Maksym, the pastor that is in
charge of us and tells us what to do, comes in to the house we are staying in
and tells us something about a village and how we are going there tomorrow
morning for 4 days. We were all
pretty stunned and didn’t really like how the news was broken to us. But Maksym insisted through our
translator that he told us 3 times already, a good example of the language
barrier that we have been working with.
This guy has earned the name Ukraimer, coined by Alex, and appropriately
entitled to Maksym. There should
be a video soon on one of my teammates blogs, then you will understand.
So
Saturday morning we all pile into the van; after it coming out of the shop with
a new clutch, this lady probably burns through a clutch about once a month. We drive about an hour, hour and half
out of Odessa to a village that I wont spell, but means “red flag” in Russian,
obviously due to communism. Riding
down the highway or interstate or whatever they are called here, there are
several unfinished bridges and roads that go over the highway, due to lack of
funding. The feel of the country
still has the lingering sense of communist rule. There are empty concrete buildings and barrack type
structures scattered about and I can only remember the story we were given when
we asked about life in the Soviet Union:
“During the summer the stores would get ice cream, but it was really
hard to come by, so when you saw someone with ice cream you would always run to
them and ask, ‘where did you get that ice cream!?’, they would tell you, but by
the time you got to the store, they were all out.” The only reason I believe this story is because people here
eat allot of ice cream, its everywhere, I ate some today.
We
arrive at a mans house, he shows us his garden, his family, and then takes us
to his church which will be our home for the next few days. Alexei is a pastor and friend of
Maksym. The church is small and
located on a side street of the one main street of the town. The neighbors have chickens, some have
cows, all have sizable gardens, some have horses equipped with buggies, which
is not out of the norm, in fact the opposite is most likely true. Saturday we rest and Sunday we pack all
our stuff up again and hide it for the church service of about 15-20+ people,
mostly families with several children.
We host an “English Club” that afternoon then Alex preached at the
service that night and some of us got up and shared our testimonies, all with a
translator. Its pretty hard
speaking through a translator, because we know on our side, things get lost in
translation, and most likely this is true on the other side. The service ended and we do what all
Eastern Europeans love, at least Ukrainians, we make a fire and cook sausages
on it. Not like good hearty bratwurst
sausages, but like hot-dog consistency large sausages. They weren’t that bad, but there was
like a hundred of them and only a handful of us, so we saved face as much as
possible and ate our fill until we couldn’t handle it, then when asked, with cheeks
full of sausage, if we wanted to do it again tomorrow, we said yes. Volleyball was a staple in the
village. All the kids love
volleyball, except no one had a net, so we just stood in a circle and hit the
ball around. When things really
got going, you weren’t allowed to use your hands, head only.
Tuesday
we had a day off from English club because we were supposed to go to the
neighboring village, but that got canceled. So Alex and I decided to take and adventure. The village was sort of in a valley. At least on three sides were pretty
sizable ridges. Our curiosity got
the best of us and we decided to try and get to the top of one. Because the roads were… paved, and we
wanted a challenge, we took the most direct route and went straight. We walked to the end of our road by a
pond, and took off through the fields.
The grass was tall and the ground was pretty soggy most of the way until
it turned into pure swamp until we got to the foot of the ridge. We made it to the top and had a great
view of the town but our expectations weren’t met because all that was on the
other side was fields and fields of something and what looked like an army
base.
So
for the days we spent in the village we hosted English clubs and did work
around the church that other people would have normally done but couldn’t due
to pregnancies and other illnesses.
Despite the fact that we were all pretty blindsided about going to the
village, it turned out to be one of the best couple of days we’ve had. Alexei told us that he had prayed for
God to send him people to do some work for him. He said he prayed that on Tuesday in a prayer meeting, and
on Thursday Maksym called him and told him about us. He said we were an answer to his prayers, as he was for us,
since gypsy camp was over and we had nothing on the agenda for next week.
After only being there 4 days, it was hard to
leave those people. A man named
Igor had some of the most contagious joy I’ve seen and I never understood a
word he said, and being encouraged through hearing another mans testimony of
his life as a Captain in the Soviet Army, becoming a Christian because his wife
heard the gospel through some missionaries that visited their town, and talking
to the English teacher in the school in the village who had never talked with a
native English speaker in her life…
Life there was pretty utopian, aside from the squatty potty. The weather was great, our neighbor
gave us milk from her cow and we got some raw honey from someone’s
