A Bunch of Stuff

Two weeks ago Tuesday we planned a cleaning day at "Disneyland" and had invited the kids from the English school to come and help out. 25 kids showed up! It was a great time! We picked up garbage off the streets, scraped paint off and started painting some of the equipment. It was amazing to see so many of them there and they were excited to be helping clean up their city. We also had the chance to tell them about God and his love. It was awesome!

Thursday we left for Molochansk for 5 nights to partner with the youth group there in a kids' evangelism week. We played games, had a picnic, had a mini outdoor amazing race (in the rain) and had services every evening. The best part was just hanging out in the evenings with the youth.

One of the guys from Molochansk named Vitali brought out a metal detector to the picnic on Saturday. We had no idea what we were looking for but it turns out that there was a battle in that area during WWII and there were holes in the ground where they were sitting in and trenches for tanks and things.

These are examples of some of the things Vitali has found - gas masks, grenades, helmets, machine gun rounds, cutlery and rings with swastikas on them, he has even found 3 bodies! 2 German and 1 Russian! I keep telling Petra whenever we dig holes anywhere that we're going to find dead bodies and this is the proof! Steve found some bullets dated 1935 so that was pretty cool. He went to Vitali's place to see all this stuff and has some pictures with helmets and things.

Also on picnic day there were poisonous snakes. Vitali is also a wild animal handler, not really but he did dress all in camo so the animals probably just didn't see him. This snake was really big and venomy. Sick.

Most of the evenings we were there we went to someone's house to hang out after the service in the evening. There were usually a lot of us crammed into a small space!

Right by the field we played games in there was this beautiful abandoned theatre. It was amazing inside but so old and falling apart and there was a lot of vandalism and apparently the basement is a frequent hang-out for drug users.

Tuesday all the kids were back in school and the evangelism was over. Andre, the youth pastor took us to see these rocks.... they're Ukraine's stonehenge. No one knows where they came from or when, there is just a random pile of rocks in the middle of nowhere that are surrounded by sand. And don't be deceived by this picture, these rocks are MASSIVE.

So massive in fact, and so randomly placed that there are tons of little caves and tunnels underneath all these rocks. Steve, Dan and Travis tried their hands at kersplunking, as we like to call it. The tiny spaces they got into were incredible and at one point we even lost Dan! And the final tunnel was probably 100 feet long with the lowest point being about 7 inches from the ground to the rock. Steve had to dig in the sand to make it through.

Since returning from Molochansk we went to the school again, got trucks to clean up garbage from "Disneyland", and Saturday was Victory Day celebration for Ukraine. I'm planning on posting another blog on some of those things but don't hold your breath!