Moments From Ukraine

Some of you may appreciate these pictures more than others (for example, the Tuscher and Savoy families) but I thought most of you would get a kick of them, so here you are!

If you look closely you can see a little friend peaking up out of the side drain of my kitchen sink!

I was thinking about starting some tomato and pepper plants next week; how nice to have one I can transplant!

Пасха, "Easter" in Russian

Sorry that I haven't posted much this week. I have a cold. This Sunday is Easter here in Ukraine since they celebrate it a week later than in the West. We are having a service on Friday evening followed by watching the Passion of the Christ, I think. Then, on Sunday after the morning worship we are having a Church picnic. I'm exciting about eating traditional Ukrainian Easter foods such as Paska (special bread with raisins in it) and Holodets (meet suspended in Gelatin, so says Jon). I'll let you know how it is!

AN-24

I flew home from Odessa in this plane yesterday. It was definitely really cool and a first in an Antonov for me.

Presbytery Meeting

I'm going down to Belgorod-Dnestrovsky in the south of Ukraine for Presbytery for the next two days. You can pray for the Church as they will be discussing some important issues about planting new Churches here in Ukraine.

Team Worship

Yesterday we had our monthly team worship. We rotate hosting duty between all of the families of the team. Yesterday we had the pleasure of hosting! It's like a big potluck. We gather around 2 after our Russian church services and everyone brings a side dish, while the host is in charge of the main dish. We introduced a family staple, Pizza Dip, as the appetizer and served up lots of lasagna. I think there were 21 people here including children.

We have a balcony that connects our kitchen to our living room. The kids have sufficiently broken in our "track", running circles through our kitchen and living room. It was like a little piece of home to have lots of kids running around being loud and having fun!

As always it is delightful to sing praise to God in English and to understand God's word being preached! We thank God for the fellowship of our team members!

Thanking Jesus,
Kristen

Some fly break dancing

We were downtown today on the main street, Kreschatik, and watched some guys dancing for the crowds.

Spring is Springing

It's April and Spring is springing here in Kiev. Today, walking home from Russian class I noticed people cleaning up flower beds, planting flowers and trees, and beginning to make everything look nice. We've had 3 days in a row now that have been sunny and warm! I had heard that it was cloudy in Kiev all winter long but I didn't realize what that meant until actually living here. It has been shocking to see the sun shining all day long. I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, it's just different than in PA. It might be better now that I think about it. When Spring comes around and the Sun comes into existence again it is really is wonderful.

I say 'springing' because I've also heard that Kiev gets snow in April too. We'll see!

Pushkin and Engels

Last night was English club and there were 24 people there. I think that's the biggest group we've had since being here. Jon had everyone translate a passage. Their choices were: 1) Easy - Pushkin poems 2) Medium - a Children's Bible 3) Difficult - A Communist Manifesto. It was really fun!

Sunset on a Marvelous Evening