Doing service in Croatia

 We can't go to Croatia right now.  We can't even go to the other major cities in Slovenia.  We are restricted due to COVID.  But I wanted to share what is happening in Croatia.

First, there was an earthquake in Croatia last December 29, in a town near the border with Bosnia & Herzogovina.  It caused a lot of damage and I saw an interview with the mayor who said that half the buildings in the downtown area were damaged too much to enter.  OK, and the lead-in is that the church sends relief to this kind of event.  Major quantities of relief goods - food, industrial water purification equipment, tents (not so helpful this time of year), blankets, hygiene kits, clothing, and so on.  The missionaries in Croatia have also been part of that effort and they have taken turns going down and working with our relief teams, the Red Cross and Catholic Charities to clear the rubble and get people cared for.  The missionaries provide basic grunt-labor in clearing things back so they can be re-built.

A photo one of the missionaries sent back, showing the damage they are helping to clear.

This photo brought back to me what happened to us in Zagreb last March.  Those triangular cracks are the same as what we had in the mission home, although worse than we had.  I looked out the windows in the mission home and saw the houses across the street where roof tiles cascaded off the roof and landed in heaps of rubble at the sides of the buildings.  Chimneys broke off and slid down and over the edge, bringing more roof tiles with them.  Some of them landed on cars and crushed them flat.

People here have often asked us if it's true that in America we build houses with wood.  They look like they expect to hear crazy when they ask it.  They are firmly convinced that bricks are better, and in many ways they are, but not if there are earthquakes.

Second, our missionaries went out to the camps where the thousands of displaced people were living.  The government brought in little, white containers (shipping containers?) for them to live in, and very few outside people go into the camps.  The missionaries shared stories of taking hygiene kits to distribute to all the residents and having people break down in tears, just to see a helping face.  Apparently the containers provide for basic needs, but no more.  It has been a cold winter, too, which makes it much worse.  I thought the missionaries were going to send us a photo of the little, white containers, but I haven't seen them, yet.

So, we are very grateful to be living in a nice cozy apartment in Maribor.