Onno Westrate – Netherlands

We had hit a roadblock (part #6).

Despite all the progress in developing our business plan, we had no Romanian manager and we really needed one. Prayer started and the request went out again to our local contacts to see if they could recommend somebody. By now we had good connections with Daniel Malutan who was previously connected to the machine shop that we looked at in Cluj. Following our request, Daniel sent out a man from his church to go and visit a church in Tirgu Mures and asked around for somebody that they could recommend. 

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At the end of a church service this man stood up and told the church that an American Christian company was looking for a manager who could set up a machine shop in Tirgu Mures. The guest speaker in that church service – a man by the name of Sorin Ignat – heard this message and knew it was for him and that he needed to respond to this call.

He was managing a large company in Tarnaveni at that time, located about 1 hour from Tirgu Mures. This company was previously an old government-owned business and Sorin had the task of closing it down and selling all the assets which ultimately meant that he would be out of job at some point in the near future! Sorin got in touch with us and we agreed to meet in Budapest, Hungary. It was a cold winter day in December 2007 and as I arrived at my hotel I got the message that he was delayed due to an accident he had on the way to Budapest. His car slipped off the road due to icy conditions and was a total loss. Not giving up, he asked his friend Vasile (a person you will hear more of in a later blog) to come with another car and to bring him and his wife to Budapest. 

Finally, Sorin arrived and after our first introduction we agreed to meet again with Marian Noronha, the president of Turbocam, in January at Amsterdam Schiphol airport – and so we did.

We met, discussed, prayed and agreed to start setting up a new Turbocam company in Tirgu Mures Romania under Sorin’s leadership. We all felt that God had been orchestrating everything in an amazing way!

In spring 2008 we sent our first cnc machinist, Marco, Gerda, his wife  and our first local Romanian engineer, Pal Sarosi (who lived in the same village as Marco and Gerda) to our company in India for training. It is worth mentioning at this point that as we grew in size over time, Pal Sarosi became our biggest recruiter – from his little village, Curteni he was able to find some great people who subsequently joined us and many of them are still working with us now.

Well, we were on our way and slowly things were coming together.