Ahh...back in Oxford, after three weeks in Macedonia. And guess what? So far, based on the four hours of daylight I have thus far experienced, it isn't a hard transition! It is a beautiful, sunny day with blue sky, and while some of my comrades have commented upon the heat, 26 degrees celsius is NOTHING compared to 40, even when you do take England's relatively high humidity into account (yes, I can now appreciate temperatures in centigrade!). I plan to spend my next few English days getting some odds and ends completed, meeting up with people, maybe even making a quick get-away to the Lake District; but also on the list is trying to come to grips with my experience in Macedonia these past three weeks. As anticipated, it was remarkable--and I do not use that word flippantly. I have seen God produce such fruit in myself and others... Again, it's hard to put all the emotions into words, but--for the sake of posterity, if nothing else--I will try.
Stepping onto the tarmac of Skopje Alexander the Great International Airport, I wondered what the heck I was doing there. The first thing was the heat. The Oxford I had left was in the hardly balmy upper sixties (I was still thinking in Fahrenheit at the time); here it was in the mid-nineties--and this was at night!
Secondly, while the airport and the nice, if rather silent, passport control officials looked the same (maybe they do all over the world, now that I think about it...), everything else seemed fearfully unfamiliar. Kosta and Nada, the founders of the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture, were not even in the country, and I would be met by Roska, with whom I would be staying. I had met her, I'm sure, fleetingly in March, but amidst the swirl of faces that paraded by during that week I must confess I didn't remember her. We had corresponded via Facebook, and even had a near-collision in Granada a few weeks ago (oh yes, I haven't blogged about that yet, sorry!), but I was not at all comfortable in my ability to recognize her face. Then, to make my anxiety even more acute, my bag was just about the last to be offloaded. The very nice Macedonian man who had been making passes at me the entire flight (good-naturedly, and not at all in a creepy way) had long-since departed, and I was having frantic flashbacks of my luggage-less Paris existence. When my brown Pierre Cardin suitcase appeared through the plastic flaps, I had already started upon the tried-and-true bargain-with-God-method of prayer. I snatched it up--as well as one can snatch a sixty-pound bag of that size--and rushed the hundred feet outside (benefits of a small airport), hoping against hope that my hitherto untried memory for faces would prevail.
Thankfully, it didn't need to. (more to come)
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