February

We have SNOW and our first three weeks here were COLD! It was downright weird, ha ha. 

We celebrated Dezmond's seventh birthday on Feb. 8th.

We usually go to Igro Boom (kids place center) sometime around the boys' birthdays and we went with our friend Andre and his older son Eric this year. We ordered the pizza that the waitress highly recommended.....I can tell we had been out of Ukraine for a while when we actually listened to a pizza recommendation....and it was as un-pizza-like as it could be, with lettuce and cooked eggs on top.

 It tasted fine though, although I wouldn't have called it pizza.

Volleyball has been happening every Saturday from 12-2.

Yesterday there were 28-30 people who showed up to play which was awesome!

August's fifth birthday was February 12th:

The graduated orphan boys that Steve has been wanting to work more with ever since our friend Lyosha passed away in December have been coming to our apartment once every week. Steve has also been going to floor ball training with them, they're coming to Just Youth and volleyball on Saturdays. They are interested in learning English and studying the Bible together and Steve is excited to be working with them.

Steve started teaching English at school 71 (Dez's school) again and is hoping to renew ties with school 31 as well. There is potential to get into another school as well so he's hoping that works out.

On Friday while the boys were in school we picked up Jessica, her friend Caren who is here visiting and Ev Wiens who is here until April and we drove out to Malikaterinivka - a village about 30 minutes from our apartment, south of Zap. It is where Jessica purchased land in November to build a house for orphaned children.

She is in the middle of zoning paperwork and the headache that is doing anything in a foreign country but it's so amazing to see her vision slowly becoming a reality. Her website (House of Compassion) is in the LINKS tab at the side if you're interested in hearing more about what she is going to be doing.

We had a #JustYouth planning potluck/meeting on Saturday and the countdown is on until the next one.

In church this morning the boys got to celebrate their birthdays, which means getting a chocolate bar and being sung to.

Continue to pray for the war happening in Ukraine. We are not close to it here but things have escalated a lot in Avdiivka where our church has been ministering for the past couple of years. Two of our pastors head out there regularly with a van full of supplies and they share stories and pictures in church so keep them in your prayers.