Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!!!

We were getting ready to go to bed at 10pm tonight, and we looked out the window...this is what we saw...How beautiful!!!

Inroads...

HI,
We're back in Kiev and back to work. We've spent some time at the U lately helping students with their English. It's such a big job learning another language that it's no wonder that those people who can afford to hire a native speaker of the target language to be a nanny for their children.
For the students we're helping it's just another subject and I don't envy them, just as they probably don't envy us as we continue to trudge through Ukrainian. We could very much use your prayers for our ability and determination to keep up the pace. (Russian is still a very easy default settting so it's difficult to force yourself to say some small thing in Ukrainian that you understand, only to be answered in Ukrainian with words you don't understand.)
Also remember the students and teachers we have contact with. We want to be useful there.

Well, I guess a while back I said I'd talk about Ski Ministry. NOW, before you say, "Yeah, right!" let me tell you that Mount Kiev (ok, it's not a 'mount' exactly, but Bunny Hill Kiev just sounds unkind) is located about 10 minutes away by public transportation. 10 runs cost a whopping $3.65 by today's exchange rate. If you read the letter I wrote about meeting Taya, it was there on the slope that we met.
This week I rode the t-bar with Yura who invited me to go to the sauna with him and his three friends. He said he'd call this Monday to set up the place near a subway station to meet them as they drove there. In the attempt to make contact this is one that I happen to enjoy the most and also seems pretty effective since, once you get on the lift with someone, their pretty much forced to talk to you for the next 3 minutes that it takes to get up the hill.

So there's that. Thanks for reading. We're encouraged to see our 'hits-counter' keeping track of our readers and are glad you're reading along.

It was a good week

We just got back from a trip to Moscow for meetings and for getting our Ukrainian Visas. As Jerry said earlier, we got our visas!!! That is great news.

It was an extra special time in Moscow because some of our team mates from our last 2 years were also in Moscow. We were able to spend time with the Mason family and the Hecock family. Although there were 10 of us in the guest flat, we had such fun with the kiddies and their parents. It has been a while since we have seen them and fellowshipped with them.

During the day Jerry was in meetings and I had fun helping cook meals for the leadership team. There is a saying…”many hands make light work”. I had a good time laughing and solving the world’s problems together with Lisa and Shelly.

Everyone got together one night to celebrate JB’s 30th birthday party. It was so good to get together with the Crouches, Merrills, Volstads, Diane, Eliel, Masons, and Hecocks and spend an evening enjoying one another’s company. Ok, we actually nearly cried several times from laughing so hard, that is good medicine for the soul, I needed that. I sat around and watched how the little ones ran around, playing with each other and it made me think of when our kids were the little ones running around with the others. It hasn’t been that many years ago and yet…it has…thank you God for our great kids and Your plan for our lives!

It was a good week, but, it is really good to be back home…sleeping in our own bed, talking with our kids on skype and seeing our new friends. Today we go to the University to begin a full week of English conversation classes. Please pray with us as we seek God’s direction in this new door opened to us. ~kim

Metropolitan

Leninsky Prospect

The platform at Leninsky Prospect

The metro arriving

So, while we were in Moscow getting our Ukrainian visas, we traveled around the city.
We got up before the crack of dawn and made our way to the Metro. I love the metro (subway).
In the winter, it is warm and in the summer it is cool. And, there is always the smell. It isn’t a foul smell, it is like the smell in your Grandpa’s garage, somehow it brings warm feelings to me.
That morning we were able to get a seat right away, we got to the metro stop just as it opened for the day.

As we were riding, I looked around and noticed a man getting ready to get off at a station. He was extremely concerned with making sure his shoes were clean. A little later on I watched another man across from me actually get out a shoe polisher and polish his shoes.
As I was riding, I noticed the woman across from me. She had her eyes ‘closed’ and she was looking around, mostly at us. I noticed this, as I have used it myself on some occasions.
During the course of our ride, we came to the stop called “Leninsky Prospect”. It is a stop that is very familiar to me. 10 years ago we lived in Moscow and every day the kids and I rode the metro to their school at this very stop. As we sat there waiting for the passengers to board, many wonderful memories of that year flooded my mind.
I love the metro.

Thanks for reading

Embassy in Moscow

Hi friends,
We recently put a counter on this blog to see if anyone actually reads it. Turns out there ARE people out there. Thanks for listening to us. We hope that your attention to what we're up to leads to greater prayers offered for the world of need that we are priveledged to serve in.

Quick update: We got to the Ukranian Embassy in Moscow at 7a.m. and were about 5th or 6th in line. We got through the whole process and were warming up in McDonald's by 11:00a.m. Kim will head back downtown tomorrow, while my meetings continue, to pick up the finished products. This will keep us in Kiev until this time next year and maybe even until we return to the US 1 1/2 years from now.

And just now Alexander from the U sent us a teaching schedule for the next three weeks. He's got it pretty packed, which we like, we only hope to do a job for them that leaves them all soooooo thankful and gains us some credibility.

So, anyway, there's a quick update of what we're doing. We'll keep you posted on the teaching we do next week.

Jerry

Air Transit-ion

Hi,

It's Sunday afternoon and Kim and I are at Borisopol Airport, Kiev's hub, on our way to Moscow. We'll be there all week getting 1-year visas in order to live in Ukraine and also for meetings. We've been delayed by almost 4 hours by snow in Moscow but we planned extra time so no sweat.

7a.m. Monday morning I'll be in line at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow for the 9a.m. opening time. I hope that I don't regret not arriving at 6a.m.

Before we left home today we had to go upstairs to say goodbye to our neighbors. When Enver saw us he was surprised, thinking we'd left yesterday, "I thought you left without saying 'goodbye'" he said smilingly, Whew! Glad we didn't skip that. We dropped off a copy of Purpose Driven Life in Russian for Galina for her to include with her Bible reading.

We will arrive home late Friday/early Saturday. We expect our friend Alexander, the director of the University language program where we help with English, to have a new schedule for us. We hope to have a lot of hours scheduled to be there since they give us really good Ukrainian practice.
Well, Kim is beside me and said, "Okay, don't make that too long", so I'll end here.
More later...

Pasha’s Tomatoes

These are 3 liter jars of tomatoes that Pasha canned this past fall. All summer long she works in her garden in a little village outside of Kiev. She grows enough food for her and her husband to eat all year with enough leftover to sell during the winter to supplement their pension.
She also sells her own homemade sauerkraut. Have you ever tried freshly made sauerkraut? The cabbage is still crunchy and even if you are not a fan, you would like it.

Today Pasha took her husband, Ivan to the polyclinic. It has been an extremely time consuming process to just get an appointment with some specialists. Hopefully they will return with some answers. We have been praying for Ivan for more than a month. We have been praying for a miracle in his life, that he would experience God’s healing and know that it was God working in his life.

English is such simple langauge

Well, as you can see by the title, maybe it's not so simple. Kim and I spent an hour and a half with the students at the U yesterday (and we leave in 45 minutes for another two hour class session) and we were able to hear that most common of errors that Russians and Ukrainians make, the classic 'vanishing article'.
This tendency that these speakers have, and probably all other speakers of Slavic-based langauges, makes their English sound primitive by just leaving out 'the' and 'a'.
It was a good reminder: there are no easy languages, only more and less gifted learners.

The whole 'less gifted' thing was driven home with gleeful enthusiasm by those same students when they turned the tables and started to teach us Ukrainian. We easily crossed the line from 'experts' just because we happened to have been born in English-speaking America, to 'dumb foreigners' just because we happened to be living in Kiev.

Oh, well. It was a good experience and we're happy for the chance to teach and learn and to get to know a lot more people all at the same time.

Ukrainian church service

(this is a table of the Ukrainian alphabet, pronunciation and Russian equivalent)

Well, this story is about church yesterday, when we went to our first church service all in Ukrainian. It is surprisingly hard to find a Ukrainian service in Kiev. (Which you may think begs the question: "Why bother with Ukrainian if everyone's speaking Russian anyway?" I'll try to answer that below.)
The church service, as I said was all in Ukrainian, with the exception of one word in Russian. The really cool news is that we understood a very high percentage of what was being said. I'd say we got all the main ideas and many of the actual expressions and individual words.
It seems that after the initial shock over the differences between Ukrainian and Russian what we see more and more are the similarities. What's more, now that we have the patterns of verb conjugations down (forget about the exceptions, which are rich in number and cruelty) many things we can piece together.
So, 'Why bother?' Well, one of the curious things about the Ukrainians we know is that even though the relationship between them and Russia has been close politically, there is no surplus of love for Russia's continuing political influence (and even less for the tendency in Russia these days to turn the clock back, away from the democratic leanings which Ukraine has come to value.) This lack of enthusiasm is also expressed in the positive preference for their own language over Russian- even though most people are at the present time still using Russian.
When we tell them we are studying Ukrainian they consistently use the Russian expression which translates to something like "Good for you!" Our Ukrainian tutor tells us she feels pride to think that we want to study her language.
So we'll keep working on the language in order to keep opening more doors to people's heads and hearts. For today we're encouraged by our experience in church yesterday and look forward to practicing more and more as we gain momentum.

At the U

The university

the university from the street

the view of the university (far blueish building) from our kitchen window

After a long wait for a schedule from the university director, we received a tentative plan yesterday. Aleksander said he thought they'd be scheduling us to help students with their English once every two weeks or MAYBE once a week.
This is a good place to stop and explain a cultural thing you learn fairly quickly in Russia (and which seems true here also): Keep your expectations about the concreteness of plans and times low.
However, knowing that we were still happily surprised to see that he'd scheduled us for two classes this week and FIVE next. So we'll start our language-helper careers on Wednesday at Noon. Unfortunately the visa trip I wrote about in our last prayer update will take place during the week that we have the 5 class times scheduled.
So, while I could have called and told him about the conflict in the schedule, another thing that long years in Russia have taught us is that you have to do things face to face where ever possible. For that reason I was at the U this morning at 9:00am to explain to Alexander that we were sorry that we wouldn't be able to come during that week but we would definitely be ready to do a lot when we come back from Moscow. He was very understanding and accomodating.
The 'deal' we've made with him is that we'll help his students with their English if we can work out a way for them to help us with Ukrainian...which brings us to another story: Ukrainian church...

Big Pockets

We live 3 big blocks from a pretty nice, reasonably priced grocery store. It’s name is translated “Big Pockets”. It is a round 2-storied building surrounded by a small, year-around, outdoor market. There are a few things that make this grocery store attractive to me….
Grocery Carts – These are not always standard in grocery stores. Times are changing and one is finding more and more stores with them. When we first came to this part of the world, the grocery stores were very different than the ones back home. All the products were located behind counters in several departments (dairy, meat, canned goods, grains, pasta). In order to purchase any goods there were several steps taken. First one would need to ask the clerk for each item and she would add them up. Next, one would go to the cashier and pay the said amount. After that one would go back to the counter and give the receipt to the clerk and she would give the groceries. It was a lengthy process, one that needed to be followed in each department separately.
3 Blocks – It is wonderful to have a store that has all the basics that we need only 3 blocks away. Everything that we eat is carried home in grocery bags. So, closeness is everything!
Reasonable Prices/Good Selection - Big Pockets grocery store has all of the basics that I am looking for at a pretty good price. There are huge selections of other things that are not as basic to me….canned fish products, canned meat, frozen pelmeni (similar to tortellini), frozen fish, smoked kielbasa, sparkling mineral water.

**I always feel a closeness with my fellow shoppers there, as you can save places in line for others…I am still shy about asking this favor of someone. But, I have saved many places for people behind me.
I just wanted to share a little glimpse of our grocery shopping adventures with you.