So I’ve been traveling for somewhere around 30 hours
now. I kinda got confused on the
plane to Paris. We left JFK about
7, the sun was setting and 1 or 2 hours after take off it was dark. Then about and hour before we landed
the sun rose again and it was almost 8am.
I was ready to go to bed but people were eating breakfast…. Jetlag.
We sat in the Paris airport for a few hours while we waited
for the rest of our squad to arrive from other flights. We all got on one plane in Paris, and 3
hours later we were in Kiev, Ukraine.
We split up from here, and some of us went north and the rest of us went
south, with one group going to Romania.
I got on a bus with my team and two other teams and headed to the train
station. Our trains didn’t leave
for another few hours, so we all sprawled out in the station with all our
bags. We ate dinner at the station
and I had something like a Belgium waffle but more crispy and it had chocolate
on it. It was really really
good. Then I ate something that
resembled pizza but was more of like a cheese toast type thing with what I
think were mushrooms on it. It was
also pretty good.
So the leaders spent several hours buying our train tickets
the day before the rest of us got here.
I couldn’t understand why it would take several hours to buy train
tickets, but once I saw the ticket I could kind of understand. One thing about Ukraine is that they
don’t use the English alphabet and very few people here speak English. Of course I knew that coming here but I
didn’t anticipate it being so difficult to work around. When you have a piece of paper that has
some numbers over here and some in the corner and some sort of characters from
another alphabet on it, and you think that piece of paper might get you on a
train and the person you are trying to tell that we belong on this train
doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Ukrainian and she doesn’t know how to
tell you where to go, things get pretty confusing. Luckily we met a guy from Turkmenistan who spoke English and did some
translating for us. We made it on
the train but the tickets weren’t bought correctly. This was an overnight train so we got tickets for rooms that
you can sleep in. 4 people fit in
one room and we were all supposed to be together, but of course that didn’t
work out. I think all the guys
ended up in rooms with no one from our group in it. I stayed in a room with a married couple and one other man.
None of them spoke English but that didn’t really mater because we all pretty
much slept the whole time.
11:30pm in S.C.) and met our contact at the train station. He gave us a ride in his huge VW van
back to the place we are staying.
We are staying in what I can best describe as a very small Christian
hostel/missionary house. Its actually a house owned by someone in the states but lets missionaries use it. There are
a few other people here, at least one from the states, working with this
ministry. They run a camp here for
gypsies and work with gypsy children.
Ill be able to tell you guys more about that when we’ve actually had
some time working with them, but as for now, we sleep.
