If you were wondering about what our daily life looks like in Ukraine, I’m pulling back the curtain a little bit in this blog! Hope you enjoy!
My team stayed in Ternopil, Ukraine, and just like this picture says, we loved it!
I don’t think I can adequately express just how much I love these group of human beings… or how much these human beings love ice cream. This night in particular we each bought a tub of ice cream and proceeded to eat all of said ice cream together.
These are the girls made Ukraine feel like home. They were all excellent translators, but even more, they were great friends. We took a girls’ day to get lunch and explore Ternopil.
This special moment I was teaching Josh how to braid hair using Regan’s head as a teaching tool. (For the record, Josh asked us to teach him!)
This was a typical breakfast for us! Yogurt, granola, the most delicious raspberries, bread with peanut butter or apple butter (or both!).
Whenever we walked around Ternopil we always looked for opportunities to talk to people and share the love of Jesus. These two people were completely open to talking to us about God and the Church and people and life.
Literally always and forever toting around my big pack. Here we are getting ready to leave Lviv, Ukraine (which we flew in to), to head to our ministry city of Ternopil.
This is a homeless woman that we got to sit with, talk with, pray with, and ultimately buy her dinner and medicine for her eyes. It was so humbling to sit with someone who is so precious to God and to show her love, despite language barriers.
Typical meal in Ukraine called “borsch.” It’s a soup with beats, potatoes, cheese, and a bunch of other delicious stuff.
Different families from the church would host us for dinner so we got to know a lot of different people this way!
On an almost daily basis, at least one person on our team ended up matching someone else (apparently we all have very similar taste in clothes!). Josh was a repeat offender, matching us girls all the time.
Living in Christian community looks a lot like interrupting ordinary activities (like Regan and Kayla’s game of Go Fish) with intense and deep theological discussions.
Kayla became our team back-walker, so here you see us helping her balance while she walked on Danny’s back. Just before this photo was taken, she also walked on Josh and Regan’s backs.
One of my favorite things that brought us together as a team was helping our team treasurer (Kayla) out with the finances. In this picture we handmade her some envelopes to help her stay organized.
We had a few opportunities to go on some amazing adventures, like the weekend we traveled to Poland, saw Auschwitz, and explored Krakow, which meant a lot of time in buses together. I love traveling with these folks!
Here we see Regan and Kayla on a public bus in our daily commute to ministry. Public transportation is really popular.
And when we weren’t on buses, we were walking EVERYWHERE. It was glorious! Here we are actually in Krakow, Poland.
Here we fit 8 of us and our driver (so 9 total) into a 5 passenger van… This wasn’t a daily thing, but I think this depicts just how close we were all month. All the girls shared one room and the boys shared another, and we all shared one bathroom. Needless to say, we bumped into each other a lot.
Everyday we were blown away by the generosity and hospitality of the people of Ukraine! This is our friend Tolik and his wife, and they opened their home to us, filled our bellies with pizza and cake, and our hearts and spirits with joy and laughter.
These two kiddos were from our Day Camp ministry, and I absolutely fell in love with their little hearts. We did a lot of silly things with the kids, and fish lips was one of them! Also, photobombing.
This was the last day of our first week of teaching English to the middle/high schoolers. This is me in action I suppose! I loved these kids, and at the end of the week they all wrote me a letter and gave me gifts and totally made me feel loved and appreciated.
This was one of our favorite treats in Ukraine. We called it “The Pocket Place.” They were some sort of bread stuffed with random stuff, like chicken and tomatoes and mushrooms and cheese. You could smell them when you got off the bus, and most of us had at least a few “pockets” each week. We made friends with the woman who worked here, whose name was Ana. She was incredibly sweet, and even though she didn’t speak English, we shared smiles and laughter and Jesus with her.
I had the absolute honor and delight of living with these two amazing women this month. I cannot tell you how much they mean to me, and how much I love them already. We are sisters, and I’m so excited to continue this journey together. Also, more matching. And also, more photobombing.
Ukraine’s mosquito population was very glad when I arrived. I think I had somewhere around 100+ bug bites over the course of the month. Here we see these lovely ladies taping up Kayla’s mosquito net in our window so that I would no longer be feasted upon.
We also made ministry our own by playing soccer on a weekly basis with locals. It was SO much fun! At the end of the month we shared with them why we were in Ukraine, and got to pray over them.
It was SO hard to choose which photos to represent our typical life in Ukraine, since our daily activities did seem to vary a lot, and since life was so rich and vibrant last month! PLEASE ask me questions! What do you want to hear about from my first month on the World Race? What do you want to know about Ukraine? About living in community? About my team? About me? Shoot all your questions my way in the comments below!
