The Voices of Ukrainians

Janna and I live only about 5 miles from where most of the violence is taking place, but when we walk to the neighborhood grocery store, you can easily forget that we live in a country in turmoil because everything is going along just like normal.  At church, we’ve spent a lot of time praying about recent events, and about the future of Ukraine.  I can see the concern on everyone’s faces.  But on the other hand, last week when we went to the orphanage, not a single kid or teacher asked about events in Kyiv.  People write us everyday wondering if we are ok, if we are safe, when we are planning on evacuating the country.  But Tuesday night we went over to Second Chance and did English lessons with the girls, ate lasagna and played games.  Life is going along like normal, except that we check the Kyiv Post more regularly than usual.  At least for now, we aren’t in any danger.  But even if things get worse, I don’t want to leave, I want to keep working with the kids so that they will have

Please continue to pray for Ukraine as the protests are still going on. At first they were peaceful, but they are turning a little more violent. Its hard to follow all the news, but it seems like 5 people were killed during a clash between protestors and police. This makes my heart heavy. A picture we took last week.

Christmas break ended this Monday (the 13th) for the kids at the orphanage.  Originally, our plan was to  go up on Wednesday and give out our gifts of photo albums, flashlights and some candy.  But at the last minute we changed our plans.  We are going to wait to give out the presents. ******** The week before all the kids came back, I went up to Komarivka with a few friends.  It was still the holiday so there were only about 25-30 kids there.  It was a great time to reconnect with some of the kids that I had missed so much while we were in the US.  Near the end of the day, a youth group came up from a church in Kiev.  They were putting on a Christmas program for the kids.  This program consisted of a few puppet songs (Mom and Dad trained me how to do puppets, so that part was a bit painful to watch because they weren’t very good, but this is beside the point), a little play about an angel finding her way to the stable where Jesus was born (I think), and the Santa Claus came out and

Hey Friends, After being in the States for 4 months, we're back in Ukraine! We are so excited about this! First, however, we wanted to take a moment and apologize for not keeping the blog updated. We got locked out. Here's the story: many moons ago, blogger asked us if we wanted to further secure our blog. We had the option to have blogger "send a text" if they noticed any suspicious log-in attempts. We thought "sure, that's sounds good because with all the crazies out there, and hackers and stuff, you can't be too safe." So we did that, and then many months later, we arrived in the States and tried to log into our blog account. A box came up and said "you are logging in from new location. Click here so we can send you a text with a code."  The problem was, the text went to our Ukrainian phone, and we had not way to access it. I tried to get around it, but nothing worked. Not that I'm a computer genius or anything.  So, we're sorry