Thursday, September 27, 2007
Some of the evangelism teams, especially those who will minister far from Kiev, have left on their missionary journeys. The teams for Odessa and Izmail, on the Black Sea, thought they’d be on a train for 12 hours, but learned they’d be riding in a van for “only” six or eight hours.

Others plugged in at the student computer lab, on the second floor of the administration building. Rather than negotiate Microsoft Windows environments in the Cyrillic script and Ukrainian language, and frequent misspellings due to a different keyboard layout, four people chose to connect their own laptop computers to the Internet cables. Well, that was not completely successful! DNS and INS numbers, Internet configurations, preferences, packets received and sent, LANs, and all kinds of buzzwords for nerds were tossed about! But the connection speed felt like a shared dial-up, with delays being common. Definitely not broadband. Still, all agreed that it was good to at least answer a few personal e-mails, if not upload large media files to The Quiet Hour!

The evangelism coordinators met at the union conference office in Kiev today, after about 70 minutes of riding through forest, then the congested streets of the city. Congested is a double entendre’. Lane markings are generally followed, but… the vehicles crowd in from side streets when they see an inch of space between cars. And the exhaust emissions: break out the inhalers and cough drops!

Vladimir Krupsky, union mission president, met with Quiet Hour and ShareHim coordinators to consider this and future evangelism plans.

Routes for the coordinators were determined, and a driver and translator assigned to each of three teams: Mike Porter to the east country, Mauri Bascom to the west, and Luis Leonor and I to the central and south evangelism sites. They’ll be visiting every one of the 50 evangelism sites in the first six days to instruct and encourage the volunteer evangelists and iron out difficulties.

A few notes on the personal bits about living “on the missionary journey.” For the first several days, we’re staying at the Adventist college near Kiev. The students have doubled up in some rooms for a few days, to free up room space for the guests. In this dormitory during this time, there are boys’ rooms and girls’ rooms on the same floors—of course watched over vigilantly! The students, you surely understand, are quite excited at the arrangements. But they seem to act very naturally and appropriately with each other.

On Wednesday evening, I stayed for a while after supper and watched the high school and college students fill the banquet hall chairs and tables. A trio of girls with microphones, another girl on the electronic keyboard, and a boy at the mixer, created lovely harmony. From the rest of the room, I heard the young men singing bass and baritone parts—without prompting from a music teacher. While I was standing up with the video camera, a young woman, Katya, wrote a note in English, folded it, and placed it under my still camera. The note read, “You are not alone. Jesus love you. Thank you that you may go in our country. We thank you. God’s blesses!!!”

Later in the dorm hallway, she stopped me and told me that I was beautiful and she was so happy to meet me. As if I was a celebrity. Later, a young man knocked on my door and in broken English, invited me to attend Friday’s agape feast and communion.

Tonight, while writing this report, I’m listening to a group of seven young people crowded on a futon-sofa in the dorm lobby next to my room. They’re singing Russian and Ukrainian praise songs while one of the boys plays a guitar. When I went out to videotape them, they sang “All in All,” one of my favorites. I showed by pantomime and pointing that the song can be sung as a canon because the chords repeat. Then we sang alternate verses, they in Russian and I in English. The chorus lyrics are “Jesus, Lamb of God, worthy is Your Name.” It’s truly beautiful in any language, to have people singing to Jesus and "Yee-soos", in harmony or unison. Jesus said that if He would be lifted up for His sacrificial love, He would draw all mankind to Him.

The campus and buildings are kept clean by students with brooms of bound rushes. No broom handles, so one must bend over to sweep everything.

The shower and toilet situation are somewhat different from America. The toilets and sinks are at opposite ends of the long hall, for boys and girls. I haven’t inspected the men’s, but the ladies’ could use a squadron of plumbers! The flush valves or handles are missing or oddly rigged on the toilets that are considered functional. Sometimes the stalls have brown, rough-pulp toilet paper—not always. The used paper does not get flushed, and must be put in a plastic-lined wastebasket in the stall. Then there are the Asian-style toilets in the administration building, which are not meant for sitting (they’re a porcelain ring on the floor), but at least flush and have paper. The showers: access alternates between men and women on about 20-minute intervals. You get a key from the dorm monitor, and several others of your gender go downstairs, past the building entrance, in bathrobes, at the same time. There are no doors or curtains on the shower stalls. Both hot and cold faucets work—but they have the same effect: just cold. At least that makes for a fast turnover in shower time. No dawdling for chilly water! The water smells a bit sulfuric. The guests have been instructed not to drink the water, not because it’s contaminated, but because our American intestinal systems don’t have immunity to the common bacteria here. We are to brush our teeth with bottled water. But I didn’t have any, so I assimilated the toothpaste suds rather than rinse with tap water. I was extra-minty for a while!

The beds are four-inch-thick foam mattresses on plywood bunks. They are topped with feather comforters in duvets. Mine is a lumpy concrete-like foldaway with a blanket duvet. I turn all night like a chicken on a rotisserie. Although it’s autumn, the rooms are warm without radiators turned on. We were told to bring our own linens, towel, and heavy clothing. Perhaps we’ll need it when we hit the road. That’s tomorrow.

Friday, September 28, 2007
The evangelism coordinators traveled to their assigned sections of the country of Ukraine today. Mike Porter, CEO of The Quiet Hour, went with Vladimir Krupsky, union conference president, to the eastern third of the territory; Mauri Bascom, evangelism field director for TQH, went with his driver and translator to the western third (near Belarus and Moldavia); and the team headed by Luis Leonor of ShareHim, including translator Pastor Roman, Pastor Yuri Kuzmenko from the union office, and Christy Robinson from The Quiet Hour, piled luggage enough for a week into the van and drove southbound for the central section, Dnieper Conference, and in a few days, Odessa on the Black Sea.

For at least the first 90 minutes, we wove through the congested streets of Kiev and its suburbs. The van has manual transmission, and there are many deep potholes and rough shoulders both in the city and the countryside. So you can imagine the swaying, the jarring, the forward and backward movements as we shifted gears. If there are vehicle emissions control laws, someone forgot to tell the drivers. The scenery is interesting, and the weather is warm, perhaps in the low 80s in the sunshine.

After leaving the city, we drove through fields and forests. The forests are a mix of conifer, elm, chestnut, and in some stands, birches. The fields are sometimes dry brown sunflowers (ripening seeds for food and oil); carpets of Kelly-green wheat recently planted; drying sweet-corn stalks; hay; tilled black-brown earth; ripe wheat; orchards of apples and pears; and home vegetable gardens. The senior citizens have less-strenuous jobs than they must have had under Soviet rule, but now they tend the staked-out goats or cattle on the road verges, or sell buckets of apples and pears and tomatoes on the roadsides. Sometimes they can be seen gleaning from harvested fields. The children are in school as we travel, so we don’t see them.

Our first stop was at a rented hall in Kirovograd, where Roy Terretta was conducting his first meeting of the series. His daughter-in-law, Renee from Connecticut, read the Quiet-Hour-provided health talk in English, which was translated into Russian. Ray then spoke in fluent Russian, saying that he’d spoken Russian in his childhood home because his father was Russian, and that earned him applause. He chose to use a translator, though, for the sermon on Daniel 2, “The Man of Mud and Metal.” About 120 people were in attendance, 20 more than the original estimate, so everyone was happy.

Back at the Kirovograd church, the pastor’s wife had prepared a “light supper” (more on that later), and then the traveling evangelists checked into a hotel.

Light suppers in Ukraine consist of ALL of the following: apple quarters, banana halves, orange quarters, piles of green and red grapes, fruit tea with honey, bread (like Italian), two fruit juices, bread rolls or sticks, a dessert, slices of cheese, a soft cheese spread (something of a hybrid of cottage cheese and cream cheese), and then, because you might still be hungry, some more fruit. Keep this in mind if an eastern European visits your home!

Some evangelists are being hosted in apartments of church members. The members move in with a friend or family, leaving the home for the evangelism team to share. Breakfast is provided as part of their “rent.” Some others, like those of us traveling every day, stay in a hotel. But the hotels are not exactly the Crowne Plaza. They’re fourth-floor walkups (no lift for the baggage), with no phone or Internet access, a single bed (no-spring foam mattresses about 3 inches deep—until you lie on them!), a rabbit-ears TV (all in Russian!), and a bathroom. (Having one’s own is worth the $40.) The sink and toilet are Western, thank goodness, and the shower is a hand-held wand with not much gusto. Hot water (actually just pleasantly warm) is not available midnight to six a.m. Still, after several days of “camping” at the college dorm, it’s good to feel human again. Luis seems to be a whole new man!

Read September 29-30 reports