Zaporozhye Ukraine, March 17-30

March 17, Thursday: Left on our first flight at 6:30 a.m and Dez slept through the whole 3 hour flight! We had a 5 hour layover in Memmingen, Germany so we took a bus into the town and wandered for a little while. The town itself was very beautiful and we ate real schnitzel and bratwurst to complete our German experience. Another 3 hour flight to Kiev (that Dez slept through) where we were met by our friend Marina (Z - there are 2 Marinas). We arrived at 6:30 and took an 11:30 overnight train to Dnepipetrovsk. It was a really nice and comfortable train. A nice surprise!

March 18, Friday: Wake-up call at 6 a.m. Arrived at 7 and took a marshutka (kind of a bus, kind of a van) to Zaporozhye where we were picked up at the bus station by Yura, a friend of our friends Marina (B) and Bogdan. He took us to our apartment where we would stay for the week.
Front entrance:

The apartment was typically Ukrainian - wild wallpaper, hot water heater that needs to be lit every time you want hot water, everything just a little on the scary side. But for 12 days it worked just fine. The last time we were in Ukraine Evelyn had a saying about the second apartment our team was renting: "It's a little bit like camping", and this felt the same way.

Kitchen:

We went grocery shopping and ran into John Wiens who invited Steve to go to Nicolaipolia to play soccer with the new Trek team guys so Steve jumped at the chance to go to that village again. Unfortunately out of the many guys who played there was only one that Steve recognized from our time there however after two years it's expected that the guys in the village would grow up and move away to find jobs. The unemployment rate in villages is 70% and this usually leads to alcoholism so we were glad to see that many of those guys had hopefully moved to somewhere where they could have jobs.
March 19, Saturday: Steve went to a youth conference with our friend Bogdan and went to meet a man named Sasha who we were told was in charge of all the youth in Zaporozhye. Well, we had hoped that this would be some amazing opportunity and would be the perfect guy to talk to about our vision but nothing really came of it. I spent the day with my two Marinas and Esther - Marina and Bogdan's three month old daughter. We all had supper together after the guys came home from the conference and had a short time of singing together.
March 20, Sunday: At 6 p.m we went to New Hope Center - the church John and Ev started December 2009. We had invited all of our friends to come and visit with us as a way to see all of them. About 10 people showed up and it was awesome to see them again.
March 21, Monday: Went to John and Ev's for supper and on the way there walked past "Disneyland" - the playground we worked on two years ago. Other than being faded and the sign being worn away by weather, it still looked fairly decent.

March 22, Tuesday: Dezmond was sick so he stayed home all day. In the morning I went shopping with Marina (B) - I thought we were just shopping-shopping but apparently we were fabric shopping with her seamstress friend - even better! In the afternoon I stayed home with Dez and Steve went out with two friends for coffee to catch up. In the evening we had another friend over to our apartment so that we could all hang out and not have to take Dez out anywhere in the cold.
March 23, Wednesday: Headed to Molochansk (a village) to stay with Olga (who we stayed with for a week two years ago). We found a guy to drive us through Bogdan and Marina - I think a guy that goes to their church. Marina had told us that there were lots of business men in their church with "big, fancy cars" so we were excited to potentially have a comfortable ride there. We had found a carseat for Dez (it was my one stipulation that we were not driving that far without one because carseats are somewhat rare for babies as a lot of people don't have cars). We had been driven a few places within a short distance during the week and I could handle holding him for those (my prayer all week was "Jesus be our seatbelt") but I was SO glad we got a carseat for this ride to Molochansk! The "big, fancy car" was a Mitsubishi Lancer and seriously, this guy drove it to its full potential! The average speed this guy drove was 150 km/hour - and that's on Ukrainian roads with Ukrainian rules! Plus he had a GPS that lead us WAY off down some dirt roads into the middle of nowhere. It was quite the ride. There were times along the way that I was holding Dezmond's head to keep it from flying around as he slept. Once in Molochansk we went to Olga's where she had a ton of food waiting - borsche, bread, mashed potatoes, salad, pickles and tomatoes SOOO good! And then we met Andre - the youth pastor from the church in Ketusivka and he drove us to the church for a youth night! A lot of the same youth were there that we met last time - mostly the younger ones but in the past two years a lot of them have been learning English so we could speak with them easily. It was a great evening - (another) meal, talent show and homemade fireworks rounded out the night!

March 24, Thursday: Visited with Olga all morning and had another amazing meal - vereneky, potatoes, compote (fruit juice) bread and jam etc. 

We were supposed to catch the only bus to Tokmak at 1:20 but we forgot our iPod at Olga's so we just got a cab to take us back there and then all the way to Tokmak to catch the marshutka to Zaporozhye. This is a marshutka - kind of bus, kind of van:

Olga wouldn't let us go home without a large amount of canned goods. We told her that there was no way we could carry all of these jars home with us with all our luggage, stroller, carseat and everything else and there wasn't enough days to eat everything before we left to go back to Spain. But....she wouldn't take no for an answer so we came home with black cherry jam, some other berry jam, apricot jam, apricots, juice, pickles and tomatoes. Oh AND some dried pears.

March 25, Friday: Went bowling in the afternoon, Steve went to Nicolaipolia again with the boys from the Trek team to play soccer.
March 26, Saturday: Met two friends for coffee in the afternoon and then went to New Hope Center's church service at 6 p.m. There are upwards of 60 people who have been coming to services so the place was packed! It was so awesome to see! John had Steve and I come and say what we were doing and then they prayed for us. Afterwards we visited - a lot more of our friends were there so we stayed until 9 p.m chatting with everyone. We also talked to the new Trek team a lot about how they're feeling about Ukraine and what they're doing. Met a different John from California and Steve was telling him about our vision and he instantly called a guy named Kyle and set up a meeting for the next day to talk more about it.
March 27, Sunday: Steve went at 11 a.m and met Kyle - a 21-year old from Virginia who is living in Zaporozhye and has the same vision as us - to open a youth drop in center. They talked for about three hours all about their visions. And just as we had been praying for a team to hook up with, Kyle had been praying for people like us too. At 5 p.m we went to the youth church service at Bogdan and Marina's church where a guy from Canada was speaking so it was great to be able to hear his message in English first and foremost! Afterwards we went to Kyle's apartment and met some of his friends who are also working in Zaporozhye right now. One of them was Jessica - a girl we met the last time we were in Zap when she had just arrived here to teach English at an orpanage and she is still here two and a half years later.
March 28, Monday: Went with Kyle and Jessica to orphanage number 3 to sit in on their English class. We had tea and cookies (special because we were there) and they asked us questions in English. The class we were in was kids 11-14 years old and they were the sweetest kids. It was sad to think about their circumstances but there are groups in Zaporozhye that are working to give these kids a chance. To work with our early morning flight we had to leave Zaporozhye at 7:30 on the night train to Kiev. It was not a "fancy" train this time - only the Dnepipetrovsk trains are the nice ones apparently so it was a restless night. Our friend Marina (Z) escorted us back to Kiev and it was very much appreciated.
March 29, Tuesday:  Train arrived in Kiev at 6 a.m. After a McDonalds breakfast we took a taxi to Marina's friends' place where we had a morning nap before finding a hotel to spend the next night, mainly due to the aggressive nature of their cat (it bit Steve really badly and we didn't want it to bite Dez). The hotel we found looked very nice from the pictures and was inexpensive so we called a cab and headed over to it. We were both looking for your typical hotel-looking building and the cab driver ended up driving us down the driveway between these old, box-style, USSR apartment buildings. We stopped in front of the right one and discovered that the hotel we would be staying at was actually in an apartment building and was in fact, one apartment converted into six hotel rooms. It was still actually quite nice, just not what we expected and again Ev's words of wisdom rang through my head: "this is NOT North America". Check. We settled our things and then took the metro to the city center to take a look around before making it an early night back at the hotel.
March 30, Wednesday: Woke up at 3:15 a.m and were picked up by a taxi at 3:45. We were flying out of a different airport other than Borispol - the main airport in Kiev and we had no idea where it was. Apparently our cab driver didn't either because he was zig-zagging back and forth across what felt like the whole city - through residential areas, down multiple freeways, under some freaky bridge - it was crazy. Steve and I were praying the whole time that we wouldn't still be driving around at 6:10 when our flight was supposed to be leaving! But we did make it there in plenty of time! Said good-bye to Marina and boarded our flight. Dez slept the whole way again and we spent 12 hours in Norway before boarding our final flight to Malaga. It was so good to be back to warm, sunny weather!
All in all an amazing, tough, challenging, eye-opening trip!