Weekend Journeys and Excursions

Saturday July 10 and Sunday July 11   by Meredith

Saturday morning, we finished up English Camp with card-making, conversation, and more out-of-the-park meals.  Mmmmmm.  When your breakfast has a dessert to go with it, you know you're in the right place...  We began the reverse process to get our luggage and ourselves off the mountain and back to the mahtshutka station, and we hiked down to the "willage".  (Ukrainians learning English often have trouble with the letter V, despite having a multitude of "v" sounds in their own language... No longer "Wisiting willages" is one of the fine points of language that we helped our advanced students appreciate.) 

Bus 1 had a rough go of it, I understand, packed in to every seat and then some.  Bus 2, where I was riding, was thoroughly pleasant.  An hour and twenty minutes brought us safely into Ivano-Frankivsk, where we all met up and went exploring in the city with our Ukrainian friends from English camp.  Eric, the Nixons, the Bottomses and I went with some of the girls to a restaurant (selected after some of the group assured themselves that it wasn't a sushi place, despite all appearances.  Sushi is really big here in Ukraine, and--not to slight sushi--no one knows why.  There are no Italian, Chinese, etc. restaurants, but sushi on every corner of the cities...)  The Americans ordered slow-cooking food, and we dashed back to the train station to meet the group rendezvous time. 

The train was another adventure.  It was just a three hour ride, and we wanted to save money for our team and for the Ukrainian students, so we traveled on the lowest class tickets.  Seats were assigned, but roundly ignored, so we all crammed ourselves into various open seats.  More and more people got on the train, and we had a slightly rough start to our area as the babucya (older woman) sitting next to me got very angry when we protested adding two more sleeping people above our heads.  It looked like it was going to be a tense ride, when she opened up her big shopping bag and pulled a packet of cookies out and insisted that we eat them.  After that, she and David, the missionary pastor, had a great conversation in Ukrainian, and she left the train with happy "bye-byes" and a reasonably serious promise to come visit the Methodist church service sometime.  God turns things upside-down and always has a "twist" to the story!

Today, we woke up back at our hostel--'back home' to us, now!--and went for a big brunch at the traditional Ukrainian restaurant that has franchises all over the country.  Yum!  One of the girls from the student center took us sightseeing in L'viv and taught us just the right amount about what we were seeing.  Highlights for me included the Armenian Orthodox church built in 1363 with beautiful murals (and painted lambs circling the domed ceiling at the entrance!) and the statue dedicated to the first printer in Ukraine--complete with a huge book fair filling the square at his feet. 

Most of the team climbed the tower in L'viv's city hall to see the city from up high...but a few of us hung out down below and people-watched as tourists from Ukraine and Poland (and Buffalo, NY) wandered around and read the history displays in the square. 

Church was at 5:00, and we heard a good sermon from Pastor Ludomir about Mary and Martha--Mary the disciple chose the 'best dish' at the banquet table that Christ offered!  Dinner was pizza again, and then we got ready for VBS tomorrow.

Throughout the day, we stretched ourselves in getting ready for VBS, or, as it's called here, 'Kid's Club'.  (VBS is a very American thing...and so very foreign to Ukrainians!)  In the morning, afternoon and evening, we went out in small groups with interpreters to invite kids/parents to come to Kid's Club this week.  I haven't done a lot of one-to-one cold-call evangelism in my life in America, let alone in a foreign culture, and that seemed to be true for all of us.  We did our best to be inviting and reassuring--but it was tough going sometimes when people would dismiss us as being some kind of 'sect'--which to most Ukrainians means 'cult'.  David and Yura told us that, really, it's mostly just the Jehovah's Witnesses, fundamentalists and the LDS folks who walk up to strangers and invite them to church-oriented events, and those groups are very much disliked by the vast majority of the population (who are Greek Catholic or Orthodox).  Our teams worked really hard, though, and ended up having some great conversations with people who seemed excited to bring their kids tomorrow.  We'll see!! 

We're eager to get started with 'Kids Club', and all the other things planned for tomorrow.  The youngest members of our team and some of the student center young people went out to the Fan Zone tonight.  It's a big screen in the local park for the World Cup, with games to play all day today, and a strict no-alcohol policy tonight during the game--as our Ukrainian friends tell us, it's the nicest place in town to watch the game without hooligans and with a HUGE screen!   I see on the computer that the score is still 0-0, and I will have to wait till morning to hear the final... 

Thanks for reading and thanks for keeping our team in your prayers.  We're having a great experience, doing good work, and growing as a team.  I would apologize for the double (and extra-long) post, but surely you were forewarned when you saw that it was the pastor's day to write??  :)