Szombat (Saturday)

Hotel Mercure,
near Budapest-Deli station

A first installment from the road, but the main content will have to get churned out once I"m back in England, and even then I imagine it"ll take a few weeks to get typed up.

This keyboard is a bit confusing, and I can"t work out the system for apostrophes, and the Z and Y keys actually type the opposite to what they say...

So I+ll keep it short, and get out into the chilly sunshine to see some of Budapest itself (the bits beyond the nearest supermarket, at least).

Five ways that God showed up on my trip to Devecser and Kolontar, bearing in mind how little was sorted out in advance.

1. Getting to stay at the OM mission base in Erd that first night, and for other people to sort of accidentally be there (sorting out paperwork for second hand cars they"d just bought) and the way they were around to pray me out the next morning. Istvan, a big St Nicholas/Falstaff of a man, grabbed me by each shoulder and prayed in Hungarian, then Marcel in Dutch (I even figured out he was praying for my wife and children back home, which really moved me). Great camerarderie.

2. Providing Gagarin, a guy who works for the Mayor's office (found that apostrophe now!) in Devecser, the only English speaker they had, and the way he offered to give me a place to stay, how he and his girlfriend Marianna took me under their wing, took me for dinner, showed me the public meeting in the town hall...

3. ...which just happened to be on that night. And how He gave me a chance to speak to the people there and declare God's hope and justice for that place, and how He sorted out translators for me (and how later the next day I heard from a student at the high school how she'd seen it on television...)

4. How he showed me someone at the local elementary school (actually, that was a word through Attila, team leader at the OM base, to seek out the local school as a route in) who spoke English and then gave me a chance the following day to meet the English teacher at the high school (Kate) who just happened to be on a free when I turned up, unannounced, which led to a chance to meet a couple of students, Boggy and Viktoria, who mostly giggled.

5. Getting to meet the local Roman Catholic priest, Miklos Mold, who hadn't been there the day before (but his mother, it turned out, had tried to explain that to me at the time, with gestures and expressions), and in a strange hybrid of German, Dutch and Italian we managed to talk about why I'd come, and how God gave me the courage to lay hands on him and pray for him.

More later. The Hotel Mercure is queasily over heated and I need to sort out some water pronto.