English Camp

Steve did double English camp duty this week - he was at School 71 from 10 a.m until 12 p.m and then he headed over to School 31 from 2 p.m until 4 p.m. 

His lesson plan is as follows: one hour discussion time followed by a one hour game. One day's discussion was if you could choose to have a super power, what would it be and what would you do with it. 

He's not allowed to talk about his faith in class but if they ask, he answers!

At School 31 he was with some younger kids which really isn't his target market as far as age groups go but maybe in a few years we can scoop these kids up, ha ha.

Teach a lesson, play a sport is his general motto I think.

The boys and I met him at School 71 after the lesson time a couple of days this week to get to know some of the teenagers, and today was the last day so we played ball hockey. Usually girls are very scared to play but once they start they love it! We played girls versus boys - three boys and seven girls, including me but I had to bow out early in the game because it was causing me too much pain. I had fun however and I think/hope that I helped the girls step out of their comfort zone a little bit!

Tomorrow and next week we have a few sports days planned so we've invited all of these new teenagers to come and hopefully we can build some new lasting relationships!

The Building Hunt Begins

Part of our dream when we were planning to move to Ukraine was to open a drop in center. We obviously haven't yet, but it's always been in the back of our minds, yet the longer we are here the more the idea has changed into something even grander. 

We want a space where we can run our programs all in one place. Along with doing a drop-in center we'd love to have English clubs, a big kitchen for cooking groups, musical instruments and maybe a recording studio, an arts and crafts room, a cafe with lots of fun Canadian treats, a big area outside where we could do sports among other things. We'd also love to have a few rooms for anyone who needs a place to stay or for any teams that would come in to give us a hand.

The more we thought about it, the more we thought that an old Soviet kindergarten would be the perfect building. Not only are they usually sprawling two storey buildings, they usually have a large fenced yard that has plenty of room for a basketball court, football, volleyball, maybe even a skate park - who knows.

Steve would always walk by this kindergarten and wish that it could be ours: 

It's obviously not in use but when we walked past it last week there was a lady doing yard work. Steve and his intern for the summer, Yegor went in and talked to her about who the building belongs to and whether or not it's for sale. It turns out that she was really friendly and helpful - it belongs to one of the factories and she wasn't sure if it was for sale but she gave us the phone number for the administrator.

All that being said, kindergarten buildings like this are generally owned by the government and cannot be sold. We haven't called the administrator yet but have already been told by a lot of people to not even bother trying because it's impossible. However, we know that God can do the impossible and that's what we're counting on! IF this is the building for us, there is no stopping His plan, and if it's NOT the building for us, then He'll show us which one is and He always knows something that we don't know. Please pray about this building - we're excited to see what God will do as we move forward with our BIG plan. And while we're just in the very very beginning steps, it's exciting and kind of scary all at the same time!

#JustYouth: May

We held our May Just Youth event this past Saturday. There was a beautiful sky over the church building beforehand: 

Summer typically has fewer people in attendance but we didn't really think we'd have a small crowd yet so imagine our surprise when we had only 25 people including us! There are quite a number of reasons why this happened - the main one being that it was the last week of school and Friday/ Saturday were graduation days for students.

We planned a "people bingo" game based on having more than 24 people so we had to switch it up a bit to make it work, but it did.

The great thing about having so few people was that Steve turned his message about freedom in Christ into a discussion time, and it was absolutely awesome.

There were a lot of hard questions for him and we had some of our more mature Christian friends share stories from their own lives as well and it was such a blessing in disguise to have such a small, informal group. Buuuuut we always hope that we have more next time!