Cold Beetroot Soup and Important Conversations
- vineandbranch73
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
When Inga returned she was carrying two bouquets of flowers from her flower garden. Her mother sells flowers in the Riga market. One bouquet was for our room and one was to lay on my father’s grave. We had an emotional moment. She didn’t know how sick he was until a week before he died and didn’t get to come to the funeral. Somehow, no one kept her informed and I think losing him so suddenly has made it harder for her to have closure. I took a picture of her with the flowers to put at the grave and pressed the flowers between paper next to Psalm 91:11, Daddy’s life verse. I have a friend that can put them and the picture into resin.
We headed to the fabulous Riga market. I have never seen a market so large – much bigger than even Cleveland’s West-Side market. Part of it was under canopies, some in tiny open shops in a row and some under several gigantic hangers. Those were Russian hangers for military airplanes during the occupation not that many years ago. Latvia has only been out from under Soviet rule for 33 years. Some people, including Inga, do not have refrigerators. Others with families might have very small ones. The poor people shop at the market. The more wealthy at grocery stores.
The only “souvenir” I purchased in Latvia, besides some candy at the airport, was some very sweet strawberries and large raspberries. They were so delicious and we ate them the next two days. We walked down Riga’s streets past the tall buildings painted or plastered with pastel colors – some are very historic and hundreds of years old. We passed a sleeping homeless man. After the market, we went to a lovely authentic Latvian restaurant. Another homeless man was taking food off the plates in the dirty dish rack.There I had my first cold beetroot soup. I was in LOVE! I wish I could eat it nearly every day! Jordan laughs about him being offered it when he visited Latvia as a child. He said, “It had three strikes against it! It was cold. It was pink. And it had beets in it. But I liked it!”
Then, Inga took us to a coffee shop with Latvian milkshakes. They use slightly tart plum juice in their ice cream, which gives a lovely balance to the sweetness. There at the coffee shop, we shared deeply and began to understand and get to know each other more and began to see through a glass darkly how we might come together in God’s work there. Inga is used to doing a lot with almost nothing that it is hard on her to receive funds sometimes. Her recent apartment for example was heated only with wood. It had an unsafe chimney and she had six buckets catching water from the leaking roof.
She is soon going to move up north next to the border of Estonia. It is an open border and she is looking forward to starting home groups in yet another country. She did finally admit that it costs money to start these new groups, translating and printing in yet another language, traveling, etc. She has translated all of my father’s books into Latvian and Russian but has almost none left for distribution and people are asking for copies. Funding is needed for reprints. (See pics of a worn copy of “The Law and You” in Latvian.) In the early days of the CTO home groups, people would hand copy my father’s letters. Now they make copies for every individual in the 365+ home groups. It was a very important meeting. We had asked Inga not to “overbook” us with activity so that there would be time for these necessary conversations. The train station was next. We caught one of their new, modern trains but enjoyed watching the Russian built trains passing us. As the Latvian countryside flew by, we had interesting conversations about the political situation in that part of the world. We got to bed by 10 pm and I slept without a worry about a boogie-man in the bushes.
