Welcome to Ukraine-
So here I am, sitting in a country
where I don’t speak one word of their language. And somehow, I am
supposed to live life with the people and build relationships with
them and hopefully God will do crazy things. SAY WHAT??? How did I
get here? I don’t know anyone here other than my 5 teamates whom I
just met a few weeks ago, and I just got done traveling for 4 days on
planes and trains to get to this place just outside of Russia. In
fact, I am currently farther east than Moscow and overlook the
Russian border at the camp I’m at. Over the next few weeks, I will be
working at this camp with about 130 Ukrainian kids. Right now, we
have a group from Fresno, California and every one of them is
bilingual- completely fluent in Russian. I am so excited to learn the
language- both so I can understand a little bit about what people are
saying around me and also be able to communicate the basics with
them. This would be nice since apparently people here do not
comprehend our blank stares and shrugged shoulders as us saying we
have no clue what they are saying 🙂 The husband and wife that work
this camp have two adopted children who are amazing. They are super
outgoing and help translate for us! I am a little bit worried for the
Fresno friends to leave us in a week because we will be on our own
not speaking any Russian. The kids here are pretty cute, they are
really really good at ultimate frisbee which they just learned from Americans a year ago, and I heard they were great at
soccer but I’m not so hot at that sport so I took a much needed nap.
So far, Ukraine is so great. The place we are staying at is actually
pretty nice, we have beds and showers—hallelujah. The food
situation has been quite interesting…my stomach is not all that
pleased with me at the moment. It will need to get over that real
fast.The kids here have such crazy stories. Most of them are from the orphanage and are super tough kids. Most of them smoke and have been since age 6. The girls dress like they work in Vegas by the age 8. Its really sad to see but its really cool teaching them games and playing with them. I just taught a bunch of them ninja and they absolutely love it. We can’t speak very many words to each other but they’ll come running up to me and say NINJA??? I am working on my Russian…it’s coming along quite nicely except when an adult spits out a sentence that doesn’t sound so pleasant and all I can say back is, Hi, my name is Ashley, yes, no and thank you. 🙂 Our translators get here soon…yay!
My team:
If I haven’t told you about my team yet
here ya go! Nathan is our leader- he’s great, he has an amazing sense
of humor and will definitely turn a tough sad situation into a
lighthearted funny one. Alissa- she’s from MN, so we understand each
others lingo and don’t make fun of each other for accents. Angela-
she is going to challenge everyone on the team by asking the
questions no body wants to be asked. She’s great and such a deep
person. Kris- she’s the baby on our team and in charge of all of our
finances. We have already started finishing each other’s sentences
and I’m thinking she will be my Jess Schaeffer for the year. Jess you
are not being replaced I promise- I miss you like crazy. And then
there’s Tyler- he has a huge sweat tooth like me so we get along
great. He has such a strong character and gets so excited when we
whip out scripture!
I am working on memorizing the entire
book of Philippians right now. I just started, and I have never
memorized a big chunk of the Bible like this before so you could be
praying for that.
Prayer Request: that our team would not
be hindered by the language barrier. God has us here for a reason and
we need to go all in and figure out what it is without being
discouraged by not knowing Russian. Also, pray that we learn some
Russian 🙂
