Another Busy Week

Last week Wednesday we headed south to Balkovo for a night to help start some projects in the MB church there. It was a pretty fun time and they had lizards.

The one project was putting up these huge concrete beams that are going to be incorporated into a sunshade outside hut thing, and they were by far the craziest thing we've done so far! It took 5 guys to just push them up and it was insane! You can tell by Steve's face that they were not light, but it's okay because he works out. The man in front is Greesha, the pastor.

During the evening we were there we drove a few villages over to what used to be the Mennonite village of Friedensdorf, where the Voth family originally came from. I had a map of which yardsite was the Voth's and everything but it there are no original buildings left on it so it wasn't an exciting picture. The village itself had a few Mennonite buildings left and was really a beautiful village. It was really cool and surreal to be there because I always loved reading the Voth Book recollections when I was smaller and to actually be in the place where some of the stories took place was really amazing. There is also an abandoned collective farm very close to the village as well which was very eery and a little bit sad.

This is the finished project when we left Balkovo...obviously not finished, but really different than when we started! And it's not about finishing, it's about participating and coming alongside the people to encourage them and help out with the time we have!

Saturday was Petra's birthday, which included a kind of surprise birthday party complete with toilet paper streamers!! They have all different colours here so they're even cooler than when I was little!!!

And what's a birthday without "the cake"? What we thought was powdered sugar still wasn't, so I iced it with the grainy icing, covered it in dream whip (a new twist!) and then Steve spelled out the message with M&M's!

On Sunday we went to the circus. It was pretty cool, not many animals other than pigs, goats, dogs and the occassional monkey but the high-flying acts were really cool!

And even though Sunday was not Easter in Ukraine, we went to a Mennonite church that was celebrating Easter and we each received paska bread, which is very different here, more bready and it has raisins in it. And they're a funny shape.

Monday we went to a school in the morning to talk to the principal about maybe getting in on some classes to talk to kids, and we were thrown right into it that day! It's an English school so we are scheduled to go Monday and Thursdays from 9:15-11:25 just to talk to kids during those 2 class periods. Steve and I were terrified because we didn't know what to expect, but it ended up being an amazing experience to just talk and answer questions. You're not allowed to talk about religion in classes, but if the kids ask questions we answer them truthfully and it's amazing door to have opened to our team! So please pray for this ministry opportunity!!

We also started cleaning up Ukraine Disneyland! In just 2 short hours we had cleared out most of the trash and it was starting to look way better! A few people also came by, one man even helped rake and dig out a tree stump, and another woman invited us over on Saturday to eat Easter cookies and to watch her paint Ukrainian eggs! The people we met there were all so grateful! We were also VERY blessed to have an interpreter with us! Ilena is the daughter of one of John's interpreters and she had the day off school so she was really excited to come out and help us so that we could actually talk to people! Thank God for people who show up at our events when we need them!! God is trying to get His message of love out to these people!!

I think we counted 25 needles in this one little leaf pile. Gross and overwhelmingly sad. Ukraine has the highest HIV rate in all of Europe.

Finally, Tuesday was potato planting day in Morozevka! It was SO exciting to work with Pastor Alexander again! We all love him and missed him!!! All our work has come down to this!! First in the morning we did a little burning across the road from the church which caught a lot of positive attention from the neighbours.

Finally at 2 pm it was potato time!! It took 8 of us 1 hour to plant what we figure was about 1200 potatoes! It was so much fun!!!

We also discovered some kittens that we played with and threw down the new outhouse hole that we dug a few weeks ago (don't worry animal lovers, they're out and unharmed)!

If you want to hear Pastor Alexander's story, there is a 4 minute video on http://www.mbmsi.org/ that is really cool. Today was a relaxing day off and hopefully we'll have more stories for you in another blog soon!!!