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I always show pictures of the outside of the building since that has been the major part of the construction so far. Recently though, there has been some major progress on the inside and it is much easier to get up and down without remembering what it was like to crawl on a jungle gym.

For the first time today, I got a tour of the whole building! WOW! There is so much space and LOTS of possibilities! I’m super excited to see how everything will look when it is finished!

First floor:

Dining Hall

The kitchen is also on the first floor but I couldn’t get a good photo of it.

Second floor:

There are two classrooms and an office on the second floor with some lounging space.

“… and this is what a conjunctive adverb looks like.” Future statement in the future classroom.

April can’t wait for this classroom to be filled with students!

Potential office

Third floor:

Third floor is mostly all bedrooms. There are 4 showers (2 girls, 2 guys) which I didn’t bother to take a picture of since they are really just dark looking brick closets right now. There are four bedrooms total on the third floor.

Bedroom for the geometrically inclined

Double balconies in the bedroom? Yes, please!

Fourth Floor:

“He leads me into a spacious place…”

Fourth floors is really a glorified attic that will be turned into a living space. A place to relax, hang out, sleep, chat, it’s a multipurpose room! There is also space for another bedroom.

View toward city center (west)

View to the east

Looking to the south

There is also a basement to our new building. I couldn’t get any pictures since there isn’t any lighting there yet. The basement will be used for community events and storage space.

A connection is made (or reconnection, depending on view).

A teaching opportunity.

A sudden invitation.

A bumpy bus ride.

Arrive at a home in the Карпа́ты or Carpathians.

Teaching with Lance

I had the great opportunity to teach in the Carpathians along with three others, Andri, Allison and Lance. We were asked to staff a retreat time for the staff of the Ternopil Missions Institute. This was their first staff retreat and the first time they had someone come to do any teaching.

Building team

We had fun partaking in team building games, relaxing together, teaching, praying, and some sightseeing. We taught on topics such as team, relationships, unity, confrontation, and healthy boundaries. We did a lot of debriefing which is basically taking a step back and reflecting on what has happened both good and bad in the past years. This team of people had never been able to have someone help guide them through this process. Allison and I helped them create a timeline and go through all the fun and happy memories to the sad and tearful memories.

Seeing a castle

Not always easy to get a picture while I’m teaching, but here is one while I was closing up our time of creating a timeline. The hanging green, blue, and purple chickens in the background were used to create a mobile to demonstrate how taking away one piece will completely alter the mobile. Each piece needs each other to balance and it will take time to adjust when one piece is taken away. The same applies to a team or family when one member leaves. Transition takes time and will cause some imbalance at first.

Here is a short video clip of Baba Halya reciting some childhood poems from memory. My coworker Allison lives with her and recorded her recitation. This is a great glimpse of Ukrainian culture! Every child is taught poems in school, the same ones their parents learned which are the same ones their parents learned!

A friend posted this video showing just how bad roads can get, especially after the winter. It’s 5 minutes long, but if you watch the first 2 minutes or so, you get the idea. It’s a “highway” from Ternopil to Lviv.

Remember my adventure on the road to Moldova? Just picture craters covering the road…

Traveling is not complete without some kind of adventure. Although I have to say, I don’t necessarily go looking for it all the time, but it is fun once you’re in the midst of it!

The scene

While in Cahul, Moldova visiting Lance, we made a “short” trip to pick up his leader in Odessa, Ukraine. It was supposed to be short but the fog and ice slowed us down. We arrived to a sunny Odessa picked up Kyle, dropped off someone else and were on our way. Despite being pulled over by police our trip home was uneventful… except for one stop.

The GPS had led us to Odessa on one road, but for whatever reason, decided to take us back by a different road. It was a bad road, we thought about marking it in the GPS as the Never-Go-Down-This-Road road, but I think we forgot. It was like we had entered onto Mars without a landrover. Or maybe it was a remnant of a mine field littered with holes, potholes to be exact. I know roads can be bad in Ukraine, but this was hardly even a road. We kept thinking it would get better at every turn, but it never did. The fact that we saw less and less cars should have told us something but we were busy chatting until Lance finally said “we got to get off this road!”

We looked at the GPS and saw that we were basically traveling next to the road we took in the morning. There were no roads apparently connecting them. Lance just decided to take the first left that he came to, we had come to desperation out of concern for the car. So we took a left.

It was a slightly better road, a little more deserted, but was a degree better than the previous road from Mars. It led us into a little village where it seemed the road ended. Great. We looked around, asked some villagers who directed us a different way. This led us to the outskirts of a different village. We were traveling on what reminded me of a dike between two fields. We were just driving between some fields in the middle of no where. No. Where. This is where it got a little too adventurous.

We saw another road closer to the field that looked better so we thought we would just go down off this crazy dike road and continue to the road ahead… what? what’s wrong? Why aren’t we moving? Ack! It’s mud… no it’s worse, it’s clay!

Yep, we turned off a perfectly good road for a deceptively muddy road and got stuck. We tried for a good 20-30 min to get out, spraying the car with mud/clay all over. We were quite the sight. As I noted the fuel gauge bordering empty and the sun nearing the horizon I began to determine which house looked the friendliest and might allow some strangers to stay the night with them. Lance and Kyle decided to go ask a villager if someone had a tractor they could use to pull us out.

Lance trying to get the clay out of his wheel well.

Don’t be fooled by the road’s smooth appearance…

Praise the Lord they found one! The tractor was slipping all around as well but eventually managed to tow us out. The man who had towed us out was a pig farmer, with him was his brother, dad, neighbor, son, and neighbor kid. We were a spectacle. They enjoyed the spectacle so much they invited us over for homemade wine made with red and black pepper. Typical Ukrainians, always ready for guests and hospitality.

We muddled through the mud to their farm. As we rounded the corner, I saw them defuzzing a pig they had just roasted. The man brought out a pitcher of wine and one cup. His brother (or neighbor I kept getting confused) downed a glass in one gulp. He filled the glass again and gave it to Kyle. Kyle finished his glass, the man poured another glass and handed it to me. I weigh like half the weight of these guys and I had not eaten much that day, I cautiously took the glass and took tiny sips until I had finally finished the glass. I was proud of my accomplishment.

At this point, they brought out some  food. Since they were pig farmers they brought out pig skin, just a big ole flap of pig skin. It had been roasted, but was not crunchy or hard, just sort of a grey rubbery consistency. Luckily, it did not have much of a flavor ,just chewy, really chewy. Then there were some nice little meat patties, I like meat patties, can’t go wrong with those. Then there was this sort of triangular shaped jellyish-looking meat thing. Not sure what to call it. It was made with pork meat and ground up pig skin. It had a slimy jelly texture, reminded me of a JELLO jiggler with meat and pig skin. This also did not taste that bad, I just kept thinking “JELLO jiggler” and swallowed it.

I was offered another glass of wine which I took but drank even slower than before. I managed to finish it, but when they offered me another glass I had to decline, after accepting two glasses I was sure they would not be offended if I refuse the third glass. We chatted for a while longer about the farm, they gave us a tour, we talked about what we were doing here, and Christmas. They were happy to help and refused our monetary offering. We drove off in our clay covered car just as the sun was about to set. It was a fun adventure indeed but I will think twice before turning on seemingly smooth dirt roads!