By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Scott Matthews wants to go to Romania, a 4,000-mile journey partly inspired by 1,500 pounds of generic soup starter mix.

Matthews is a cook at the Hope Haven Gospel Mission. The soup – dehydrated pea pebbles and a mix of tan, orange and gray pellets stacked in the basement – isn’t something he would serve to the homeless and poor who congregate two or three times a day for free meals at the mission.

“It was designed to be nutritious, not necessarily pretty or what we would consider filling,” said the Rev. John Robbins. But added to a slice of bread – a loaf sells for a U.S. nickel in Romania – it’s enough for a meal for the extremely poor in Romania. And maybe the message that follows would be enough to convert someone to the Baptist church.

That’s the broader mission.

The more immediate one: raising $7,000 so Matthews, Robbins and at least three others can fly half a world away to serve food, patch buildings and embark on horse-drawn carriage evangelical missions into the countryside for 30 days.

The soup will make the trip first by container ship. The people will go second, they hope, in early fall.

To raise money, there are ideas for candle and candy bar sales, a car wash and a block party. Matthews, a former roadie, says he would love to gather bands for a charity concert, something clean but rocking.

“Being Christian, you can have fun too. It’s not always, Thus sayeth the Lord,'” he said.

Matthews borrowed English-to-Romanian and “Romn-to-Englez” dictionaries last week to start learning basics like “hello” and “goodbye.” A student in Hope Haven’s intensive Bible-study program, Matthews lives in the five-story building on the corner of Lincoln and Cedar streets.

“I wasn’t always a good guy,” he said. He believes going to Romania is a chance to do good.

Several years ago Robbins became pastor of a Florida church after its leader left for Romania to do mission work. Robbins and his wife visited the country in 2001 and brought back pictures and stories.

That former Florida pastor and others teach at the Faith Bible College outside of Iasi, Romania, in a converted slaughterhouse. The college teaches local men to become Baptist pastors of small churches set up there by missionaries.

Robbins said he always intended to go back one day. The soup mix, which he spotted two weeks ago at the Good Shepherd Food Bank, “started the whole issue in our minds again.”

Villages near Iasi (pronounced “yosh”) are predominately farming communities, he said. The dominant religion is Orthodox, similar to Greek Orthodox.

Families often live in rough shacks, and “the folks that live in the villages, generally they’ll eat probably once a day, if they have that much money. If they don’t, they won’t eat,” Robbins said.

Since announcing the trip, the group’s gotten mixed reaction among soup kitchen regulars. One man asked why they were going, and reminded Matthews, “We need help here.”

“They’re so spoiled here,” said Diana Charest, who graduated from Hope Haven’s Bible study and did missions in New York and Boston. She said she feels a lot of compassion for others.

As Robbins explains it: “We’re going to do for somebody who has nothing the same thing we’re doing for you right now.”