So, last night, I was sitting in our “hotel” which is basically a very nice apartment building on the church property where we are staying when a man named Lyodik walked in the door. We had met Lyodik the night before at the airport in Lviv. He drove one of the cars that brought us to Krements, the small town where we are working this month.
Anyway, Lyodik is always very excited about everything and loves talking to us… entirely in Ukrainian. He knows we don’t understand but he enjoys it and tries to teach us new words. We, however, don’t usually know what those words actually mean.
So, I am sitting in the common area and he walks in with a cardboard box. All while jabbering away in Ukrainian, he opens the box and pulls out a pizza. He holds in up to show me and continues talking. I smile and go back to my computer until I realize he is still looking at me as if he is waiting for a response. I look back and say pizza and then he starts again telling me all sorts of things in Ukrainian. I use the tiny amount of Russian that I know to tell him “I don’t know Ukrainian” as if he doesn’t know that and we both just continue to talk (him) and laugh (me).
Eventually, he puts the pizza down and uses both hands to first point at the pizza, then point at the whole apartment, then point at freezer, and finally, the microwave. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’ve got it- this pizza is for all of us living in the apartment (my team and a few others) and we should keep it in the freezer and then cook it in the microwave. I was pretty proud of myself here, until I realized that it took me about 5 minutes to figure this out when it should have taken all of 30 seconds- am I allowed to blame jet lag? So with the great pizza mystery solved, he left and stuffed our freezer full of pizza.
All done, right? Wrongo!
About 20 minutes later, one of the boys who lives upstairs in our apartment comes in with an identical box and he quite possibly knows even less English than Ludic. He puts the box down and says “pizza” and then tries to tell me basically everything that Ludic did and motions toward the freezer. I get up and open the freezer that is already full of pizza and show him to communicate two things. Number one, I understand! Number two, we don’t have room for all that pizza. He laughs and we start rearranging and fitting as many pizzas as possible in the freezer and have to move some to the fridge but all is well.
So, what did I eat for breakfast this morning? You guessed it, yoghurt! Haha I set you up for that, but I had yoghurt AND pizza.
Throughout the day, we apparently got ANOTHER delivery of pizza because the fridge is now almost as full of pizza as the freezer! AND THEN, while we were sitting eating dinner, a woman walked in with three pizzas in her hand, waved to us, and put them in the fridge.
We have no idea where the pizzas are from or why they were given to us but we are more than a little excited about them.
Ukrainian Pizza Fairy, I don’t know who you are or why this happened (aside from the fact that we are obviously walking in the Lord’s favor) but thank you!
Our first few days in Ukraine have been great and we are really loving the church we are getting to serve. Everyone has been so kind- the church members found out we didn’t have warm winter coats and literally brought more than 10 the first day we were here! This is already an awesome month and we can’t wait to see all that the Lord does through us here, especially during Easter, which, is in fact NOT April 1st but the 8th here. So, April Fools! It is not Easter.
