Ukrainian New Year & Orthodox Christmas

I'm back from a lovely two weeks spent in the Eastern side of Ukraine. I arrived in Dimitrov on December 29th to spend a few days with one of the students from the IM E. European Training Center that my team runs here in Odessa. Marina is one of the girls that I met with weekly for discipleship/accountability meetings and I thoroughly enjoyed the time that she was here in Odessa. She invited me to spend the New Year holiday with her, her family and her small church, so off I went. The four days there were a great time of visitation and relaxation for me and I could have easily stayed several more days. But, I was really looking forward to spending Orthodox Christmas with my brother and his family, so I headed down to them on January 2nd.

Baptist churches here keep very busy and have things planned pretty much every day of the week. And since this was a big holiday, things were busier than normal. Will was at the church a large part of the time that I was there, or busy planning for some church activity, so I was able to spend a fair amount of time with Phyllis and the kids. I was super impressed to find out that Jaan and Raia know how to play Uno and we had a good time playing on a couple of different evenings. I attempted to teach them to slap the nines and was a little worried that one or the other would get upset. But since Raia didn't quite get the concept, she was very pleased to always be last and to get the "prize" of one more card. =-)

I specifically wanted to go for Orthodox Christmas because I had heard about the Christmas caroling and wanted to take part in that. Granted, I had no idea that we would spend a total of fourteen hours out doing this, but really had a great time experiencing this tradition. Below is a short video clip of some of the youth singing at one of the houses after we were done. To look at the complete photo album, with lots of interesting food pictures, click on the title of this post.

Marina is getting to be a really good and much needed friend here.
It's a shame that she lives on the other side of the country.

My favorite munchkins- Jaan(6), Asya(2) and Raia(4), my brother's children