Skip to main content

Our TEAM and what we're doing!

Here's some info about our team here in Ukraine and how they tie into the Smile House. For those of you who don't know, the Smile House is a future transition home for orphans graduating the state-run orphan system. It has three floors plus a full size basement. In other words, its massive!
Yay Smile House! This building started as a dental clinic (hence the name), but for certain reasons that ministry could not continue as planned and Manna Worldwide came into possession of the building in 2009. The 3rd floor has two apartments: one large apartment for the Stoddard's, as Doug is the overseer of the project, and one small studio for orphans in the last transition into independent living. We are planning to live there temporarily while we finish the rest of the building. 
This is our team! The back row is the Stoddard Family. Doug (remember the unicycler of Ukraine? That's him!) is our director. His wife, Suzie, is a 2nd grade teacher at Kyiv Christian Acadamy (KCA), a school for missionary kids.  Below is a picture of Doug and Suzie's room!
They have four kids, but only two are living in Ukraine right now. Suzie is a wonderful cook and pictured below is her future kitchen! Though Ukrainians have done must of the labor in this room so far, I did get on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor....twice! This room has the most work to do right now.
Please refer to the picture of the team above. You'll see Benjamin in the middle back row. He's a hearty lad of 16 and likes soccer, goes to school at KCA, and has a brown and orange room. The work we did to finish this room includes prep and painting (anyone who's painted knows prep takes just as long if not longer than painting), laying the floor, installing baseboard (not quite done), hanging the door, and cleaning the windows (hours of scrubbing and scraping and windex)!
Megan is the youngest and only daughter of the Stoddard's. She's shy, also goes to school at KCA, and likes lime green and teal! The work we did in this room is the same list as above for Ben's room!  So beautiful!
The next picture is the Stoddard's living room! It is a lovely room with many windows (that Lexi and I got to clean) and it has a great view of some fields and trees. Daniel laid the floor (and in fact has laid all the flooring in this apt.), and we both painted.
This next picture is Doug's office, also known as the very first completed room!!!! It just needs a light fixture! This room has a funny smell to it for some reason that we can't figure out. It's not a bad smell; it's just wierd.
Not pictured: the laundry room and bathrooms. They are all painted pink and I didn't think you would like to see them.

Quick side note, our team is hilarious! We have fun together! We laugh a lot! We're planning to dig a tunnel to Poland! We smile and joke around! And we're all different heights!
In the lower left corner is Meisha. While not with Manna Worldwide, she is still a part of our team! She moved here just a few weeks after us and plans to work with orphans in Komorivka (the orphanage Doug has a relationship with). Right now she is in language school....which is loads of fun!
 
This is our friend and teammate Lexi. She recieved the Fellowship Award at Dartmouth and just came over to Ukraine for the next nine months. She has been here before and plans to continue serving at the orphanage and village of Komorivka.

That's our team! We are working as fast as we can on Smile House! Please pray everything will go smoothly so we can keep moving forward!
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 12, 2011 at 7:33 AM

    Love the colors - house is looking so good! AH

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The power of a hug

Three weeks ago at church, Masha sat next to me.   Masha is ten, has Downs Syndrome and is a fantastic hugger.  She just loves hugging.  So I try to always stop and hug her back.  During the service, she came in and sat between me and her dad, for a while she loved on her dad and then she leaned her head on my shoulder, so I leaned my head over onto hers, and she looked up at me with this big smile.  She reached around and gave me a shoulder hug, and then patted my head, and then rubbed my back for a few minutes.  I didn’t move the entire time because it just felt so good.  It was just simple, innocent affection, and it sent tingles up my spine.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about you need more hugs and back scratches. Human contact is so important.  That’s why I try and hug the kids when we go up to the orphanage.  These are just a few stories of some of the hugs I’ve given and gotten this past month, and why hugs are so imp...
4 comments
Read more

The Costs of Dehumanization

  Our friends, Marina and Ira, have family in Russia.   Not long after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, they spoke with those family members.   Those in Russia expressed their disgust that people in Ukraine were eating children.   Marina and Ira’s reaction was naturally surprise and horror.   In the early days of the war, back in 2014, state-controlled Russian news agencies had started to run a story about a young boy that had been crucified in Ukraine’s eastern territories.  The narrative was that this was what Ukrainians were doing to Russian speakers.  It didn’t take long for the story to be debunked.  But this was primarily outside of Russia, most people within Russia kept hearing this story, and stories like it. Over the years, the stories grew to the point where Russian citizens were hearing that Ukrainians were regularly eating babies.   This is why Marina and Ira were having this conversation.  They told their r...
Post a Comment
Read more

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain: Why shopping is a pain in Ukraine.

I used to like shopping. I thought it was fun. I love closure, and so nothing was more satisfying than crossing items off a list. I enjoyed the experience of checking out new stuff, looking for bargains, and of course everyone knows that buying stuff feels good.   That was then. This is now. Shopping here is a pain. Let me explain (hey, I’m a poet and I don’t even realize it)! First, we don’t have a car. That means we are at the mercy of public transportation, and so we have to keep that in mind when choosing what store to go to. Is it close to a bus or metro stop? Do we have to transfer metro lines? When we lived in the city center, we were really close to two metro lines. We like this store called MegaMarket, and it was only a few stops away on the metro. So, we would grab our backpacks, walk a block to the metro, go down a ridiculously long escalator, then hop on a metro and ride a couple stops down.   Then we would walk a few blocks and there it was..…Megamarket! Second re...
4 comments
Read more