Soaking it all in

I'm speechless...Ukraine is more beautiful than I imagined.

7/1

We started out from the church on Thursday afternoon. Our first flight took us through O'Hare airport in Chicago. It was nice to see Chicago again, if only briefly. Memories of my time at Moody and friends in the city kept going through my head, but we only had three hours of layover time, which was just barely enough to get to our gate, drop off our stuff, and go eat dinner in shifts. By the time everyone was finished eating, it was boarding time! The flight to Warsaw, Poland was 45 minutes late taking off. After a 9 hour flight, we had only 20 minutes to get to our connecting flight to L'viv. We landed around 5:30 PM local time on Friday, July 2nd. Praise God we made it safe and sound, and nobody lost their luggage!

7/2

I've never been to a non-English speaking country before, so i wasn't sure what to expect. I spent a good portion of the trip over here familiarizing myself with the Ukrainian alphabet. When we landed in L'viv, it was fun sounding out the words on advertising billboards and buildings, trying to make myself sound as Ukrainian as possible, even though I had no clue what I was saying! Some of the words are actually English words with Ukrainian letters, so it was neat to be able to figure out what certain signs said. The drive to the hotel in Horodok took about 45 minutes.

7/3

Friday evening and Saturday morning, we walked around Horodok inviting local youths to come to our English camp. On Saturday afternoon, we had 20-30 kids come and register for ESL. Saturday afternoon, we went down to the nearby soccer field (or "futball stadium") and hung out with the local kids. We played Americans vs. Ukrainians in soccer. Shockingly, the Americans won!

7/4

Sunday, we went to Grapevine Baptist Church in downtown L'viv. The church meets in the same place as the symphony. During the service, I could hear the vocalists warming up their voices through the open windows. tom was the guest speaker, and he gave a sermon on how God is our heavenly Father. It was a good sermon, even though Tom forgot a couple of times that he needed to pause for the translator.

Of course, what would July 4th be without a barbeque? So, on Sunday afternoon (more like evening, but the sun is up until 9:30/10:00 around here during the summer), we got together with the local team and the missionaries and had Shashlik (pork kebabs). I had a really good talk with Tim akers about the needs here in Ukraine, missions-wise. He said the biggest need they have right now is for someone to come in and teach English as a native speaker at the local universities in L'viv. L'viv is a big university town, and a lot of students are very eager to learn English, so teaching ESL is an easy in. Unfortunately, IMB does not have the budget right now to hire a full-time missionary, but if someone wanted to come for a 1 or 2 year stint as a fully-supported volunteer through their local church, it would be a huge help. Joey is going to be doing just that, and I feel like if I talk with Tim Akers about 3 more times, he's going to convince me to do the same thing. I'm already halfway there.

God bless! More posts coming soon!

~Maureen