3 Days On A Train

It’s hard to believe month 9 has come and gone. Ukraine was a wonderful month of laughter, hard work, rest, and community. We had the opportunity to serve at a pastors retreat center in Gasper, Ukraine. We spent most days painting a bright blue fence that surrounded the property and on some days we helped with cleaning and gardening around the property. We also enjoyed teaching English through conversation and worship songs in the evenings. On Sundays we got to contribute at the church there, one of the boys would preach, us girls sang some worship songs, and we each shared some of our stories and experiences from Africa that they were very interested in. This month I learned a lot about working for the Lord, not man… 🙂

 

Left: Me, adorable Anna, and Sarah playing one night after English class. Right: This was the pastor we worked with. Pastor Nicholi. This was a night I’ll never forget. He was so precious. At this point we hadn’t interacted much with him because of language barriers. This particular evening he saw our team sitting together in the main sitting room and without communicating a word he brought out all this special  tea and cookies and started serving us. He would speak some words and then laugh because we couldn’t understand him. The joy on his face the whole night was priceless. We had such a good time! 

  

 The rat had to die! You may remember from my last post, our troubles with the little critter. After countless attempts to capture him during our sleepless nights, our FINAL night there, Lyndsie and David got him! 

  

 Left: Team night outside. Drinking hot chocolate and enjoying some ‘Charlotte’ worship jams! Right: Our view of the Black Sea from the top level of the resort center.

 

This is our Lil’ David. Pastor’s grandson who our team kind of took under our wings. He was always the only kid there all day as we worked. He desperately wanted attention and someone to play with, so he was constantly seeking us out and trying to help with whatever we were doing. By the end of the month he was our little buddy and like in this picture made himself welcome and comfortable in our room!

 

On October 5th, we said goodbye to our beautiful view of the B.S. ( A.K.A. Black Sea ) and began our 3 day trek to our tenth country. We have discovered that we have the ability to sleep anywhere. We started with a 18 hour train ride from Yalta back to the capital city Kiev. We hopped off the train at 9:00 A.M. and quickly got comfortable waiting at the train station. Two people went to hunt down tickets for the next leg while the rest of us went and gathered breakfast from McDonalds for Catherine’s birthday. It was a freezing cold, yet memorable fun morning. I too was ecstatic to surprisingly run into a some of my previous teammates there. We had a few precious moments to embrace hugs and catch up. I love sudden sweet sweet moments on the race like that one. Our next train ride (27 hours) took us through the three countries of Ukraine, Moldova,  & Romania, in which leaving and entering each one we were awoken throughout the night by our bunks being searched by customs, guards and dogs  Weary we stood in the hall, oblivious to what was going on. At one point we all willingly, in our slumber, handed over our passports to a guy who disappeared with them. I then spent the next twenty minutes half awake begging God to return them to us safely. Although initially these 27 hours were something we were mostly dreading, we quickly realized upon boarding the train, that this was gonna be a good ride. It was full of laughter, jokes, reading, praying, sleeping, and lots of girl talk. Finally, we arrived in Bucharest, Romania where we parked it with all our packs at McDonalds once again. Still outside, still FREEZING and wearing every layer I had. Four hours later we were off on our third and final train, 8 hours overnight to Timisoara. This time, no sleeper cars, just four straight up seats that faced each other with bright lights all night long.  At 7 am we stumbled off the train and were greeted by our welcoming contact, Dwight, whom we all quickly fell in love with. We somehow managed to packed has van, fitting all of our gear and the 8 of us comfortably. We prayed together and then were off to begin month 10.

 

 Charlotte, Monica, Me, and Michelle goofing off in our room!