Sports Camp

We had our last camp for the summer this past week and it was another sports camp. The last one was wildly popular so we decided to do it again although we knew that the turnout would be smaller due to school starting next week. We still had a decent turnout and the sport schedule was as follows: Monday - baseball, Tuesday - ball hockey, Wednesday - American football, Thursday - ball hockey by request, Friday - baseball. Unfortunately we were too busy most days to get pictures but these are from the first ball hockey day. There was a mixed game, then guys, then girls games. 

Would you believe that that's ME running over there?

There were only four girls that day but if I and the translator girl played then we'd have enough for a three-on-three game. Generally I'm not a "team sports" person other than say, baseball and I didn't want to, you know, embarrass my country by being CANADIAN and being terrible at hockey but I begrudgingly agreed to Steve's request to play and it turns out that it was really fun and I had a great time.

The whole week was great, we had a few new people and it was great to connect with a few people we haven't seen since the last sports camp and it was also a great time to invite them to #JustYouth the very next day.

Santi Visits + Basketball Camp

From August 8th to 16th our friend Santi (Santiago) was here with us visiting from Spain. We met him for the first time in Spain in May and he and Steve became friends really quickly. He came to help Steve run a basketball camp and to hang out with us. He managed to book a flight straight to Zaporozhye so our first step was finding the Zaporozhye airport, which is waaaaaaaay outside of the city, much further than we thought it would be. Santi said that the landing was the roughest he's ever experienced, due to the haphazardly paved runway but he landed safe and sound!

This is the airport: 

The boys love everyone but it sure helps if you come bearing gifts!

We took him to THE Ukrainian restaurant and the largest market in the city after church on his first full day here. It took a while for August to get passed calling him Santa or Fanta but they became fast friends.

 Monday morning at 11 they started the first day of basketball. Steve rented the gym at a school that we have some contact with and he also asked Garry (from Nicolaipolia) to come out and help because he has a lot of coaching and basketball experience. They had about five guys that came every single day and then there were more that came a few days here and there throughout the week.

 Poor guys though - the entire week was +38 and playing basketball for three hours a day in a non-air conditioned gym that was also +38 degrees was just intense for them. They were exhausted every day.

Santi is from Argentina and offered to cook us some Argentine empanadas for supper one day. It turns out that when he still lived in Argentina he owned a bakery with his Mom so he definitely showed me a thing or two about pastry dough!

 More basketball camp action:

It was a great week and really awesome to have Santi with us. It's always fun for us to have people here with us!!

English Camp: July 27-31

I'm extremely behind with blogging so I'll probably try and post a whole bunch in a row. 

We did an English camp during the last week of July at our church. It was from noon until three every day and would usually consist of a lesson, games and then discussion. 

On the last day we had a pizza party - I went and baked pizzas for everyone with the help of two girls who were really excited. Steve had promised them REAL pizza because they said that they really loved pizza and ate it everywhere they went.....Steve and I both know that Ukrainian pizza is not REAL pizza....pizza with mayonnaise on it is NOT real pizza!!! I was just finishing up and the pizzas were about to go in the oven when one girl whispered to the other in Russian: "where's the mayonnaise?" I practically yelled at her - MAYONNAISE DOES NOT GO ON REAL PIZZA! Okay, I didn't yell but I certainly felt like it!! 

All in all the week went really well. We saw some new faces that have consistently been coming to more of our events over the past month which is exactly what we're looking for!

Wedding

We met Ruslan and Katya very shortly after arriving here in Ukraine. Steve got involved in Young Life immediately upon our arrival and he and Ruslan became friends really quickly. We would both say that Ruslan is one of our closest and most trust-worthy friends here and his new wife Katya (although she doesn't speak a lick of English!) is a totally sweet, godly and gorgeous young woman. 

We helped Ruslan propose last year at Young Life Camp and were excited to finally greet the arrival of their big day! Steve and I were both up early this morning - Steve went to help some guys deliver chairs to the park where the wedding was happening and the boys and I went over to Katya's parents home to do her hair. 

The wedding was from 5:00 until 8:00 p.m at Oak Grove Park here in the city. I was really interested to see what it would be like - the first wedding we attended here was very typically Ukrainian (dancing, toasting and a lot of vodka) but the wedding today was the Christian version of a Ukrainian wedding, or in layman's terms....no vodka or dancing.

August was less than impressed before the ceremony began: 

The ceremony itself was very similar to weddings at home. They had attendants, vows, a message and exchanging of rings.

At the end of the ceremony, they walked down the aisle, got to the end and turned right back around and headed to the front again to be congratulated and blessed by their parents and then all of the guests.

After that there was food:

Appetizers of all sorts, few of which I had ever seen before! The rolled meat looking thing was I *think* stuffed chicken breast, cooked and cut into slices, the sandwich was a tomato and lemon sandwich, the eggroll-looking-things are actually bliny (blee-NEE) which are Ukrainian crepes and these ones were filled with meat (we usually eat sweet varieties). The square cracker thing with stuff on top was a very deliciously dilly egg salad on a tiny square of bread, with a pea, cucumber and a sprig of dill on top. The juice is kompot. They also had various tarts - one with a traditional New Years salad called olivye (o-liv-YAY) and another with chopped creamy mushrooms and corn in it.

Steve and I were quite appalled when there was no cake and we decided that they weren't really officially married until there was a cake but then they brought out delicious blueberry muffins and we decided that they were good enough to deem them officially married.

Our family:

After everyone had eaten and visited a few people sang and there were some games with the couple. They were all quite cute and interesting (from what we could understand).

The only traditional game that we know of was the tossing of the bouquet (the girls in red were Katya's bridesmaids):

Survival Club *WARNING* Snakes Ahead!!

This is really late in coming but here are a few pictures from a survival night that Steve and Ruslan did with some guys near the beginning of July. 

They took boats to an island in the middle of the Dniper river right here in the middle of the city. The island is about half a kilometer long and they found a vast array of.......snakes......for eating....and a lizard.

They also found a whole bunch of various fruit trees which was a very nice surprise for them:

Each of the guys with their supper ready for cooking over the fire:

 The snakes they usually catch are slightly venomous - as in, if you got bitten by a really really big one you *might* have to go to the hospital. Steve claims that they are more afraid of you than you are of them also, and they try to get away when you're hunting them....not that I will hopefully EVER personally have that experience. After you kill them they start to coil so if you skin them and put them on a stick they will wrap around the stick and you can cook them kind of like a really long, super disgusting hot dog over the fire (that was obviously my personal input on eating snake). Steve said that the Ukrainian guys seem to really like the taste of snake while he himself does not particularly. They enjoy eating a lot of dried fish here and snake tastes quite similar - fishy and swampy so that's why Steve thinks they like it, and he does not.

Out of some of the fruit they found they made kompot (kom-POTE) which is just fruit juice with the fruit pieces still in it.

They slept on the ground or in their boats and were up with the sunrise, wellllllll before 5:00 a.m.