"For us the shipment was a huge blessing – for us, for the community, for the church!" Magda Cini explains as we are getting ready to take some Christmas parcels to families in her village. Magda is the pastor of the Nazarene church in Ţigmandru, a small village in the Transylvania region of Romania, and has started a number of projects in the community.

One of them is a mothers-and-babies club – Magda has been trained in baby massage and is using this skill along with her experience in parenting to meet a great need in this community – and we are planning to visit several of the families that are part of this program.

This year’s shipment for Romania and Bulgaria included a total of 640 Christmas parcels and 611 boxes with aid goods. Each selected family with a small baby will receive one Christmas parcel – a box full of food supplies and hygiene articles that none of the families can afford on their own – and a baby blanket made by members and friends of a Nazarene church in Germany.

“These are so beautiful!” Magda exclaims when we unpack the blankets, “When I had my babies I didn’t have such nice blankets for them!”

The first family we visit is a couple with two children who live together in one tiny room – just big enough to fit a bed and a stove. The older son is two years old, the mother herself is only 15.

“Many girls here marry at a very young age – usually because they are trying to escape a bad situation at home,” we are told. Marriage is the only option for most women in this area, though it hardly serves to make their lives much easier. There are few prospects for positive change and little hope for an escape from poverty. Some of the families are so embarrassed about their poverty that they have asked not to be visited.

Almost every home we visit is similar: a tiny room, totally over-heated – in December there’s still enough firewood, though it may not last the winter – with a young mother, often herself only a child, and a timid toddler who gazes at us with shy curiosity.

“These are children that [never saw toys before],” Magda says. When the children come to the club with their mothers, they can choose from a variety of toys appropriate to their age, and play as much as they like. “They cry when they have to leave.”

They are also children that have never seen chocolate or gummi bears before. Little Fetiţa excitedly grabs a chocolate bar and sticks it into her mouth, wrapper and all. Two-year-old Janoș stares a little skeptically at the heap of gummi bears on the chair before he carefully selects one and starts sucking it with curiosity.

Their mothers are more grateful for the parcels’ less sugary contents – rice, pasta, coffee, shampoo, hand lotion and other good things considered “luxury items” in this poor community. In Ţigmandru, only two or three of the men have a permanent job. The others work on the fields in the summer and cut wood in the forest in winter, but their income is barely sufficient for the basic necessities of life. Over the past years, Magda has started several income generating workshops with the women – like sewing and gardening – and is hoping to start more, in order to enable the families to earn some extra income. One of her dreams is to establish a bakery.

Some of the families in Ţigmandru are receiving Christmas parcels for the second year now.

“When Fetiţa’s family got a package last year for the first time, they were really shocked that they would receive such a wonderful package! They were so excited,” Magda remembers. Fetiţa’s father is one of the only men here who has a proper job. Nevertheless, his income is so low that while the family can afford electricity and firewood, there is no money for special food items like chocolate or coffee, not even for milk or butter. “They’re very nice packages – very useful. The families like everything that’s in the package. To all of us it’s a huge blessing!”

When we leave, we feel the most blessed: blessed with sincere gratitude that we are asked to convey to all contributors of the Christmas shipment in Germany, blessed with a thousand impressions that remind us of our own reasons to feel grateful, blessed with the knowledge of having been allowed to be a blessing to others.