Goodbye Nepal, hello culture shock.
This place is amazingly overwhelming for a poor little World Racer who has spent the last nine months wading through garbage, dodging motorcycles, scavenging street food, and pooping in a hole (or on the side of a road), all in the company of chickens, children, and other various livestock.
In the first twelve hours of landing in Kiev, I sat on a western toilet, had a hot shower that didn’t require a bucket (the first in eight months), used high-speed internet, ate a Big Mac meal, and slept in the most comfortable bed (by myself) on the race. It was a little much to take in but once I shook the feeling of being at home, I praised God for Eastern Europe and, after our one-night stay, we packed up our stuff and headed to Lugansk.
Here in Lugansk, our contact is a way cool guy named Forrest who moved here from America with his family five years ago. Our second day in this city happened to coincide with Memorial Day back home so, being good ‘mericans, we had to have a cookout. So Forrest grabbed his family, his dog, a boat load of hotdogs, and his cargo-van-turned-family-van and we all packed in and headed to Russia. He took us to a World War II memorial on a little hilltop clearing where we sat around in lawn chairs, made a firepit, grilled hotdogs, and overlooked the Russian valley that was just across the river.
Our ministry this month is also awesome; the first half of the month we will be helping out in English classes and in the middle of the month we will move to a summer camp and help out there. Today we had our first day of helping out in the classes and it was one of the most fun days I’ve had in a while. Let me highlight it for you:
-First, we were split into three groups and after hearing that one of the schools was near a McDonalds, Ryan and I instantly volunteered to take that one. The two of us alone without more than three words of Russian between us, made our way downtown to this school we had only passed by earlier that day.
-We made it.
-Our first class, we were told a very long, extravagant, slightly gory Russian folk tale.
-Our second class, we sang “Gangsta’s paradise.”
-Our last class, we role-played. Ryan and I were the mother and father and we had to talk our daughter (a 20 year old college student) out of doing karate and our son (a 40 year old truck driver) out of taking belly dancing lessons. Please picture an older Ukrainian man with a heavy Russian accent saying, “But I like to jiggle,” while this young girl (also with a very heavy accent) is yelling, “Brother, you are so fat!” Obviously, I ended up peeing my pants a little.
-To end the night, we missed our bus stop, had to walk back a mile and a half, and, because we were parched from the long trek, we stopped to grab something to drink and I won my third free Coke of the day thanks to one of those “prize under the cap” sweepstakes.
(That’s Russia on the other side of the river.)
I’m digging Ukraine.
