After 1 Week

The picture above is me with two of my favorite people in Ukraine: Tanya and Markus. The two of them came to the airport to pick me up. We then came back to the apartment where Tanya cooked us lunch. What a gal!

I wrote in the last blog things I'd forgotten about Ukraine. Here's one more: Only in Ukraine will you see outside in the freezing cold, an older, completely naked woman in the Dnipro River, breaking away ice from a little water hole, to have her morning splash, which keeps her healthy. Only in Ukraine.

Since I've been here, my home phone didn't work, my cell phone needed to be unlocked, and I had only the Internet. Right now, my home phone still doesn't work, but my cell phone has been unlocked and is working fabulously after a slight brain fart (there had been money on my account, and I tried calling people...but I needed to add more money to the account, because it had been frozen while I was gone...took me 3 days to figure that one out!), and the Internet has been shut off.

The internet thing actually really got to me for a little bit. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it allowed me to be more intentional to go somewhere to use the internet than to just have it at home and get sucked into the endless hours of procrastination and wasted time. Once I looked at it that way, I've actually enjoyed not having it.

We are set to leave for Uzhgorod on Monday at 4am pst, which is actually 2pm here in Kyiv. We get in at 7am the next morning, and then we will start looking for apartments. We almost had one, but it was bigger than we needed, and out of our price range! We are looking forward to meeting the DTS outreach team there. They are already hard at work, and we will be joining them and exploring the endless possibilities there.