From chaos to praise

This past Friday, Laurie and I experienced an odd event. The event included driving with a friend of a friend who's driving habits I can only describe as...chaotic. I literally had motion sickness from the drive, but afterwards we experienced such a lovely worship service at our friend's house. What was interesting was our song leader, who was very passionate and good at leading the group, was also our driver. I am convinced that automobiles and roads/traffic change people. For, our ride home was just as adventurous as our trip there. This drive was the first time we experienced someone using the tram line as a passing lane and what was a wee bit nerve racking was being stuck on the tram line for awhile since we could not merge back into traffic. However, we did make great time. We had one of the students from UBI come with us to translate for us. We asked him if Ukrainians needed to take a test to be able to drive, he said yes, and that what we were experiencing was not the norm for Ukrainian drivers for they do get tickets for unsafe driving. I don't think that our friend of a friend has had one yet...

The house service we went to was very warm. It was centered on worship, prayer and the Word. Many congregations here in Ukraine do not have buildings so many gather in homes or rent rooms from universities and such. This afternoon we went to a service that took place in a classroom at Donetsk National University. It was a fairly signature C of C service. I had to use the washroom afterwards. If you have not seen a squatter toilet before here is one from the University.

Last Saturday we taught our first English lessons. We were told we would be leading an English Bible study so that some English conversation could be practiced. However the English level was fairly low among the group so we had to start from the beginning. Actually, we used one of our Russian learning books to teach from since we don't have much else to work with. Next week I think we will be more creative, maybe use uno cards to practice colours and numbers.

We have a new home now. It is a nicely renovated, quaint little house just a 25 minute walk from the school. We are currently waiting for our Internet to be installed there and then we will move in. We don't have any pictures of it yet, but they'll come soon as we will move in this week.

Here are some pictures of our friends. The guys here like to play table tennis in the student lounge. Here is Sergei returning a monster serve. You can see the fear in his expression.

Bogdon is arm wrestling me. I must admit he is a stronger man than I.


Lena and Vladimir took us home from church on a bus this morning. It was our first time on public transportation. Here is Laurie and them.


The students here are fun and want to get to know us. They are full of joy and even though we cannot communicate with most of them we can sense their warm hearts.

This last picture is a man made mountain. It is a mountain of coal mine waste. When the ore below is excavated they extract all the coal and whatever remains is placed in these huge mounds of dirt. There are several coal mines here in Donetsk and they cause some serious pollution. Everywhere you look around town there are tall smoke stacks. Some very big, some only thirty feet tall.


The pipe in the picture is actually a gas line. The most recently developed areas in Donetsk have their gas lines buried but everywhere else they are above ground. It is kinda weird. You look down a street and you can see the gas line running parallel with the street, going vertical at places to make sure a tall vehicle could clear it. It's functional, but not the most beautiful.

All in all Laurie and I starting to feel more comfortable with the culture here in Donetsk. We start Russian lessons tomorrow and are going to work hard on that. We feel that this is our biggest barrier right now. We so wish we could speak freely with everyone we meet. We want to get to know people better but for now charades is the best we can do.