Off to the Hospital
Denyce is in labor and we're leaving for the hospital. Just wanted to post a quick note so you will know.
I'll be sharing live updates on my Google+. Click here to view. I'll post them publicly so anyone can view them, no Google+ account necessary (though after a few days I'll make them private again, so I still recommend you sign up for Google+!).
Pray for a smooth delivery. Can't wait to find out, and share with you, what God gives us!
A Little Blog Housekeeping
I'm in the process of doing some badly needed updates to this site. The only evidence you'll notice is the most obvious -- a new look (if you're reading this in your email, you'll need to click through to the website to see it). But more important -- and what's more motivating for me to do this work -- is some under-the-hood stuff that I'm doing. Our blog wasn't bad 5 or 6 years ago when I last updated it, but in the meantime it's stayed the same while the state of the web and of blogging software has continued to develop. In comparison to what is out there, this has become way too hard to post stuff to.
So I'm in the process of doing several stages of sequential overhaul on this thing. What you see here is probably only a temporary step in between our old blog and the end result I'm moving toward, so don't be surprised if it keeps changing. This new look, for example, is something that I spent all of five minutes slaving over, because it's not likely to stick around long.
Finally, as a little memorial to the past however many years, here is a screen shot of the previous site:
Any Day Now
Could be tonight.
The due date is not technically for another week (the 24th), but Denyce has been saying since we first found out a due date that she thinks it will be a little earlier than that.
For now we're just working and waiting. I've been working a lot during the days trying to get plenty done before the baby comes. This has included things like developing support contacts, retooling our financial tracking/recordkeeping (we used to be on an accountable plan, now we're self-employed Schedule C), and just starting to dabble in helping Missions Resource Network (where I'm officing about 3 days a week) improve some of their IT-related stuff.
At home, Denyce and the boys have been spending lots of time with Denyce's mom, Kathy, who has moved in with us. She lives about an hour and a half away, across the metroplex, but she can work from home at least for the time being.
Our weekly OB appointment is in the morning, so we'll see if that comes with any new revelations about how things are progressing.
Meanwhile, Malachi turns 6 this Saturday. We decided to go ahead and plan a birthday party for him for Saturday morning. We're not doing anything complicated, just a get-together here at the house we're staying at, and we've invited a few families from Legacy who have one or more boys around our boys' ages. Everyone knows that the party will go down if the baby doesn't come along first. Otherwise all bets are off.
Letter from Jacob
A good friend of ours is teaching a 3rd-5th grade Bible class in Sumter, SC. This summer she is emphasizing a missions theme and we agreed for the class to "adopt" us as their missionary family to learn about us, about Ukraine, and about mission work.
Last month our friend had the kids write us short letters, and she mailed them to us earlier this month. The letters were great, with lots of good questions we'll write back to them to answer. But this letter below, from a boy named Jacob, has really had us laughing (transcript below if you can't read the photo):
Dear Mr. ROB and Ms. Denyecy
I'm just visiting South Carolina
Because My DaD is in third Army &
so we came to visit for the summer. So what
do people in UKRANE use as wepons.
Not a Bad Way to End the Day
Just thought I'd share an overview of the day today, with a few photos too.
I spent the morning working on some translation and preparation for my sermon for our assembly time this evening (in the Russian-speaking church plant). I adapted and translated a study and handout that I did for our Friday night Bible study with the Nigerians a couple of months ago.
After wolfing down some lunch I hurried out to pick up the LST team from the apartment they've been staying at. David was there already and we all rode together out to the airport to drop them off. It's been a quick two weeks that this team of 5 from the Seattle area spent here, but it's been productive and has definitely broken some new ground in the development of the work here in Kharkov. They read the Bible with a good number of folks -- I don't have the final tally available, but I know it was at least 34. Both Friday evenings while they were here, we hosted an "LST party" for all their readers here at our apartment. This last time a couple days ago we had 40 people altogether.
LST party Friday night
Many thanks to Dave, Kathy, Leandra, Janice, and Amber for their willingness to come and for the service they gave. They, and the word of God, definitely made an impact on people during these two weeks and we look forward to seeing how God grows some of the seeds that have been planted. I'm heavy-hearted about the fact that right as it's time to start working on follow-up for these, I'm needing to leave Ukraine for an extended period of time. But our teammates will do a good job.
Interestingly enough, while driving from the apartment to the airport with them to drop them off, we happened to spot three of the people who came and read with them for the past two weeks -- one lady on one street, and a lady and her daughter at another spot a couple of miles away. "One and a half million people in this city," commented one of the LST workers, "and we've just passed three of our readers."
From the airport David and I came straight back into town to Brandon and Katie's apartment. When we arrived the English-speaking assembly that our team started a month or two ago was already underway. This assembly is mainly geared toward an initial handful of Nigerian brothers, but we pray that it can grow to serve and evangelize a wider swath of the population of non-Russian speakers in Kharkov. Just this last week one Nigerian young man that has come to a couple of our events in the past few months was baptized by a Ukrainian preacher here in town. He joined the other Nigerian brothers at this English assembly today and we made a point to celebrate his new birth in Christ with him. His name is Kelvin.
Three Nigerian brothers and the five AIM students. That's Kelvin with the black pants.
Directly after the end of the English assembly it was time to head straight to another part of town where our normal (Russian-speaking) church assembly was to gather. This week was the first time we've had a formal Bible class in conjunction with the assembly (the hour before it). We hope that will serve to edify the church and each person in it. Our numbers were down a little today with one brother sick and some people out of town, but it was a good time together. For the sermon time I shared my handout and the thoughts that came from this particular study of the word.
The kids coloring together after our Russian assembly.
On the way home at the end of all this, my phone started ringing. It was Sergei, a neighbor of ours in our last apartment with whom I had a couple of Bible discussions quite a while ago. I haven't had any contact with him in over a year since we moved, although I have thought about him repeatedly and have been wanting to call and reconnect with him. So it was very interesting that he called me, seemingly out of the blue. He called to thank me for the Bible that I had given to him (this was at least a year and a half ago now). At the time he had shared with me about how he was reading from his Bible, which is a traditional, old translation that is sort of the Russian equivalent of the King James. At that time I gave him a Bible in a modern Russian translation. At the time he seemed mildly curious about it but was put off by how small the text was (he had a large print version of the old translation).
So I was a little surprised but very delighted to get this call from him a year and a half later, and he is singing the praises of the Bible I gave him. He said he has been reading and comparing several different Russian translations and after all this time he has decided that he thinks the translation I gave him is the best. He didn't go into detail on the phone call about how he came to that conclusion but I'll be curious to hear more. He said that it (the one I gave him) is now his "настольная книга." Literally translated, this means "tabletop book." A looser, but more meaningfully accurate, translation would be "the book he keeps closest within reach," "go-to book," or even "handbook."
That was one of those rare and very valuable "Oh yeah, this is what it's all about" kind of phone calls. And right before I'm having to leave for several months at least (he is out of town, so I can't even get together with him before we leave). But we agreed to exchange email addresses and I told him I'd love to hear, while I'm gone, about what he's reading (in the Bible) and what he thinks of it. God's word will be doing its work.
June Never Stops
This has been hands-down the busiest, fullest month in the work here in Kharkov so far. It's been wonderful, but at the same time exhausting.
Our new AIM team arrived at the beginning of the month. We've spent a good amount of time with them, helping them get set up and familiar with things here. Two of them (the two guys out of a team of five) are living with my family in our apartment and we are enjoying that. The team is two weeks into their full-time Russian language studies at a local university and I think that has been really challenging for them.
Separate from that, we're currently right in the middle of a two-week Let's Start Talking campaign. A group of five Americans from a church in Washington state is here working with us on that, and it's going well. This has brought us into contact with a number of new people and has expanded horizons in relationships with some people we already knew. It's a work in progress, and I look forward to seeing how the next week will go.
Separate from all of that, we've been planning and preparing for a second combined assembly of congregations, following after the very positive precedent of the first one we did on May 1st. This second one will be tomorrow, and this time around we are featuring the theme of help for those struggling with addictions and dependencies. We invited workers from a rehab center in a neighboring part of Ukraine, whom we knew about through mutual friends at Ukrainian Bible Institute in Donetsk. That husband and wife team of workers arrived in town today and he will be delivering the message at our assembly tomorrow.
In the midst of this we've also bought tickets and made arrangements to return to the US next month for some period of time to both have our baby, do our annual visa renewal process, and seek a sponsoring church and the monthly support we currently lack. We'll be leaving Ukraine on July 12th, arriving in DFW on the 13th, where we will be based for at least the next couple of months after that.
Well, there is a pretty minimal overview of what's been going on. Things have truly been going on overdrive at times lately, for both us and our teammates. Being so consumed with the work is not good in some ways but in other ways it's been very fulfilling to have so many good things to be working on, and to see some of the work that God is doing here. I could easily write a whole blog post about any given paragraph above. It's good to have so much that could be written, but at the same time, I didn't come to Ukraine to sit and write blog posts. But don't worry, I'll still cover it all in our next monthly newsletter, and may find time to squeeze in another blog post about some of this.
The Latest from Here (part 2)
Continuing from yesterday's part 1, here are more updates in regard to:
Previous sponsoring church: Sun Valley's partnership in our support is officially over at the end of this month -- in two days. As a congregation we wish them the best and we will continue to be blessed by many wonderful friendships there. They've transitioned about half of their Ukraine mission account balance to Legacy (the church managing our funds on an interim basis) and the rest is supposed to be transitioned by, well, two days from now.
Logistics: Assuming that our relationship with our sponsoring church would be at least the intended 6 years, if not for a lifetime, in early 2008 we moved almost all of our stateside logistical roots to the Phoenix area - mailing address, voter's registration, driver's licenses, etc. In the last month or two we've done as much as we can from 7,600 miles away to pick those roots back up. Denyce's sister and brother-in-law in Texas are now temporarily handling our mail. Voter registration and driver's licenses will have to wait until we are in the States, I think. We still have a filing cabinet storage box at the Sun Valley church building that we're going to have to get to Texas one way or another too.
Next sponsoring church: Who knows? I've written up a document articulating what we're looking for in a sponsoring church and we've sent that to a couple of places. We've been thinking and talking about various scenarios, and are looking into each of them, including such possibilities as:
- A church that already knows us and supports us taking on the role of sponsor in addition to their existing financial support.
- A church that has no financial resources to offer currently, but already knows us and would be eager to take on the spiritual, emotional, and logistical role of oversight.
- A church we've had no previous relationship with becoming our sponsor. This would require more time to establish the relationship, naturally, but we need to be open to that.
- One church has asked about possibly becoming a temporary sponsor all the way until our next furlough, but for now we are favoring taking the time to find a long-term sponsor sooner.
Support need: Since we got the news from Sun Valley, we have been blessed with a few new monthly supporters who have stepped up as the first part of replacing the support we are losing. As of right now we are still a little over $2,200 per month short, and we will be continuing to work on that.
Fundraising/Birthing plans: Before all of this came down in March, we had already made plans to go to Austria to have the baby later this summer. That is because 1) the medical care is very good there, 2) the cost of the care is lower there than in the US, and 3) our Ukrainian visas expire in August, which means our whole family has to leave Ukraine to obtain new visas at that time anyway. However, in the wake of our support situation now, and considering the input of some of our other partners and advisors, it seems like it might make the most sense to go ahead and travel back to the US to have the baby so that we can pursue in person whatever support opportunities can be available during that time. We haven't actually booked tickets to the US or cancelled arrangements in Austria yet, but we will likely be doing that this week. We'll keep you posted on this.
The Latest from Here (part 1)
In the midst of the constantly-evolving saga that has been the past two and a half months, I thought I should take a few paragraphs to fill you all in on how things are. It's been tempting not to do blog posts like this simply because our situation, plans, feelings, and mindset in the midst of all of this has rarely stayed the same for more than a few days, and so even now as I write this blog post it's probably got an expiration date that's sooner than that carton of milk in your fridge that you bought last week.
In an effort for this post not to become a mile-long string of text, I'm splitting it into two parts. This is part 1, and the rest will come tomorrow.
So here is the latest from us, in regard to:
Our family: We recently celebrated Denyce's birthday. The boys are doing well and we're encouraged by Malachi's growth in interacting with people in his limited Russian. We found a good school right down the street for the boys, but they are already out for the summer. Hoping to get him started in a school here in the fall (or whenever we get back...) Silas has recently been showing a strong penchant for singing, which he does often throughout any given day.
The pregnancy: Denyce is now in the third trimester. All is well, which we are so thankful for. We've tried to keep some of the stress of our situation off of her for the sake of her and the baby. That is easier said than done. Thankfully she is a woman of faith and has taken things well so far. We don't know the sex of the baby and don't plan to find out. Due date is August 21st or so. More about where we will be giving birth in part 2 of this post tomorrow.
The work in Kharkov: After a number of months of praying and planning, we've recently started the ball rolling toward a second new church plant in Kharkov. See this post and this post from teammates' blogs for details. This is exciting. Our English-through-the-Bible group is going well. We have a Christian young married couple in town right now who are deaf and are looking into opportunities for deaf ministry work in Eastern Europe. We are preparing for our first team of AIM students, who will arrive this Friday and serve with us for 1-2 years. We have an LST campaign coming up starting in mid-June, which will involve the most widescale publicity that we've attempted since our creation-evolution seminar. On the other hand, it's been frustrating, because of our support situation, to not be able to be as fully invested in the work right now as we otherwise would be able to be. Our teammates have picked up some of the slack but I also don't like to see the extra burden it places on them.
In tomorrow's part 2 we'll share more updates about our support search and upcoming plans.
Combined Assembly
(Note: in order to not reinvent the wheel, I am just adapting a blog post about this event from one of our teammates' blogs, rather than write basically the same thing myself. Original post on the Prices' blog here.)
To our knowledge there are a total of five congregations of the churches of Christ in Kharkov. The largest is around fifty or so, ours is somewhere around twenty, and the other three are under ten people (one has about three, I think). Kharkov is a city of about 1.5 million people, so having several congregations is definitely a good thing.
However, like many churches of Christ it seems, there isn’t a lot of communication between the different groups. One of the reasons why is because these five churches have been started by three different efforts over several years. Over time these groups have learned about each other, but there still hasn’t been a lot done as far as fellowship activities go.
Our dream for the churches we plant here in Kharkov is to keep them simple and, ideally, to continue to meet in apartments all around the city. Because one congregation can’t grow very large in number in a living room, we have had the long-term dream to have all the congregations that are started meet together once a month or so to encourage one another in a larger group. It’d be a time to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that we are part of a much larger family in this city.
Though our own group is just getting large enough to merit dividing into two groups, we have not made the move quite yet. However, we thought it’d be a great idea to try out one of these larger meetings by inviting all the churches of Christ in Kharkov to an area-wide worship service and to use that meeting to do some good. Our own congregation collected money to rent a place big enough for us all to meet in. Then an invitation was sent out to join us on May 1st to worship together and to take up a collection for a Christian organization working to provide relief in Japan for the earth quake and tsunami victims.
Sunday, May 1st was the big day and we were blessed to see 39 people come together that evening from all five congregations to worship and encourage one another. We arranged the schedule to allow men from all five groups to participate in the service, which turned out really well. It was so encouraging to see everyone fellowshipping with one another afterward, getting acquainted with their fellow brothers and sisters they hadn’t met before. We were told by several that if we hadn’t had this meeting on Ukraine’s Memorial Day weekend that we would have had many more which was good to hear. And, through our efforts of working together, we collected and sent $310 (USD) to the relief efforts in Japan.
Yesterday was the beginning of something very good in Kharkov, and we look forward to seeing how God grows this effort to bless Christians and non-Christians alike here in this great city.
Kharkov Remembers Chernobyl
One question we've been asked a number of times in the past few years is how close we are to Chernobyl and whether we are affected by it living here in Ukraine. Kharkov is about 280 miles from Chernobyl. Fortunately for Kharkov (but not fortunate for others), the wind was not blowing in this direction when the incident occurred, and Kharkov received no significant amount of direct radiation from Chernobyl. Instead, most of the radiation traveled up into Belarus, Russia, and other parts of Europe. To this day there are still measurable effects of Chernobyl in Austria and Germany, for example. The very worst of it, though is in the immediate area of Northern Ukraine and Southern Belarus, where to this day there are large swaths of contaminated land that are largely abandoned. These days the worst threat that Chernobyl can still pose to us is the possibility of buying and eating produce grown in contaminated soil. We try to buy local.
Kharkov does play a role in the Chernobyl story. As background, Kharkov has long been one of the capitals of physics research in the former Soviet Union. We have a physics university here that is well-known, at least in this part of the world. It was in Kharkov that the nucleus of an atom was split for the first time in the Soviet Union. But more specifically, there were Kharkovites on the ground at Chernobyl both at the time of the disaster and in the immediate aftermath. If I'm correctly understanding what I've read, the steam turbine in Chernobyl's reactor #4 (where the disaster occurred) was built in a factory in Kharkov. The night of the disaster, two men from the turbine plant in Kharkov where there at reactor #4, and they were two of the most immediate casulties. One of those is buried in a lead coffin in Kharkov (I'd really like to find out where -- which cemetery -- but I've yet to dig up any further details about the burial location). In the months that followed, some 20,000 people from Kharkov and the Kharkov area contributed to the massive containment effort, at the risk of their own health.
In one of the main parks here in the city there is a Chernobyl monument. I pass by it often and until recently it seemed kind of forgotten, sort of out of the way off of a main path and not ever attracting much interest that I could tell. But then sometime around mid-March I walked by and there were two men there with tools starting to take off old tiles. It looked like they were doing some sort of refurbishment. Over the weeks that followed the work around the monument gradually gained momentum. They were installing lighting, repainting parts of the monument, laying brick tiles to expand the area in front of the monument, installing new benches, laying sod, and more. Starting the weekend before last, they were even out there at night working under flood lights.
This past Tuesday marked 25 years since the Chernobyl accident. Fire trucks and ambulances came and parked near the monument, there were lots of balloons representing each of the 25 years since the accident, lots of flowers laid on the monument, lots of people milling around. We got over there right, apparently, after some kind of formal ceremony had been completed. Below are some pictures I took that day.
New landscaping and freshly planted flowers leading toward the monument.
You can see that the monument itself, when viewed from straight on, is shaped like the international symbol for radiation hazard.
At the center is a sculpture of a man who looks like he's being blown back by a blast, and has his arm and hand up shielding his eyes.
The whole front of the monument was covered that day with countless flowers and bouquets brought by those who had come. Normally visible, but almost completely covered by all the flowers, is large metallic lettering that says (when translated) "To the Chernobylites."
While I'm on the subject, here is one more interesting visual to share. Our teammate Dougle picked up a newspaper last week that featured an article about radiation in Ukraine with this large graphic. The blue arrow points to Kharkov. As you can see, according to whatever data this map is based on, we're in a good situation, but we don't have to travel too far to be in the yellow at least. I forgot to mark Chernobyl on the map, but it's in that U-shaped red area on the northern central border.
