The Voices of Ukrainians

MegaCommentary© on MegaMarket, a Ukrainian grocery store. The following is a basic list of the layout, with insightful and interesting comments added for your enjoyment: Bakery-also known as Heaven. Cereal-one of my favorite foods! Cooking oils-don’t know the difference between any of them yet! Sauces-ketchup, tarter, tomato, etc. FUN FACT: GUESS HOW MUCH TOBASCO SAUCE IS??? 429 g.r.n = $53! Canned fruits and veggies-limited to tomatoes, olives, corn, pineapple, peaches, and a few others. Cookies-aisles and aisles of cookies, all varieties! It’s been fun trying them. Tea and cookies is huge here. Chips-mostly potato, with flavors such as sour cream and onion, bacon, squid, and crab. Hooray! Canned fish-and lots of it. Alcohol-where you can buy a liter for 50 cents, which is the same price as water. Nuts, sunflower seeds, and dried fruit-you can find dried anything here. Dairy-the biggest bottle of milk you can buy is one liter. We buy milk every 2 days. Produce-where you can buy a t

We saw an actual real-life American style pick-up on August 11th.   A Dodge Ram with a bed that could hold something over 8 feet long.   It only took us 30 days in a city with 5 million people to see one.   We arrived in Ukraine on July 11, so that means we have been here for one month, and we thought it would be a good time to reflect. Daniel :                 It’s crazy to think that it was less than a year ago when we hopped on a plane to come to Ukraine for the first time.   When we headed back to the States we knew that we wanted to come and be a part of the work going on here, but didn’t really know how long that would take to make that dream a reality.   Here we are less than a year later.   We found out this month that we raised our support in record breaking time (thank you again to all of you who are making this possible)!   We are in immersion language school, and in a few weeks we start some very serious work on Smile House.   In the meantime, we are building relationship

Bogdon and Andre Baptizing Dimon                                                                       Vova    Everyone praying for the new believers It was a great day! Last week we were able to witness two Baptisms at Safe Haven.  Dimon and Vova are two of the young men who have only been in the house for a little over a month.  We all hiked down to the lake.  Bogdon read a little from the Bible and then he and Andre took the two young men into the lake and baptized them.   Afterwards everyone prayed over their two new brothers.    The great thing was that when we went back to the house, we had cake.  And why not?  It was their new birthday after all!

Our first trip to the grocery store! We wanted to make spaghetti that night and bought what we thought was spaghetti sauce. turns out it was ketchup (flavored ketchup). So our dinner was very interesting; i added about 10 cups of garlic and fresh basil to the sauce. It was okay, just super sweet! Just found tomato paste, so that won't be happening again!

We do lots of stupid things, which keeps our days interesting. One day we needed toilet paper, so we went to the store and bought some (2 packages with 4 rolls in each package). Turns out we bought paper towels! We didn't notice that it was 2 rolls, not 4! so daniel went back to the store and came home with two more packages of toilet paper....except that they were paper towels...again!!! He just wasn't paying attention, because the ones he bought even said "paper towels" in English! So he had to go back out again to get toilet paper!

One of our many shopping blunders! An innocent little bag of tortillas? I think not! Paul Bunyan's coming to town and he's eating with us!

What is church …? In language school we are doing a homestay where we live with a Ukrainian lady who speaks Russian with us.   She is a sweet lady and a wonderful hostess, but she speaks very little English and at present, we speak even less Russian.   Our first week here she asked me what we “do on weekend?”   I told her our Saturday plans and said on Sunday, “We go to church.”   “Schtoe Church?” (What is church?) She replied. Umm.   How do you explain church when you can’t explain anything?   “Gdeeya mui Slava Bog.” (Where we praise God) I said … exhausting my religious vocabulary.   She didn’t get it.   So after about 15 minutes of back and forth in English and Russian, I got as far as “place we Praise God … in a house … with friends?”   And each of those statements add a whole new level of confusion to her expression.   I know church isn’t place , but I still wrestle with the question, “What is Church?”   It’s the Body of Christ, but what is that, really?   I plan on asking Jesus

Not too long ago, I watched a four year old walk up to the bathroom door, pull down his pants, walk into the bathroom, and close the door.   I thought it was hilarious, because, hey, he didn’t know better.    Now if I did something like that … I think my mom would be getting a few complaints, I’m 29 after all.   But the other day we got on the wrong bus (I think the wrong bus factor will play into a lot of our stories).   There are different types of busses in Kiev.   Five, I think.   I had only one of them figured out … and this one wasn’t one of those busses.   On this bus, you get on.   You pay.   You get a ticket.   You stamp the ticket, yourself .   Then you hang out until your stop.   The busses I know, you pay and you get off.   We didn’t know the other rules. So we got on. (Janna and I were with a friend from school.   He didn’t know any bus rules.) I handed money for two of us to the guy in front of us, and he passed back our tickets (apparently stamping them in the process)