We Are Available ...

That is what we told everyone at UBI. We are available to help with whatever, and they have taken us up on that. This week I have been asked to teach a Christian Apologetics class and Laurie has been asked to take over the school daycare for the time being. The usual daycare worker needed to take a sudden leave of absence and so now Laurie gets to practice her Russian with a 1.5 year old and a 4 year old. She is quite thrilled to learn that she reads Russian at the same level as the 4 year old girl. They'll be study buddies, I guess. Also, we have been asked to teach a youth English class on Saturdays and currently we are studying Russian with a tutor three days a week so we are quite busy.

We have also learned recently that we need to plan and give ourselves plenty of time to shop and cook for ourselves. No longer can we rush home and have a quick dinner. This became apparent to us on Thursday when we had a Russian lesson from 4-6and we were starved afterwards. However, it took us 45 minutes to get home with the tram and walking so we realized then that we need to plan our time better.

We are now living in our new place. We can control the temperature inside...oooh that is such a luxury here. I believe almost all the apartments here share a hot water system but we have our own! Here are some pictures of our place. As you can see it is fairly nice. We looked at four different places here before we picked this one. For the price and location it was a no brainier. The other places available were closer to the school but their conditions were considerably less.




Here is a picture of our neighbor across the street.

Oh and here is the power plant that is basically in our back yard. That smoke stack is maybe five hundred feet from our front door. Our place though is still considered to be located downtown Donetsk. We have a twenty five minute walk to UBI from where we are at so downtown is a fairly large area.

This is a very interesting place to be. On one side of the street you see a beautiful modern commercial building and then on the other side there is a fifty year old building that has obviously been neglected. Laurie and I saw an extreme of this when we walked to the Amctop last Thursday. The Amstop is a large supermarket, the closest thing they have to a Walmart here. On the way there we came across huge, beautiful homes and right beside them were houses falling apart. We have been told that there are some here who are doing very well financially but the majority of the people are not. An American student we have visited with who studies economics tells us that the unemployment rate here is 25%...That is huge. He told us that the unemployment rate during the US Great Depression was only at 20%. There are definitely a lot of people in need here. We are looking forward to helping out where we can.

This last picture is of our neighborhood hoodlums. There are quite a few stray dogs here. These two are our roosters they bark quite a bit but our place is fairly sound proof. Every morning on our commute to school Laurie and I walk by a posse of homeless dogs. They look cute all cuddled together. There are about five of them but they are completely harmless