Doug's Journal for November 16-30, 2006

Thursday, November 16 – My 54th birthday

I made the mistake of leaving my cell phone on and I received 2 sms (text messages on the cell phone) around midnight! Everyone wants to be first to send birthday wishes. Through out the day, I received a total of 20 sms good wishes for my birthday. My real morning started at 1:15am when I woke up from going to bed so early. I was up for a couple of hours, checked email and went back to bed. I woke again at 4:40am. Jenise called me on the internet at 5am – internet phone. Janessa at 5:30 and we had a conference call with the 3 of us until 6:30am and then Butch, my oldest son, called at 7am by regular phone! I made myself Mexican egg/breakfast tortias for breakfast and that was really tasty. At 9am a guy came and said that my electricity hadn’t been paid for several months and they were getting ready to cut off my electricity! With Zhenya’s help, I got that paid before they shut it off. My owner of my apartment had been paying it and then I was paying her. I guess she just decided she didn’t want to do it like that anymore, but failed to tell me! I had to pay for 4 months back utilities!! It was pretty shocking! So my living expenses have just jumped another $45 a month or so. We will see what winter utility costs will be. When I first started renting this flat 3+ years ago, it was costing me about $50 a month for rent and utilities. Now it is about $145 a month – nearly tripled! I know by American standard that isn’t much, but the $45 a month increase is about 1/10th of the work fund and the $145 is more than ¼ of my work fund. We had a great personal study with the twins family today, mother Inna, and 3 teenage kids. However they are going out of town for a month, so we probably won’t be starting up again until after the first of the year. We had 25 for our Bible Study tonight and 30 for Nadya’s (Nadya is a mother and wife of 30 who has been coming to our lessons and activities for almost 4 years. Her husband refuses to allow her to become a Christian, but is a little more open than he used to be. Her sister Lyuba is a Christian because of her!) and my birthday party afterwards. Both of us received many wonderful and useful presents. We had some good salads, cakes (any idea how much cake and salads that takes for each to get just a little?) and juices. I took a carload of females home (guys think that the girls should have rides and the girls think so, too!) across the river and got home about 10pm. A really good day!
Friday, November 17
The day after! The days have continued to be pretty warm for this time of year – around 50 during the day. I had a lot study catch up to do, so I did that. At 1:45, Jared, Oksana, Artem and I went to Bugkivka. We normally go on Fridays for class, but today we went to see a concert of sorts. They were actually going to have a fall disco and this concert was for the 5th-7th grades. But to start this, they had a contest between 3 boys from each class to see who would be the king of the fall disco. This is were the concert came in and several of our kids participated in this, especially since we have about 20 of these kids actively involved in our classes and many more that have at some time come to our classes. It was very enjoyable. We returned to Kremenchuk about 5:30pm after a fun day. Then we had our fun night with 10 people – eventually – they kind of came in piece by piece. We did have a good time until after 10pm.
Saturday, November 18
I worked on my Sat. Bible club lessons in the morning, went and bought juices and cookies, got my house ready before 11. At 11, Alyona, a 5th year Univ. student came and we had our first personal Bible Study. We had a good study, but I can see she is going to be a real challenge. She says that she has no faith and that she is just made up of a collection of chemicals. She is very nice and is no means rude about it and is open to searching. We are reading the book of John together, besides answering her questions. At 12 we had 5 for our Adult/Univ. class, at 2 we had 5 for our Beginners club and at 6 we had 6. The numbers weren’t really great today, but it was a good day of study. Several of our older, regular Christians and young people no longer come to the clubs on a regular basis as the clubs are more designed to introduce God and English and they have accomplished this. So most of those that are still coming are not Christians yet or young Christians, so the clubs are still doing what we want them to do – reach out!
Sunday, November 19
The temps stayed down around 32 all day with a brisk wind. Today was Valery and Zoë’s last day of worship with the Central Church of Christ as they are moving to the USA – CA on a flight tomorrow! It was a very hard day for many of us to see them go as they have been a valuable part of our friendship and Christian family! Valery has been a very faithful minister and servant of the Lord and Word and he will be desperately missed! He plans to start a Russian speaking congregation of the church of Christ in CA among that large population in the area into which he is moving! We made sandwiches today and took them to Gregory. PLEASE pray for Gregory if you are not already! His infected foot is a result of his liver not working properly because of the medicine that he takes for his asthma!!! He needs our prayers VERY much! At 3, 4 of our kids went to the Orphans home and had a good afternoon with them. At 6:15 we had 21 for our evening worship service. Valery brought torts, drinks and tea and we had a good fellowship afterwards until about 8:30pm. After that, I went to a local restaurant and had some salad and then came home. I watched a Disney movie Jared had loaned me. I haven’t been able to use the internet the last 2 ½ days because all my money is used up on it and the company is not open until Monday, so I wait to use it. I miss the communication that I have from it!
Monday, November 20
I woke up at 5:15 and since I couldn’t get on the internet, I started working on this journal and have been writing now for about an hour. I began my plans for Thanksgiving. We went to the village for our older class today and had 4 girls in class – 2 girls have remained the same and 2 different. We had a good class and got home about 5:30. We were supposed to have a dinner at Kelli’s but that fell through.
Tuesday, November 21
I went to the market this morning to buy pumpkin and apples plus several other things. I shopped for turkeys to see if I could find any. I found 2, but it is too soon to buy them! My Thanksgiving cooking and preparations has started! We also had a 2 hour AIM meeting squeezed into my preparations! I prepared from scratch and cooked 2 large pumpkin pies! Fortunately my balcony is enclosed now and the temperature is cold enough outside for my balcony to be a 2nd refrigerator or I would not have enough places to put all the food. I had a good class of 8 kids at School #9. Veronika (17 years old and first year Univ. student who has been coming to us since the 9th grade) and I had a good personal Bible study. She is really growing a lot closer to the Lord and being obedient to His will for her life! Our singing/devo in the evening was well attended with 21 people. We found out tonight that we are expecting 42 for Thanksgiving dinner! I am a bit overwhelmed about the number!
Wednesday, November 22
Today Frankie left for France for an AIM retreat with AIM students in Europe that could come. My cooking continues with the cooking of 2 large apple pies – 6 large apples per pie, pealed, and thinly sliced with double crusts. Well that was very time consuming! I got my crusts a little thick, but they turned out okay! I also bought turkey today – but cut up Turkey. I bought 14 pounds of boneless turkey breast and 10 pounds of boneless dark meat cut from legs and thighs – so about 24 pounds of boneless turkey. Do you think that should feed 42 people??? Jared, Olya and Kelli helped prepare the dressing for the turkeys and making of a double batch of crescent roll doe. We got into a fun but messy flour fight afterwards! We had 1 girl in our English/Bible class for the older kids (9-11 grades) at School #9 today. The good thing is that she came, even though she knew she would probably be alone. We went to the private school and taught 3 classes of a total of 45 kids from the 4th – 7th grades. Afterwards we ate pizza together and then I went home and made a batch of cinnamon rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast. It was another good but exhausting day.

Thursday, November 23 – Thanksgiving Day!
Happy Thanksgiving! I know you will get this later than Thanksgiving, but I want to give you good wishes again! I started my cooking at 8:30 with the cinnamon rolls. While they were cooking I got my first of 3 batches of turkey and stuffing ready to cook. So when the rolls came out at 9am, three pans of turkey and stuffing went in! I have a good meat thermometer that does a good job of telling me when the turkey is done. It took about 2 ½ hours to cook. Kelli and Jared were supposed to come over for rolls at 9, but Kelli had a migraine headache and couldn’t come. But Olya did. We had a big pan, so we had plenty for Kelli and others later in the day. I rolled out the crescent roll doe and made 3 pans of rolls. I cooked, cleaned and prepared all day long! About 4pm, people began to arrive to help finish the cooking. People brought more deserts, lots of wonderful salads and different kinds of pickles, fresh fruit – we had 2 large fruit salads and tons of food! We used 2 and ½ folding tables (1 table is a ½ because the supports for the wings of the table broke a long time ago, but we supported 1 end of the table by stacking 2 foot stools together and putting a pillow on top of that!) end to end. We actually were able to get 42 medium sized plastic plates around this table. We sat down close to 6:30pm to eat with 37 people (10 more than last year and several didn’t come that said they would)! I was NOT disappointed that we didn’t have 42! We had a wonderful meal and fellowship together! Everyone helped out so much at the end and I am so thankful because I had completely run out of steam! Everyone left about 10:30pm.
Friday, November 24
The morning after! Wow, I slept a lot more than my usual 5 or 6 hours – thankfully!!! People came at 11am to see me, but I had turn them away as I was cleaning up. I usually don’t turn people away for any reason! Our village class in the afternoon had 14 – the school had let out early and still we had that many! We had just 5th and 7th graders. No 6th graders at all – very unusual as they are usually the ones that are always there, but still we had a good class. This class has been running about 20 kids each week. When we got back home at 4:30, I was going to rest before our fun night at 6, but no doing as I was interrupted 4 times by 5pm and gave up the rest idea! We had 14 people come and share our leftovers and play games together. We had good evening.
Saturday, November 25
As usual I was busy preparing lessons, shopping and food preparations in the morning. We had 6 for our Adult Bible club, 4 for our Beginners at 2pm and 6 for our Teen Club. At the church discussion at 4pm, 2 of my kids went with me and we had some good Bible discussions.
Sunday, November 26
Service was good and I preached today. There were 5 of us that went shopping at our big department store at Prostor and then we ate together. At 3pm, 7 of us went to the Orphanage. At 6pm we had 23 for our evening services. This is the most we have ever had for this service, I believe! Afterwards we went to my house and then at 9pm we went to the train station to pick up Kelli and some friends who had been in Kiev for the weekend and got home about 10pm.
Monday, November 27 – Kelli’s 25th Birthday!
I worked a lot on my next weekly newsletter: “Living For Christ.” I have taken on several new “writing” tools that take time. If you were to read all of them, then you would of course get some overlap. What I am trying to do is to reach more people with the Gospel of Christ and to keep my friends, family and supporters better informed about my life. In the afternoon, we went to the village and had a class with 5 10th graders. It was a good class I believe – the girls are very active and are doing a good job of participating. I have invited them to our Christmas party on Dec. 25th. I hope they come! When we got back in the evening, we went to Kelli’s for supper that Jared did most of the cooking. That was great and a lot of fun. Kelli had invited some friends from Kiev down that are staying in Kremenchuk for a few days. It was good to have them here, too. I went home about 9:30pm.
Tuesday, November 28 – Anya D’s Birthday!
A normal day of study, classes, lessons, etc. We had 6 delightful 6th grade girls from school #9 today in class. In the evening we had a really good devo/singing night with 24 people there. Yura, one of our young men led the devotional tonight and did a great job! Afterwards we celebrated Kelli’s birthday. She received a lot of kitchen things that she needed and wanted and really seemed to enjoy her party! Kelli made chicken enchiladas for everyone that was REALLY good! Plus there were great torts for everyone to have some of, too!
Wednesday, November 29 – Olya’s Birthday!
I would like to just make mention that we celebrate birthday 2 different ways. We celebrate spiritual birthdays – the date when someone becomes a Christian and then physical birthdays as well. Jenise, my oldest daughter, called this morning on the Skype internet phone and we had a nice visit. She is encouraging me to get the Pimsler (sp?) language CDs to help me improve my language skills – which I want to do and need to do! I think that I am going to call them and ask them about shipping costs, etc. It could be a bit expensive, but I really do want to get much better if I am going to stay here and I am going to stay here! In the afternoon, we had 2 girls from the 9th form (grade) in class at school 9. They really do seem to enjoy our Bible/language class – I just wish more would come! At 5, we went to our private, live in school and taught 2 classes to about 30 kids.
Thursday, November 30
I have almost decided to take most of this weekend off while I still have Jared and Frankie to teach the weekend classes for me. After this, it may be a long time until I can do this again. I don’t know where I will go or what I will do yet. But I really need to get away for a little while. I will either leave on Friday night or Saturday morning. I may leave by train or I may drive. The only 2 places I know to go are to Kiev or Hartakov. I studied all morning from the time I got up at 3:50am till 10am. Then I cleaned up, etc. At a little after 10, Anya, a Christian translator called for Buddy Baker and asked us to meet. Buddy had 3 other Americans with him and we ate lunch together. Buddy and others now work with 8 orphanages in and around Kremenchuk – probably a 30 mile radius. They do a lot of tremendous work in these homes and for reaching them for Christ. They have recently spent $400.00 on puppets and puppet books. They want us to develop a puppet team and have a portable puppet stage built so we can go and teach with puppets at the orphanages. We can and will also use this in teaching at the schools – I have always felt that it would be a tremendous tool to use here. We then went to a show at the orphanage that we work at each Sunday. These Americans had hired a song and dance troop to perform at the different homes. Then they gave out Christmas presents to everyone of the kids! (They gave these gifts to every child in all 8 orphan homes – over 1,200 children!) We were able to assist in giving out these gifts. It was a lot of fun. At 6, we had our evening Bible Class with 17 present and then we celebrated Olya’s birthday afterwards. All was done about 10pm.