I feel as though I have attempted to write this blog almost a dozen times now and yet I struggle to knock this sucker out. There has been several blog worthy events or moments this month and yet three weeks in and I have yet to get a single blog up . As a team, we have joked about all of the reasons we don’t write blogs nearly as often as before. Whether is be that we are lazy, don’t have to raise any more support, or the exhaustion that comes with being gone for 10 months straight, words don’t flow as easily as the use to and I struggle to figure out how to convey all that I am experiencing. I have found this to be true about my own personal journaling as well. It is almost as if there have been too many things that normally I would spend ample time processing, that they have all gotten jammed up in my mind and the result of it all is a horrible case of writer’s block. So this is my feeble attempt at accomplishing something while my mind is flying all over the place at the same time. I apologize for the lack of creativity.
This month we have been working with a church in Yalta, Ukraine. We are located on a hill overlooking the Black Sea. I think I have come to the conclusion that this is the most beautiful place I have been on the race. It is either here or our first month in the Philippines, but I think that the perfect climate here puts Yalta ahead.
For our first two weeks here, our main ministry was preparing the church and retreat center grounds for the summer camps. We did everything from weeding, clearing, sanding rust off of metal, painting metal, prepping wood, digging holes and carrying rocks. I honestly enjoyed doing manual labor again and it was cool seeing the progress we made on the compound.
This past week, we worked as leaders in the church’s summer camp for 6-12 year olds. I was assigned to work with a group of 12 year old boys who were quite the handful. It was quite the challenge trying to communicate with all the boys, however through a combination of hand gestures, broken English, and a Russian-English app on my ipod touch we managed to get to know each other fairly well.
I was also assigned to be the camp photographer for the week. Throughout the day I would take pictures of all the activities and then at night I would throw together a slide show for the kids. They all really enjoyed seeing what they did throughout the day and the church was also very thankful to have photos to use for marketing in the future. I took about 2000 photos during the week and so I am planning on throwing together a photo blog of just the camps, so you can look for that in the future.
Well, that is a brief summary of our time so far. I hope to get a few more posts out before we move on to our final month in Romania!
