Paul Coles, Youthworkerish type guy. Present location: Targu Mures, Romania. Married to an amazing girl named Fiona. I'm on a JOURNEY and have no idea where I'll end up other than in the hands of God.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

The Coles drop-in centre... I mean house.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about having some guys over once a week to hang out and play a bit of Xbox. Well this is a continuation of that story. Thanks to The Edge we also have table tennis so our house is becoming a bit of a drop in centre. The table is in our garage which as you maybe can see is incredibly dusty, and cold at night, but it does the trick.

It has been great to have this table because it and football are the only sports the kids really play growing up in the orphanages so some of them are really good at it.

This is Bobo and some of the group hanging out last Monday night when Stuart was here. Stuart is a bit of a ping pong shark himself. He played a few of the kids and pulled out some of his tenacious old school moves to impress the onlookers.
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The Underground















A few weeks ago we started aThursday night youth event for the teenagers from the orphanages that go to school in TarguMures. It has been a great experience so far. We expected about 40 kids to come and have had at least 60 each night.

The night is kind of like Beyond the Edge (for those of you from the Hinch) but the young people actually want to play the games... and I don't get sweets thrown at me when I'm talking... which is always a good thing.















These pictures are of us playing the Q-tip game (or the cotton bud game - depending on what side of the pond you are from). This is always a good one to get people involved and laughing.

We are using the basment of a Church, which they have graciously let us use. It's a great space but it has a tile floor and high masionary walls so it has about a 10 echo which makes for a extremely lound night. But it's fun.

We are also walking through the life of Jesus for the next several weeks. I hope they will meet the real person that walked our streets, laughed with us, cried with us, loved us, served us and died for us so we can have so much more than this tiny planet. Please pray that we all get to know Him better along this journey.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

A first in Romania.

Last night I had 8 of the teenage guys that live with LOC over for some chillin time. Thanks to Aidan and Niall I am now the proud owner of an XBox and 3 games (Thanks very much by the way). So we all played Burnout Revenge and Pro Evo 4 for a couple of hours. They absolutely loved it but the thing that really surprised me was that none of them had even heard of the XBox. They new about the Playstation but had never played one of those either.

My friend Emi and I were laughing so hard watching them try to figure out how to use the controler. It might as well have been a F16 fighter plane for all they were concerned. In Burnout they kept on forgetting to press the accelerator and they ran into every wall possible. But after a few games they got the hang of it and had a brilliant time. Now they can't wait to play it again.

We are going to be meeting with these guys and a few others every Tuesday night to hang out and do a cell group type thing. I hope that as I get to know them better we will have a lot of fun together and also help, encourage and challenge each other.

Please pray that my Romanian gets better... right now I am ectremely limited in my conversation topics. But at least they get to laugh at me every time I try to say something.