Michael Waskosky
Sarajevo, Bosnia
September 2006
Hi everyone,
I am greeting you from rainy Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. (We have had rain on and off for the last week.) I got quite wet once because I did not have an umbrella yet, and I am coming down with a cold so please pray that I get healed and that I recuperate well.
During our first week, my partner Cory and I spent time getting adjusted, learning to live here, and moving into our second floor apartment. Since we switched so many time zones from Minnesota to Bosnia, we had a lot of jet lag from which to recuperate. Sarajevo is an interesting city with Olympic buildings; people sized chess pieces at a park, graffiti on walls, small shops, signs written in two alphabets, a Turkish market, and lots of remnants of war such as bullet holes in the walls of apartment buildings.
The people here speak Bosnian. We are taking Bosnian class on Mondays and Thursdays from 4:30-6:00 pm. Learning an Eastern European language with unusual combinations of consonants can be tough. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:30-9:00 pm we teach conversational English. Teaching is challenging but good. One student named A(I will not tell you his name on the internet) has had a lot of questions about the Christian faith so I brought him two books in Bosnian. They were written by S. Masood. The one title is Into the Light (A Young Muslim’s search for truth) and the other is Why follow Jesus? He said he could not take them to read them. But, thank the Lord, S(name) did on Tuesday the 19th; she was also very interested so maybe some good will come from it (Just this last class though this last Thursday the 21st she gave them back, I do not know why, so please keep praying for her). I have been praying for A(name) that God would give him dreams and visions, and I have now started to include S(name) in these prayers. (God oftentimes speaks powerfully to Muslims in their dreams and visions.)
This whole month the OM (Operation Mobilization) team here in Bosnia is praying every day and fasting once a week to know where to start a new church, and the Lord has told them to start one in Dobrina. We may be involved in the work of planting a new church in Dobrina. Pray for Travis, our internship supervisor, his wife Stacy, and their six month old son Noah; they just got back to Bosnia and are getting over jet lag and settling in again. Cory and I are excited to get to know them better and learn from them as we develop into ministry.
Thank you for your prayer support. Keep praying that we could shine forth with love and spread light into darkness, and also pray because we are in a spiritual battle here in Bosnia and we are on the front lines. May the Lord help us to learn from Him and to relate to the Bosnians with genuine concern, helping them to understand just how good the Good News of Jesus really is!
In Him,
Michael
PS. You can visit either my site of my partners site to see pictures
http://www.corysjourney.com/
http://www.michaelwaskosky.com/