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1. Our work with our main Romanian partners, Hannah, continues very positively. We continue to make regular financial transfers to them, to support their core funding, conference program, and special projects.

2. The big news this year of course, is that Romania successfully joined the European Union in January 2007. This was completely unimaginable at the time of our first involvement with the country in April 1990. I firmly believe that this will provide a major positive impetus to the development of Romanian society. However, this by no means suggests our work is over! In fact, we find ourselves well placed to respond to the needs of the moment:

· Inevitably in times of economic development, certain groups get left behind, and it is our privilege to be able to carry on supporting the poor and other vulnerable groups, through Hannah.

· The massive societal changes, involving as they do whole changes to ways of thinking, give our Student Conferences a heightened relevance (see below).

· There is more focus on the situation of the Roma community. We continue to support a girl via the work of a rural Baptist Church as before (see below).

3. We continue to produce monthly prayer and information letters to our supporters in the UK, both by post and email.

4. The conference program has been excellent during the reporting year.

· The conferences are an opportunity to engage with Romanian young people, mostly those from an Orthodox background. The aim is to provoke discussion and reflection on how the many changes in Romanian society will impact on their lives and ways of thinking. We held a one-day conference in April 07, and a full conference in August 07. The theme this year was “Relationships”. The accommodation was rural and attractive, but rather restricting on numbers. Nevertheless, we were able to welcome over 20 students on each occasion, with a higher proportion new participants than usual – many having been recommended by our regulars.

· The April conference included participants from the Roma community and from the Republic of Moldova.

· The academic year in Romania is much more pressured than formerly, and it is therefore more difficult to plan conferences to fall at the best times of the year.

· Another (positive) challenge has been to keep both the material and the presentation fresh, for an ever more sophisticated audience. Nevertheless, feedback from each of these events has been very positive indeed, and we feel that these were among the best conferences yet, with an absolutely superb team combining a wide gamut of experience.

· The program will continue through the next reporting year, and we continue to make efforts to keep in touch with our students past and present throughout the year. For example, we established a wiki after the summer conference, to which many students uploaded contributions. I have redesigned our Romanian website, and we have tried using blogs and on-line response tools (with limited success).

· Most encouragingly of all, we have discovered that our conferences have provoked numerous informal discussions among the participants, along the lines of our themes. There is no shortage of people who would like to come to the conferences, including from other parts of Romania. Many of the participants said they would invite their friends next time, and indeed, considered this to be the most appropriate way of publicising the conferences.

· However, we also have a potentially powerful link with the schools system. Romanian teachers are encouraged to provide extra-curricular activities for their students, and one accepted way is to refer them to our conferences: indeed we have already received participants via this route.

· We were amazed and encouraged in equal measure this year to discover that a participant at our Summer Conference of five years ago, had been inspired directly by that experience to establish her own NGO in Romania!

5. We continue our involvement with the Roma community via our links with “Hope” Baptist Church.

· We continue to receive support for the Roma girl whom we have been sponsoring through a vocational bakery course. She qualified after two years this summer with a diploma.

· Meanwhile, she is about to start in a role as a teaching assistant for Roma children in the village State school.

· Our hope is that this will enable her to interact positively with mainstream society (extremely rare for the marginalised Roma community in Romania), and become a role model for her peers.

6. We look forward to another exciting year in 2007/8.