A 30lb bruiser

A week has past and we have all settled down after the jump start we gave to the Ukrainian holiday season.  The real holiday season doesn’t start for Ukrainians until St Nicholas Day on December 19th, but we thought we would throw in an American Thanksgiving for fun. It was a fellowship activity / invite new people event.  Since our remodeling on the student center has not begun and therefore we do not have a working stove there, we decided to host the event in our home. 

We went basic…appetizers: vegetables and ranch, main course: turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and carrot cake for dessert.  But you never want to run out of food on Thanksgiving, and with students you never actually know how many might show up, so we elected to go heavy on the turkey.

One of our students checked out the local grocery store for us, and found they did indeed carry large turkeys.  We went to buy one and were brought one that weighed 14.5 kilograms – that’s over 30 lbs for those of you who don’t convert.  We decided to go for it.  It was tough making it home on public transportation with it AND everything else, but we made it (after David walked the last three blocks from the stop to our apartment).

David brined the turkey the night before (in our kitchen trashcan – it was the only thing big enough) using fruit juices and spices.  Since our oven was only big enough for the turkey, everything else had to be made either the day before, on the stovetop or in the crockpot.  Four girls arrived at 10am to help us cook, lunch was served at 2pm.  It all turned out well.

There was the slight dilemma of the turkey fitting in the oven, but if you push hard enough, anything will fit in the oven.  It was a little heavy for the one rack, which crashed to the bottom of the oven once we finally got the turkey in.  So we built a pyramid of pans under the rack and it all worked out.   

We had three entirely new people come with friends, and two come from English club, with a total of 27 people.  We stuffed them full, then they laid all over our living room and watched a movie.  It was a lot of fun and I would say a great success.  

Communal turkey coma while watching a movie

English Club!

Since David and I arrived in Lviv, the students have shamefully been requesting (demanding) that we begin an English Club.  They explained to us that is the way new students find their way to the student center.  David and I asked our leadership team and others if new students couldn’t find their way to us by their personal invitation or other forms of evangelism?  They looked at us like we had just fallen from the sky.  

David nor I wanted to take on this task.  We speak English, we don’t teach it.  They are asking us questions using words I haven’t heard since 8th grade English, from Mrs. Roberts to be exact.  We have put them off, drug our feet, pleaded ignorance and these creative ways of stalling are no deterrent for a determined Ukrainian.  In September, I finally said “OK, I’ll do it, but you all (our leadership team) must come sometimes in order to interact with these new people.

They agreed.  I looked at the calendar and said I could get in two lessons before we were off to America for training.  They thought that this was not a great idea, and therefore allowed me to postpone the beginning date of our club until the end of October.  Saved again.  Upon our return, the city was being shut down due to the flu quarantine, and I thought, RELIEF!  I can wait three more weeks.  The students however, thought, “What better way to kick off a quarantine?”    

So three Sundays ago we began our Molod Do Isusa English Club.  We only had three students attend, and they were all Molod Do Isysa students.  I will take the blame for that.  We’ll say the advertising might have been lacking or maybe absent.  However, by week two we were up to 17 students, and we had five new students at Pilgrims on Thursday (with a total of 29).  Last night at our third English Club we had 18, with 6 of them being new.  Four of them are signed up already to come to our Thanksgiving celebration next weekend.

So I guess our leadership team is allowed to say “I told you so” when they kept explaining how important it was for us to begin an English Club.  We sit around, play get to know you games, read articles and then talk about the meanings of words and phrased, and we end with a listening exercise.  I am reading a small Piece of Blue Like Jazz every Sunday that they listen to and then answer questions about it.  

Who knew this would be such an attraction?  Coming from a country where parents have to pull teeth to ensure their children are doing their language homework to a country where they are seeking out practice on the weekends?  It is still sometimes mind blowing, but then I remember some of these students look at languages as their escape from their current circumstances.  It might enable them to get a better job or possibly even work in another country.

We are not encouraging people to leave, and I hate to see them go, but I am glad I can provide a useful service, and they in turn are introduced to our organization and Christ. 

So….Shannon is pregnant!  We are pumped, overwhelmed with joy, feeling fantastically blessed, and boundlessly thankful.

Things are moving along and currently Shannon is finishing up her 1st trimester.  All in all, the 1st trimesters wasn’t too bad.  Other than a little bit of nauseousness and the need for a bit more sleep, she has been pretty healthy.

The due date for this little one is the 1oth of May.  Shannon will be coming home to Texas to deliver and I will join her with about two weeks to go.  As for now, we anxiously await the newest goranimal!  If you would like to see the newest family picture, check out the dashboard at the top of the page .

We are back in Ukraine and busy at work but there has been an interesting development since our arrival.  The swine flu, also known around here as the Californian flu (which is a complete mystery to me) has put the nation into a bit of a scare.  Things are slightly nuts.  One of the cities east of us, Ternopyl (not Chernobyl), has completely been quarantined due to a number of deaths.  Trains are not stopping there and I’ve heard that choppers are flying around spraying some sort of chemicals.  Things in L’viv aren’t so bad but there is still plenty of worried folks.  Most people are wearing face masks or putting scarves or over their mouths.  Yulia Temenshenko, the Prime Minister, has decided put a three-week national restriction on public meetings, including schools, universities, churches, movie theaters, etc.  Makes for tough campus ministry considering all the universities and colleges are shut down and many students have gone home.  We will see how everything continues to transpire.  I suspect it this is a bit of an overreaction.  We are sure hoping the universities aren’t closed for three weeks, but we will see.  We will probably continue our activities anyways, so take that swine flue!

Here are some L’vivians sporting face masks!  I got some very straight faced, “what are you doing taking a picture of me looks” when I took these.  So enjoy them!

Shannon posing so it looked like I was taking a picture of her...the lady on her left was not happy and trying to leave!

Goranimals Newsletter Summer-Fall 2009

This is the newest version of our newsletter.  Hope you all enjoy it.  Shannon and I are still in the states at training and we will be heading back to Ukraine the end of October after a week of vacation.  Hope everyone is enjoying the fall, we sure are.  

Missionaries in Training

Well, Shannon and I are back in the states for about a month after being in Ukraine almost exactly a year.  It has been wonderful to be back and we are experiencing a slight bit of reverse culture-shock.  I think we are both most surprised by being able to understand everything that is going on around us.  We feel very overstimulated!

We spent the few days in Manassas, Virginia with Grace United Methodist Church.  This was our first time visiting a church and it was a wonderful experience.  Grace UMC gave us the opportunity to share from the pulpit and do the missions moment at all three of their Sunday services.  I was a little bit intimidated seeing as I had never formally preached at an American church before nor had I preached without a translator in a while, but it all seemed to go quite well.  One of the main goals of our visit, beyond sharing about Molod do Isusa and generating support, was to create some interest and enthusiasm for a short-term trip Grace is planning to do with us next summer.  Grace showed us amazing hospitality while we were there and we felt incredibly encouraged and blessed to have the church care so much about us and our ministry.  Thank you Grace, it was a wonderful time and we look forward to seeing you again soon!   

Other random highlights of our time home so far include visiting my good friend Rob and his wife Liz, seeing my first Copperhead on a trail we hiked, and also watching Shannon run like a bandit from the second Copperhead I have ever seen.  I also got to go fishing and Shannon enjoyed a nice peddicure.  It is good to enjoy some of the pampering of home.  

We will spend the next three weeks in Stony Point, New York at a missionary training that we were supposed to have before we left in 2008 but has been postponed until now.  It will be good to have our many questions answered and become a little bit more familiar with the procedures of the General Board of Global Ministries.  Look for a new newsletter soon.  God bless.

For those of you who don’t know me personally yet, you might be wondering why in the world I am writing about consumerism?  Well, first off, I am a consumer, and a pretty good one at that.  I have already ‘consumed’ quite a bit sense moving here and setting up life.  Second, sometime during seminary I had a huge burden laid on me (by Jesus) to become an informed consumer.  I needed to know as much about my consumption as possible, and make some Christian decisions about some of what I was finding out.  Where things are made, how they are made, how the workers are treated, the impact on the environment, etc. are some of the things I began to research.

Well, I wanted to continue living as much ‘in the know’ as I could in Ukraine and that has proved a bit trickier.  Labels are sometimes missing, and when they are in clothing, they are not a big enough brand to be on the internet so I can’t follow them up.  A lot of shopping is done in markets here, and that also makes things challenging.  I’ve tried to ask some of the bigger stores about their clothes and they look at me like I’m crazy.  There is a good chance that my words didn’t come out exactly right either, so I’ll chalk it up to that.

However, when asking my Ukrainian friends and the students I work with about these kind of things, they just laugh.  Well, they don’t really laugh, they say 1) I’ve never really thought about it or 2) Shannon, we have bigger things to think about.  At least now I can say that I have shed some light on a topic that has never been introduced to them before.  

I had an experience over the summer that reminded me that this is a passion of mine (yes, sometimes even passions get forgotten when you move to a new country, with a new culture and new language, to start a new job with a semi-new husband).  I was shopping in one of these markets with the American team that came this last summer.  One girl saw a dress, picked it up, looked at the label and said this is the exact dress that I bought in Texas before we left.  She said she paid $16 for it, and wanted to know how much the dress was selling for in Ukraine.  The seller of the dress said $45.  Yes, $45 and that was in USD, not hrieven, which is the Ukrainian currency.  I couldn’t believe it, I was furious.  The girls thought they were coming to the market to find some deals.  We pretty much stopped shopping after that…they said they would wait until they returned home to buy anymore clothing.

Well this sent me into a whole new realm of ‘enlightenment’.  Ukraine has a crazy high import tax, hence the $45 dress that is only $16 in America.  All imported goods are spiked in price relative to the cost of goods produced in Ukraine.  The only thing that I have actually found in Ukraine that is cheaper than in America is food, electricity and water.  Furniture is generally more expensive, rent is the same, clothes are higher, drinks are about the same, electronics are higher, entertainment is the same.  

Being exposed to another group that is being taken advantage of, even though they are the consumer in this go ’round, is sad for me.  You might be saying, that is just how it works.  Maybe, especially if we all say that.  But it will continue to baffle me that in a place like America (average household income of $50,000) people are able to buy cheap clothes while Ukrainians (average individual salary being about $6,000) have to pay three times as much for the same dress.

Pilgrim's Kickoff 2009

Last Thursday was our first service of the year!  Our turn out was great, our students were excited, and everything went smooth for our first meeting of the year.  Last weekend we had a leadership retreat and were able to mold a group of young leaders (ladies actually, it’s all girls) that are ready to serve and lead this student ministry.  Shannon and I feel more organized and ready now than we have since we got here.  We are really excited about the new year and seeing what God has in store for this ministry.  Pray for us and the students as we all work to bring in the Kingdom of God here in L’viv, Ukraine.

Preaching: Be Strong and Courageous!

Listening

Lily giving a testimony

If you are seeing a photograph that doesn’t make much sense, it’s about Ihor.  Ihor is our local homeless guy who has decided to make the student center landing his resting place in the evenings.  At first I had no problem with it.  Instead of going the regular route and just kicking this guy off our landing, Lubomir, Shannon and I tried to do something in order to extend Christ’s love and we decided to strike up a deal with him.  The deal was that Ihor could only spend his nights there.  He had to leave before 8a.m. and come no earlier than 11p.m.  He agreed, of course, and was about as cordial a homeless, drunk fellow could be.  And so, for maybe a week it kind of worked out.  Ihor would come in the evenings and the only hang up was that sometimes he would bring his friends.

Things changed.  Ihor started coming more and more often and then regularly during the middle of the day.  Even during heavy traffic hours at the student center, I would sometimes catch Ihor trying to get some shut eye on the landing.  So, Ihor and I had a talk and we really talked; I made him talk to me and repeat what I was saying so I knew it at least had gone in his ears, through his brain, and out of his mouth.  He had three tries, three more times to be there during the wrong hours and then he couldn’t come again.  I thought that the new plan might work, but it didn’t.  In three days there were three incidents and so I told him it wasn’t working.   He wasn’t keeping up his end of the deal, and that was that.  That last time I sat there and watched him collect his boxes and odds and ends and walked him down the steps hoping not to seem him for a while.

That didn’t really work.  Ihor is still around.  His evidence on our landing is patently Ihor and some of it is visible in the photo: his cigarette butts next to where he sleeps, old used plastic bags he accumulates, cardboard boxes he uses as mattresses, his pillow which he hides in the attic door, and of course his pee on our wall, that unfortunately is both visually and nasally evident .

Considering that initially the few students who vocalized wanting to disallow Ihor to stay in the first place seem to have been right, we probably will have to take some steps to prevent further sleepings on our landing.  Considering also that our student center entry and door were severely vandalized a couple years back,  we have all the more reason to protect our space.  I wish there was another way, to both show Ihor Christ’s love and protect our space, but for someone who doesn’t want to listen, who doesn’t respect himself or others, who shows no indication of wanting to get better, I am scared we might only throw our pearls to swine.  God help you Ihor.

Bounty!

While I have often been discouraged by the complete lack of wildlife in Ukraine, one national pastime that has surely benefited from a lack of  mammals is mushroom hunting.  While most Americans in the woods have almost no idea what is fair game for food, when you take Ukrainians into the woods in the summer everything suddenly become edible.  As for mushrooms, everyone seems to know which mushrooms are the tasty mushrooms, which mushrooms are going to make you sick, and which mushrooms will make you fly and then crash and burn.  I went mushroom hunting with Lubomir and we did well, two big medium sized bags full of fungi.  Here is some of our bounty.  The big white one in the middle is the diamond in the rough: a white mushroom.  Apparently they get to be double that size.  That one was delicious and I look forward to eating his fungal relatives again soon.