March 20-26

Seeing as how the internet is working rather quickly right now, we figured it would be a good time to make a new post about the past week.
Last Friday was a free day. Free days usually include grocery shopping because the only fridge that is working in our apartment is a bar fridge, so most things we buy fresh. We got a surprise that day as well, McDonalds for supper! It was such a treat! John took Kristine, Steve, Joel, Dan and Travis to Nicolaipolia for another Friday night of soccer and Petra and Jo headed to Anya's for a Mennonite youth group meeting (Anya is another one of John's interpreters). It was okay but because Anya was leading the group she couldn't interpret so she would give a paraphrase of what she was going to be talking about and then we'd sit there for 20 minutes while they conversed in Russian. The other crew had a great time at soccer. We guess the word is out that some Canadians are here to play so the crowd was apparently larger than normal!
Saturday afternoon was spent cleaning up around John and Ev's apartment. Petra and Jo were raking leaves in front of the building for probably about an hour when a group of young boys walked by. It's quite unusual to see people actually taking care of the common areas around Zaporozhye; we were told that the people who are paid to do it don't even bother. So we think these boys were making fun of us at first, and the people here usually pick us out as foreigners really quickly so they said hello in English. Petra immediately started talking to them, and another woman who spoke limited English stopped to talk as well. John came over and they small-talked for a while, basically saying why we were cleaning and what we're here for. Eventually, we invited the boys to play some soccer so we ditched cleaning up and went to play soccer instead. "Team Canada" won (mostly because they were too busy smoking to pay attention), but fun was had by all and another game was planned for later on.
Sunday was a church service in Bolkova which is an hour and a half south of Zaporozhye. The Mennonite church they have there was built by some Canadians and it's a beautiful huge building but they have to have services in a tiny upstairs room in winter because they can't afford to heat the whole place. They really enjoyed having us and invited us back to visit. We offered to do some work for them so we are planning on going back April 7th to spend a few nights there and help get some stuff done. Jo found out when we got home that the village where her Grandpa Voth was born is 3 villages away from Bolkovo, so when we go back in a few weeks we plan on stopping by there as well.
Monday we had a Russian lesson with Olga first thing and then we headed out to Morozevka to do some work. There wasn't a whole lot to do, and Sasha's wife Luda insisted on making us borsch for supper so it was a good day! She also make cabbage perishky (capoosta perishky) and we had bliny for supper (which is a deep-fried pancake that you put sugar on....SO good!!). On the way home John stopped for some gas for the van and Steve went inside to buy us all some Milka bars (best chocolate bars on earth) and he found Vanilla Coke! Ukraine just went up 10 points in our books!!
Tuesday was a working day in Nicolaipol. Their church building isn't nearly as finished as the one in Morozevka. They bought it as apartment buildings and ripped down all the brick walls with the intention of refinishing all the rooms. So the task for the day was to carry all the bricks from inside to the outside and to put them in a trench dug for the foundation of a future building. Then we mixed and poured sludge over the whole thing and that took the whole entire day. We were so dirty and messy it was ridiculous.
Wedneday was another free day!! Free day means grocery shopping which is always an ordeal because the food is packaged differently for example, milk is in bags, cocoa is in tiny jello-like pacakges, brown sugar is horribly expensive....we could go on. In the afternoon we had an adventure taking the bus to the Columbia store and then we walked back in the rain. For supper Jo went all out and we had Christmas dinner in March! Chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade cranberry sauce, stuffing and chocolate pie for dessert!
Thursday - today!! We had a Russian lesson in the morning with Olga and then were supposed to head to the villages. It's rained a lot in the last few days so a lot of the things we would have to get done couldn't be done, so we had another free day! We had a team time till noon, ate lunch and then spent 1/2 hour in prayer before splitting into small groups and heading out to walk around the neighbourhood. Our intention was to pray for the area and the people and see if we could find any ministry opportunities! All the groups came back excited with what had happened during our short 2 hours on the streets.
Tomorrow we have a Bible study planned for 9:30 and then the afternoon is free. Petra and Jo are teaching an ESL class tomorrow evening while the rest of the group is in Nicolaipol playing soccer so they'll spend some time prepping for that tomorrow as well as the usual grocery shopping.
We also have a few prayer requests:
- Jo's legs still hurt from the manhole experience so pray for healing
- Steve's chest is still not fully healed (it pops when he stretches)
- pray for ministry opportunities in the community
- pray for healing for Travis's hand, he injured it today and we think it's broken.
- pray for Steve who's finding it hard to not be in a leadership position
Hopefully we'll have some pictures to post for next time and check back soon for our video blog of our apartment!