged me going on my mission trip because without them, I never went. And perhaps most importantly, to the people I met, who’s lives I was moved by and who’s stories deserved to be told, I owe an array of significant accounts.
As you can see, there was lots of traveling and numerous adventures. Therefore, I decided the best way to tell the stories would be by sharing a bit of each journey individually in a semi-chronological little series.
The mission trip alone includes so many stories in itself and I’m going to start there. Of course, I hope you all read along, but more importantly with all that is going on in the world, my biggest wish is that you will be able to not just empathize, but ultimately identify with these people who’s lives, so vastly different than ours, are also much the same.
To help provide a visual to go along with my next post, below is a little video I put together from the small bit of footage I have primarily from the Nea Kavala refugee camp in Polykastro, Greece.
For reference, Nea Kavala was built on an abandoned airfield with 300-400 shipping containers serving as “homes” to individuals and families living in the camp. The containers were an upgrade made in October from tents, which prevented the camp from being shut down for otherwise unsuitable and unsustainable living conditions during the cold winter. Although at a premium, some electricity and running water is also now available within the camp. With living conditions still far from fathomable for many of us, this version of the camp is considered "good" in comparison to many others. Despite it all, the people we met were kind, welcoming and an unbelievably incredible example of resiliency in the face of extreme adversity.