May, Week #2

May means that strawberries start popping up in the markets! While strawberries are good, Steve is holding out for raspberries and I can't wait until watermelons make their appearance! 

May 9th was Victory Day and it was definitely kept low-key all across the city. We went to the beach with some friends for a shashlik which in my opinion, is the best outing any day of the week.

 Shashlik is just barbecue, but they definitely do it differently here. Usually when we shashlik we make a fire, let it die down and then set up this metal contraption with skewers of marinated chicken (or pork or more rarely due to price, beef).

 People will still call regular barbecuing with coals shashlik but they don't really do propane barbecues here.

For "a few days" in spring the city turns off the hot water to clean the system. Last year "a few days" ended up being three weeks but it didn't matter because our apartment had a hot water heater. Well...this year we're just hoping and praying that it's not actually three weeks because we don't have our own source of hot water! It went off Monday morning and this is how I've been heating water for baths:

I have 21 liters worth of pot space plus a two liter electric kettle that I boil and that add up to a pretty good amount of water in the tub! Jessica has invited us to her place to shower so we will probably go that route in the next couple of days!!

Today we were out at a camp for an event called "Time to Live". It is put on by New Hope church, Tomorrow Clubs, Young Life and another program called Real School that is run out of New Hope. They invited four schools from the city as well as the oldest class from orphanage #3 to attend a day filled with activities, games, a program and what they like to call "master classes", which are basically sessions to do crafts or sports. Steve was there first thing in the morning and I was able to be picked up later on in the day but as expected, it was pure and utter chaos the entire day. Both Steve's, and my master classes disappeared into thin air....skipped over? Forgotten about? Who knows! But it was fun to be there none-the-less - a beautiful +26 degree day to spend outside!!! 

 AND it was the first ploav (ploaf like loaf but with a V) of the season!!

 It was good but we were informed by an appalled friend that "this isn't REAL ploav!" Well, I would have never known and I thought it was delicious but that just goes to show how Ukrainian I am not.
Card making masterclass with Jessica:

We had Bible study this evening and it's always so refreshing! We meet with Garry and Teresa (the couple from Steinbach who farm in Nicolaipolia although Teresa is at home in Canada right now), Masha - our friend who works for them, Jessica and a handful of other random people who sometimes come and sometimes don't. We've been going through different books of the Bible - reading a couple of chapters and just talking about them and it's such a great time of fellowship and learning, we really enjoy it. Today Garry brought us fresh rhubarb and some fresh milk from his dairy farm. They produce 700 liters of milk a day and we're looking forward to a "field trip" to the farm next week!

Tomorrow night Steve and our friend Ruslan are going to an area outside of the city to do a survival camp-out and then Saturday morning there is a Young Life fishing event happening in that area as well so maybe we'll have some fresh fish for me to not know what to do with cook on Saturday.

Plans are being made for summer - our busiest time of the year - so pray for the youth to be available to come to our baseball/sports camps, Young Life camp and whatever else we will have going on!