There are no kangaroos in Austria

The other day while we were in Linz we were given some background information on the country of Austria. The man that gave us this information was our first Evangelical Christian Austrian we had met. His name is Martin. Anyways, I thought this information would be useful in understanding the sort of challenges my team will come up against during these 16 months.

Austria Today
-Austria has about 8.2 million people and is smaller than the state of Tennesee.
-71% of the people are Roman Catholic (20 years ago it was over 90%)
-The 2nd largest religion is Islam with about 350,00 people
-There has been major growth in cults and esoteric groups
-Nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce
-They are considered "World Champions" in alcholism and suicide
-4th richest country in Euroupe. 7th or 8th in the world

Evangelical Churches in Austria
-Today there are around 200 evangelical churches
-0.3%-0.4% of the population are evangelical, roughly 30,000 (twice as many as 20 years ago)
-The average church has around 30 members
-It is very rare to find Austrians in full-time Christian service
-In some rural areas evangelicals are still seen as a cult

Please continue to be praying for the people of Austria. Pray that they would come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and find all of their hope in the everlasing God! Pray that my team would be a light in a dark place as we spread the fragrance of Christ everywhere we go.

Gruss Gott!

(Title meaning "Greet God," although Austrians who say that usually aren't greeting God, they're just greeting you!)

Well hello one and all! I'm finishing up my second week in Austria and man oh man I am LOVING it here. Let me give you a re-cap of my week so far.

Monday we went into Vienna and signed up for our language courses and bought our books. I'm very excited to be taking the afternoon course instead of the morning. We start classes February 9th. It will be very nice to have a more structured schedule. After signing up for classes the girls went to IKEA to buy some things to make our living room area more enjoyable. We got some really great deals and had a lot of fun picking things out.
Tuesday we worked on visas. Please be praying for our team when it comes to visas. It is really going to take a miracle for us to get the kind of visa that we need. We've done everything in our power to be completely prepared for this, now we're just waiting on God to do the rest!
Wednesday we visited the city of Linz. This is a beautiful and historic city in Austria that was very enjoyable to explore. We visited another OM base in Linz and got to meet more missionaries. It's interesting that we've only met ONE actual Christian Austrian since being here. Everyone has been from other countries for the most part. Linz is an amazing city and I hope to visit there again.
Thursday and Friday we spent in different sorts of ministry opportunities. While some of the girls on my team stayed home and cooked, cleaned, and sewed curtains, I joined the guys in helping with some of the building of a church in Vienna. I got my hands dirty, worked up a sweat, and did some heavy lifting. I definitely felt good about working with my hands and doing it unto the Lord!

The rest of this weekend will be pretty free which I'm very excited about. I'll be able to sleep in tomorrow for the first time since arriving here! I'm looking forward to it.

Prayer points!
Please pray for us as we apply for visas. We found out just the other day that to receive a visa in Austria you need to have Austrian insurance. This was not in our budget and was a very unexpected extra $740 that we needed to quickly scrape together. Some of my teammates are not sure how they are going to make up the rest of that money for the rest of the time here. Please pray that God would provide for everyone in a glorifying way.

God bless you one and all!

Oh, and here's my photos. Enjoy! There's multiple pages, so make sure you check out each one.
http://s692.photobucket.com/albums/vv283/LindyinAustria/?start=0

Let's get oriented!

I have officially been located in the great land of Austria for 1 whole week! I definitely can't believe it. I've found that I seem to say out loud "I live in Austria" at least once a day. I need a reminder here and there.

Since I'm sure all of you lovely people out there are dedicated to reading my blog, I should probably make sure I bring you up to speed on some pretty important details. First we'll start with this little thing called OM. Operation Mobilization (OM) is a full time ministry that has a base here in Austria. They are specifically called OM EAST which stands for EurAsia Support Team. Here's part of their vision "We want to see God glorified in Eurasia, especially in former communist countries. We focus on serving and strengthening the Church, bringing hope to forgotten peoples and making their needs known." The base that we are affiliated with specifically deals with editing, creating, and shipping Christian literature and multimedia to these forgotten peoples. My team is actually living in 2 of the flats that OM own and we will be working with them pretty closely. So far we have just fellowshipped with the families here and they are really amazing. They are from all over the world, some from Switzerland, England, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and America. They have really taught us a lot and will be an amazing support of seasoned missionaries. They really know what it is like to be out on the field. If you want to find out more about OM you can check out there website http://www.east.om.org/ .

Life has been crazy but lots of fun the last few days. Some highlights are...

• Trying new foods of all kinds, Wiener Schnitzel, kabobs, moose, Norweigan goat cheese, Mongolian food.


• Going to a progressive dinner (Having each course at a different person's house)


• Our "Great Adventure" in Vienna where we were given 10 addresses and told to find where all of them were using public transportation and maps


• Went to an international church service at the Vienna Christian Center


• Marinated in an authentic Finnish sauna


• Got cell phones!

Those are all small tid bits of what life has been like. Things are really good and I'm definitely enjoying myself here in Austria.

When I say I'll be putting pictures up soon, I really do mean it this time. It will be soon!

Also, just letting you know, you don't have to have a blog to comment on my posts. I'd LOVE to hear from people. Please give me any and all feed back!

Until next time...

You say toemaytoe, I say toemahtoe.

Here are some interesting differences about Austria I wanted to share.

• The washing machine cycle is at least one hour in length
• You may not throw all of your trash into the same bin. They sort it before they put it out to be collected. If you don't, you will be fined!
• At 12:15 pm on Saturday afternoons an alarm sounds off in the town announcing the start of the weekend. You may not be loud (mow your lawn, play loud music, use power tools) until Monday morning.
• Many stores close during lunch time (from 12-2)
• They write the date differently. They put the day first, month second, and then the year.
• All of the fridges are quite small. They grocery shop often and keep less food in the house
• You never wear shoes in the house
• Most of the cars here are stick shift
• If you are sitting in a public place, for example a doctor's office, and someone enters the building, they will say a greeting directed to everyone and all will respond back to him.
• One of the missionaries here goes to a church that is the only Evangelical church for 40 km!
• The toilets don't have a handle to flush but a big button on top to push.

I hope you enjoyed some of those fun facts. I'm sure I'll be learning more of them as time goes on. I'll be posting photos and more stories very soon!

Austria!

Hey everyone! You all need a re-cap of what has happened since leaving Pennsylvania, so I will do my best to fill you in.

I left January 15th and headed to Minneapolis. It was so refreshing to be around old friends. They really encouraged me and were the right people for me to be around in my hours leading up to my big departure. It was very cold there, -20 at least!

I left Saturday January 17th at 7:45 and flew to Amsterdam with 3 of my teammates. The flight was long and we didn't get very much sleep. We arrived in Amsterdam and discovered that something went wrong with me and my one other teammates tickets. So, the other two went on to Vienna, while me and my friend Jake were stuck in Amsterdam. They felt really bad that they couldn't let me on the flight, so they gave me a new ticket and compensation of 250 euros and a calling card. The flight that they booked for us had a layover in Paris and then went to Vienna from there. I was definitely starting to feel some culture shock as the people and flight attendants on these flights didn't speak very much English. We arrived in Vienna safe and sound Sunday night and were greeted by all of our team except one, that showed up later that night.

So far this week we're mainly doing orientation. We've been learning a lot about what this internship will look like, meeting the other missionaries that are also here working with OM (Operation Mobilization, the organization whose base we're living on), and getting to know Vienna. The city is absolutely beautiful and I'm really looking forward to seeing more.

Some things that you can be in prayer about :

• My wallet was stolen the very first night out in Vienna. I had a lot of important things and cash in there. Pray that God will miraculously have it put into the right hands and eventually make it's way back to me.
• Jet lag! We all still have it and can't seem to make it any better!
• Logistics to figure out. There are a lot of details to cover with money and housing. Pray that we would be understanding and willing to take advice and guidance.
• The language! Pray that we learn German quickly and easily. We start language courses the second week of February. Until then, we could use some prayer for our stumbly conversations.

I'll fill you in more as things come. I have lots of pictures as well but haven't uploaded them yet. Until next time.....