All
flights, bus and train rides were successful. Team Koinonia is packed away
safely in Odessa, Ukraine for three weeks. We started our journey together last
Wednesday from JFK international airport, after a short layover in Paris we
arrived in Kiev, Ukraine on Thursday. Right after we arrived in Kiev we hopped
on a bus that took us to the central train station where we awaited our 10 hour
train ride to Odessa. We had no clue how to read our train tickets but found
someone who spoke English to help us decipher our ticket numbers. We finally
got settled in our trains cars and off to Odessa we went. In
Odessa, My team and I are staying at a house for missionaries. Our hosts are
extremely hospitable and gracious. For the past few days we have been working
at a camp for Gypsy children.
These children are absolutely beautiful and have
an innocence only God could give! We’ve done such things as sing songs, soccer,
baseball, and other silly games. They practice their English on us and try to
teach us words in Russian or Gypsy. It’s pretty cool though, how God can bring
people together through very few words. It’s been such a beautiful thing to
have the opportunity to love on these little ones right as we arrive to Odessa.
They are a breathe of fresh air!
There
is a huge language barrier with not many Ukrainians speaking English and us
struggling to utter a few Ukrainian words but God has been SO gracious. I can
truly say that God is bigger than any language barrier and it will never stop
His Spirit from moving. He’s providing a translator and helpers for us at
exactly the right moments. He provides Ahna when we have questions for our most
wonderful host Maxim. He provided Brittany, an American living in Ukraine
studying Russian, when we needed to take a trip the market and when we needed
internet. He provided a man on the train to help us find the right train cars
so as to avoid getting yelled at in Russian.
I
just can’t get over His goodness! I continue to speak over myself the words, “I
have been called!� It’s humbling and it’s overwhelming but never the less I
have been called and God is the One at work! I can’t possibly imagine what He
will continue to do here in Ukraine and in every other country that we step
foot in this year. All I can say is that He has provided immense grace to meet
the challenge.
“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things
at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good
work.”
-2 Corinthians 9:8-
Love You All!
**This is a excerpt from my teammate, Michele Hop’s blog about the Gypsy culture:
The gypsy people are a people group without
a country, or a government. Thereis not a certain number of how many
gypsy
people are spread across Europe and Asia, but Maxim told us that there
are about 400.000 in Ukraine. The original Gypsy people came from India,
they were artists, dancers and craftsman come from a lower caste who
left the country and moved elsewhere. They have roamed all over Asia and
Europe and faced a lot of persecution.
Hitler considered them a worthless people and had them on
the list of
people groups he planned to systematically wipe out. While Hitler’s
plans were thwarted, the gypsies are still viewed as outcasts in modern
society. They also keep themselves separated from others, believing that
there are two types of people: gypsy and non-gypsy.
Their cultural skills, such as craftsmanship and
horsemanship, are
quickly becoming obsolete. That, combined with the stereotypes that
gypsies are involved in bad magic and are thieves and lairs, has made it
hard for the gypsy people to take a healthy role in society.
Maxim and others work to help the gypsy people
get documents, gain
literacy, and break down the racial barriers that keep them
separate. Maxim and his fellow missionaries work to share the gospel
with these people, confident that God’s word of hope and peace can break
down some of the walls. One of the main focuses of missionaries to the
gypsies are the gypsy children.
