It’s 12ºF! Yay! Now, I know some of you may be thinking: “No Greg, that’s cold.” but when you’ve been living in -12ºf for a week 12ºf starts looking mighty warm.
Here in Ukraine the holidays are finally over and school is back in session. That means it’s time to resume the English Club, a weekly class for students in the 10th and 11th grades at a public school here in Kyiv. It gives them an opportunity to talk with native English speakers and thus improve their English and it gives us an opportunity to be a light and example to the students in the school.
I went to the club a couple times before the holidays and got to participate with the students in their Christmas presentation of The Greatest Story Ever Told. The performance was entirely in English and they invited upwards of 50 of their friends and teachers. They did a great job!
Yesterday I met with the rest of the team 2 hours before the class at the YWAM office. Right now the team consists of Victor (the guy who started the club) Amy (who’s been helping him since the beginning) Torben and Jeannette (A couple who just moved here and will be DTS staff for YWAM Kyiv) and me! Anyway, before the class we had a little celebration for the new semester, planned for the class and prayed. Then it was time to go to the school!
Amy began the class by introducing Torben, Jeannette and me and encouraging the students to ask us questions. Remember, the goal is to make them speak English in conversation. After we went through the “Oh my! You have 9 brothers and sisters!” bit they asked about school in America and what it was like. They asked Jeannette about her wedding and wanted Torben to tell them about Danish customs. (Yes, he’s from Denmark). After that we played a couple group games designed to help them learn English and Torben did a geography quiz, guys versus girls.
We’re going to invite the guys to hang out with Victor, Torben and me and the girls to do whatever groups of girls do with Amy and Jeannette. We hope to make friends and help them find the Truth in this emerging nation plagued by alcoholism, gambling, prostitution, abortion and AIDS.
Well, I’m beginning to feel like we’re finally getting settled. The little ones are back into predictable sleeping and eating patterns, the bigger little ones have books, toys and games to keep them occupied, bigger ones have books, school, games and each-other as well as some ministry opportunities. We were blessed to have a new (working!) refrigerator as well as a dryer provided for us. Being able to store food and dry our clothes quickly has obviously been an immense help to all of us, especially Mom. The rest of us are happy to have cold drinks in the kitchen and not outside in “God’s freezer”. (It’s -10ºf right now.) Seriously though, I’m beginning to feel more like I’m at home and less like I’m living a winter episode of Little House on the Prairie.
So, I’ve finally decided to start a blog. SowWhat? Well, there are a few diffrent reasons I finally broke down and started this thing, the main one being I needed an excuse to design something grungy. :c) I also figure there might be one or two people mildly interested in my experiences here in Ukraine. So here it is!
For those of you who don’t know what a “blog” is, here’s a link to the Wikipedia page for ‘blog”. (Basically a blog is an online journal.) I’ll post about my experiences here in Ukraine as often as I have time to type something and something worth typing about.
Oh yeah, and for my tech-savvy friends here’s my RSS feed.