Onno Weststrate – Netherlands

I had now been working for Turbocam for a number of years and was visiting customers mostly in Western Europe. Around 2006, Marian Noronha (the president of Turbocam) and I started to talk about how we could make more impact in Eastern Europe. We wanted to create jobs rather than just sending aid. I mentioned in my first blog that God had started to speak to me back in the ’90s about Eastern Europe and Romania was one of the nations on my list even then!

Something had started to come together in my heart and so not long after we had started talking and praying about it, I came into contact with somebody from one of our family of churches who happened to have a small machine shop in Cluj Napoca, the second biggest city in Romania. We both felt that it was time for us to start exploring this connection. I felt a little like Nehemiah as we made our first trip to Cluj back in 2006 to visit this machine shop. It was an interesting first exposure to a manufacturing site in a former communist country. Travelling around, I could still feel the atmosphere from the communist era – grey buildings, apartment blocks that all looked the same and many factories that were abandoned. But the people we met were friendly and the young generation were eager to see change, although many of them were still leaving Romania to go and work abroad as they saw no possibilities to raise a family in the current climate. This migration of the young only served to strengthen our conviction that this was the place where God wanted us to build a company.

After evaluating the offer that was presented to us to take over the little machine shop, we decided that it was better for us to start from scratch – to build a business based upon our values rather than taking over an existing company. We needed a local believer with good character and managerial skills who would be able to do that. I realised that starting a company in a country like Romania was not a small thing and we needed God to show us the way forward. Where would we find this man? We started to ask around and make more connections locally as well as back home in the Netherlands. And then, I came into contact with Marco, a skilled machinist who was already working with 5-axis mills in a company in the Netherlands and was about to marry a Dutch girl who had a ministry in Tirgu Mures, about 2 hours drive from Cluj. He was willing to move to Romania with her, provided that he could continue to do the job that he was enjoying so much – milling!

This was not a coincidence; clearly God was at work here, making a way for us. But we were still short of a Romanian manager and so I made a few trips to Tirgu Mures trying to find one. Eventually we found a guy who was suited for the position but then at the last minute he changed his mind and did not accept the position that we offered him.

Our faith and our patience was for sure tested during this time. Lord, what do we do now?