Heat, Health, Safety and Stability: praises and prayer requests

I have heat in my apartment! They turned it on on Tuesday sometimes. What a blessing. It makes such a huge difference not to come home to a cold apartment and just be focussed on keeping warm all evening. Hopefully it will also stop the mold growth. I'm having someone come to clean that while I am away this weekend (I can't be around with the chemicals they use), so hopefully that will be the end of that.
Unfortunately, a number of my friends do not yet have heat in their apartments. Hopefully they will get it this weekend.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that Ira and Alia were both sick. Both recovered quickly and were back at work on Monday. Lena has been working half days this week until they turn the heat on in the kindergarten so she can send her daughter back to school. Lena's mum looks after her granddaughter in the mornings so that Lena can still work.

Dad and a coworker are traveling tomorrow. He is in Russia presently and due to some complications was not able to get registered while he was in Moscow (he was only there for a day or less). Please pray that he does not have any problems crossing the border back into Ukraine, that he is not hassled or fined. Mum and I are also traveling tonight on the train to Kyiv for a women's conference this weekend. I'll come back by "bus" on Sunday, but mum will stay in Kyiv with dad until he flies out to the States early next week. Then she will also return by "bus". Please pray for travel safety for all of us.

Pray for Ukraine as a whole. You may recall that I had talked this summer about the exchange rate dropping from 5hr./$1 to 4.60 hr./$1. Now things have reveresed. Yesterday morning the exchange rate was about 6.15 hr./$1, by yesterday afternoon it was 6.70 hr./$1 at the same bank! While convenient for us foreignors, this does not bode well for Ukraine. We are again/still in a state of political upheaval. Pray that God would use this time to help many people to seek Him.

Safety

Do please continue to pray for our safety. I mean that in general, but a few things are on my mind right now. First off, my parents' old landlord was harassing them a couple of weeks ago, following them and that kind of stuff. He has become a creepy man. Claims to be a Christian, but does not live like one. Thankfully, my parents are going away now for quite a while, so hopefully he won't be a problem. Interestingly, he never comes to someplace public to harass them, he never stops by the office, or church or does anything in an open, honest and upright manner. The deal is that dad did a lot of repairs while they lived at that house and now, whenever the landlord is feeling short on money he accuses dad of having completely ruined the house and of having made a mess of things, etc. Silly really. But...evil people will use any excuse they can.
Beyond that, we often have to deal with a lot of banking, to pay people, to pay for conferences, rent, etc. Not really enough to tempt anyone other than a petty thief, but we have had problems with those before too. And of course, there are people who just think that because we are foreignors we have the "touch of Midas".
And of course, we also travel a lot. Dad is in Russia now and mum and I go to Kyiv next weekend. And there are just lots of accidents here and in other places that we travel.
For me as a younger woman, I also have to watch out, esp. now that we have had time change and it gets dark so early. I haven't had any problems for about a year, but in the past when I let my guard down, that is when I had problems.

Health and Heat

Two of our girls got sick yesterday: Ira and Alia. Ira is apparently feeling better today, but had a Sunday School teachers seminar to attend so she isn't in. Alia, on the other hand, is probably feeling pretty miserable. She is one of those people who never gets sick, so when she does it is really horrible. I only remember her being sick one other time, but she was sick for two weeks! So do pray for her. She is a key person and we have several projects pending on her presence.

Additionally, Lena, who has a daughter in kindergarten, told us today that if the kindergarten doesn't get heat by Monday they are closing until the heat comes on. That means she'll have to stay home to take care of her daughter for probably a week. I would be thrilled if they turned the heat on this weekend, but I don't actually expect them to turn it on until Nov. 1 and I'm not even sure about that. However, there is more hope for that as the temps are supposed to drop below freezing the first few days in November. This kindergarten closing thing is coming from a higher up source, so it means it won't affect just that kindergarten, but all of them all over the city. Which will in turn affect a lot of people's jobs. Efficiency was never a communist strong point.

On a more fun note: I overslept this morning and walked out of my building to find construction workers filling in the multitudinous potholes in the drive/road. This particular section is so bad that you basically just have to walk your cars wheels from one pothole into the next. There's no avoiding them. So they are filling them in. Happy thought. Except they are using very large gravel to do so. I'm not sure what they expect of this. The largest pothole does have a dirt base because of some construction done, but the other potholes that they were filling in are just in the asphalt. Large gravel on top of hard asphalt = ? It just cracked me up! Talk about a non-fix fix! :P

Mold Issues

I think I have put a stall on the mold growth for now at least. I sprayed my walls down with vinegar and have been switching my space heater between my bedroom and bathroom for the past few days to dry things out.
I have to say that I do seem to feel a little better. I was feeling a bit lethargic. Not really tired, but then not really like doing anything other than laying on the couch. It was really beginning to get to me, but already I feel like I've seen a little improvement over the last couple of days. So...

Office Staff (cont'd)

Here's Lena at her desk. Lena actually works "part-time" for us because she has a young daughter who she needs to drop off and pick up every day from kindergarten. But she still manages to work about 36 hours most weeks.

Our out-of-office staff consists of four men: Vitia Statisiuk, Costia Kusov, Andrii Deyneka, and Ivan Onishuk.

Vitia works with the lectures. He was part of the studio that filmed the lectures and now he is making them "look pretty" by adding titles and intro music and words for students to use to fill in the blanks on their student notes with. He and his wife have one child. They live here in Rivne.

Costia Kusov is our translator. He lives, with his wife and two daughters, in eastern Ukraine. He does Russian translation only, so we won't be able to use him for our future Ukrainian projects. He does large projects: individual books, like course guides, and whole courses. This is quite different from Kostia who works in our office. He tends to do smaller edits/changes that we have made rather than translating a whole course from scratch. Costia Kusov is a very gifted and humble man. He doesn't ask nearly as much as he could for salary and his work really conveys the feeling of the author, not just the words in the text. We're really blessed to have him working for us.

Andrii Deyneka is our artist. He has worked with us for many years already, probably six or seven, but a couple of years ago he immigrated to America with his wife and kids. We've looked for other artists since then, but have not found any that convey as much through their pictures as he does. Not only that but his work is highly detailed and just excellent quality. Sometimes he's a little slow, but he is always faithful. He really has a heart to do this and has at times even offered his services for free!

Ivan Onishuk is our tech guy. He does anything and everything related to computers, cameras, printers, etc. Until last March he was full-time with us, but at that point he asked if he could switch to part-time as our computer systems were at a place that he just wasn't needed daily. I was quite nervous about the change, but he was right and we have been doing fine with this arrangement. Right now he comes in once or twice a week for a few hours to take care of any problems and back up our server files. He's also on-call in case we have an emergency.

Last of all, there is me. I oversee everyone in the office, make sure they come on time, give them permission to take time off, help set their salaries, keep them motivated and organized, etc. At least half of my work is concerned with just keeping everyone else going. I'm the one who communicates with Andrii and Costia about their work and makes sure they know what they are supposed to do and are doing it. I also plan the work for the office, deciding what course we are going to work on and who is going to do what job when unexpected things come up--which they do most weeks. ;) In addition to overseeing the office, I do editing and write the course guides. I can't say that I really enjoy the writing, but it is a job that needs to be done and one that I have done for many of our courses already. On the other hand, it helps to keep me in tune with the things that other people are dealing with in their work, formatting and editing issues, that I probably wouldn't understand as well if I wasn't doing that kind of work myself.

Problems

AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhk. :( Last night when I went to bed I realized that my wall was really wet... Condensation apparently. Why, I don't know. But this morning I pulled out my bed and there is mold/mildew on the wall behind my bed and in some of my bedding as well.
I don't have heat yet, so I am guessing that that is what is causing the problem. For now I have put my space heater in there with the door closed and pulled the bed out from the wall. I'll spray it down with vinegar tonight. It is just very discouraging. I already dealt with this in my bathroom and have had the heater in there for several days to try to dry it out. I'm also having just a bit of it in the toilet. Those rooms all share an outside wall. Thankfully, those are also the only rooms that I have this problem in. But depressing nonetheless.

Office Staff

Just a quick update on our office staff.
Back to front and left to right they are: Vasia, Peter, Kostia; Maria, Lilia, Ulia, Alia; Ira and Julia.

Lena isn't in this picture and neither, of course, am I. There are also three other men who work from their homes.

Vasia and Lilia are married and expecting a baby in December. Lilia is our key Russian editor. She oversees that process as well as makes sure that we turn out really good quality Russian work. She's been with us for close to 3 years. In her free time Lilia also runs an orphanage ministry with several teams visiting orphanages every week and leading Bible clubs there. She will be going on maternity leave and then working part-time, probably from home, for us after the first few months. Vasia joined us last December as a formatter. That means he makes the books look good! :) It's a tedious, repetitive job, but it makes a huge difference to our books to have a good layout.

Peter is our grammar editor. He makes sure that the grammatical flow in Russian is correct and sounds right. Russian grammar is a lot more complex than English so this takes more effort and time. He is quite meticulous and sometimes I have to put a little pressure on him to move on with the material because he gets so caught up in the details. He's also our footnotes expert--we've had a lot of grief over how to do English footnotes in Russian! Peter has some health issues and last here he had some trouble with his heart, partly brought on by stress here at work, I think. Thankfully, we've been able to resolve those issues and now he seems really at ease and happy, and healthy.

Kostia is our key translator/consultant. He's been with us for over seven years. Over that period of time his health has seriously deteriorated. I believe it is partly because of the climate here as he gets terrible migraines whenever it rains, and it rains a lot here! In the office, he is by far our most valuable person for the course work. Not every translator can carry the spirit of an author forward through translation, but Kostia really has a gift with this and he has redone many poor translations so that the Russian texts now have the same life that the English texts have. Additionally, he's very good with computers and helps solve a lot of our computer problems here. Because he's been with us since we first started the office, Kostia is familiar with the whole process and is able to find new or better ways to do things, or sometimes explain to me why things are done the way they are. I consult with him a lot, esp. when my parents are traveling and I need advice on different issues.

Then there is Maria. She is our bookkeeper. She does an excellent job and has been working with my parents for more years than I have! She not only keeps excellent books (she recently received a commendation from the Canadian mission about that), but she is very faithful and willing to serve in any way that is needed. Her husband is a pastor/church planter, so she is primary financial provider for their family right now.

Ulia is Peter's daughter. She began working with us while she was still in university studying to be an English teacher. She graduated this summer and for now continues with us. Her work primarily involves comparing the initial Russian translation with the English to make sure that nothing has been missed or updated in the English, but not the Russian. With some of the older, poorer quality translations this has been a big issue. Now we are retranslating several of the courses, because the changes in English are too big to just try to fit into the old translation. The translation quality is better, but now sometimes I have her translate small portions and updates that I have made to certain materials, instead of sending them to our out-of-office translator.

Alia is our key formatter. She does the same job as Vasia, but at a higher level. We had to train Vasia in from scratch. He knew nothing about formatting, but Alia came with previous experience at a newspaper. She's a very capable person and a huge asset to our office as she is not one to sit around and do nothing, nor is she afraid to make suggestions (it is difficult for people to make suggestions here because that implies that you--the boss--are not doing something right and of course that didn't go over well in previous years, and a lot of that still lingers on). Alia also works with the pictures and graphics for the courses and lectures. She helps to prepare the covers for the books as well as making usable any pictures in the text and updating any charts or tables.

Ira is our newest team member and she is the beginning of a new project: translating the courses into Ukrainian. This is a new project for our office, some of the courses have already been translated into Ukrainian, but sadly they refuse to use our newer versions and often the translation quality isn't as good. So we have decided to do some ourselves, to show what kind of quality is possible. Right now she has been hijacked into doing some translation of the lectures instead of courses, which will be a problem for our course production in the future, but is an urgent need right now. She is just learning the ropes of translation in the style that we want, but she definitely has a gift for translation.

Julia is our secretary/lecture person/additional editor/anything else we need her to be. She is a huge blessing! Originally, she was hired as a secretary to answer the phone, buy supplies, and take care of some of these basic office tasks, but since she is efficient and we are a small office she had free time and we started her working on the lectures (dad has a series of lectures on DVD for extra encouragement, training and discipleship for leaders--there are about 150 lectures total). She compares the English and Russian versions, does editing, cleans them up, works with the studio guy to make sure that that keeps progressing and in general does a lot of stuff that I (thankfully) don't know much about. In the past we have not had one person for this job, so it has been a bit of a mess. It is a real blessing to have her doing that. Occasionally, she has gaps in her work, or we have urgent needs for our course work and she steps in and does some editing as well. She's a quick learner so it's easy to have her do a variety of jobs. Now with Lilia going off to have her baby she'll be helping do some of Lilia's work.

Lastly, for our in-office-staff, we have Lena. She was originally hired in the hopes that she could help with some of the smaller translation projects that frequently come up, but we've managed to keep her busy doing a lot of other things instead! Now she is starting some of those projects which is very helpful. Additionally, she will also be helping take over Lilia's job.

This turned out rather longer than I had intended. I'll try to come back tomorrow with Lena's picture and a continuation with my job, our out-of-office staff and anything else pertinent. ;)

Electicity Fun

I blew a fuse again last night. This happened a couple of weeks ago and my neighbor was kind enough to hot wire them for me. Naturally, that was just a temporary solution.
So, last night, I was using my space heater, microwave and computer (and maybe the fridge came on?) and the electric went out. Unfortunately, my neighbors, who I discovered are the only ones with the key to the utility box in the corridor, weren't home. I did eventually discover a candle--through using my mobile phone as a flashlight--and sat in the dark and waited for about half an hour and then I heard my neighbor lady come home, so I ran out and asked for the key. It's rather embarassing, no Ukrainian blows their electric this much! I was in the middle of replacing the old fuses with the new ones I bought last week, when Uri (neighbor's husband) came up in the lift with their baby carriage. He immediately took over the screwing in of the fuses and explained that they were automatic ones, so that I wouldn't need to buy new ones in the future, just press the button back in... That is why I bought them of course! But being female here carries with it certain, uh, stigmas (which just crack me up!). He also instructed me to make a duplicate of the key for myself (hallelujah!), but if I ever needed to do anything--like push the button in--to get him or one of the other neighbor men from our floor to help! Every time I think of that I just about die laughing! I've been playing with fuses since I was a kid because we were always blowing them with all our "equipment". Apartments here just aren't set up for some much electonic stuff.
Anyway, the whole situation just made me laugh. But I must say, I didn't mind having him take over with the fuses or fuss at me for doing it myself. It's kind of nice to be treated like a woman sometimes.

More for Prayer

First off, a praise. A renewed or continued praise. Last year I had asked for prayer for friends here, and I really feel like God has been answering that request. Friendships take time to be built, but there have been some women here who have really reached out to me, which I really appreciate! Since I am frequently sick or fatigued I often end up turning down invitations or not inviting people over--not because I don't want to be friendly, but because I know my priorities here are not a social life but my ministry at the office. So, I really appreciate these women who continue to make a push for friendship even when I am not always able to accept or return their invitations. I know perfectly well how discouraging it can be to be the one who is always asking and being turned down. But God continues to build that up and I am grateful for it. Very grateful, esp. with my parents doing so much traveling, it is nice to have other people out there to be with.

As for prayer requests, primarily my eyes. I feel like they are being strained beyond bearing. At first I was worried that I was straining them, but over the last week I realized that I went through this last year at about this same time. I'm guessing it is some kind of a sensitivity, perhaps to the decomposing leaves or something. In any case, it makes my eyes very sore and I don't seem to be able to find a good relief for it. So pray that I'll bear up under it with grace and that the season will pass quickly.

God's Faithfulness

Today in our office devotions (which we have every day with a different staff member leading each time) we watched a video about a Russian man who was severely persecuted for being a Christian while he was in the Russian army. I couldn't get the exact date, but I believe it must have been shortly before the fall of communism. While these things don't happen very much right now--an hopefully not at all, but...--being in the army here in Ukraine or Russia (it's mandatory for a couple of years) is usually not a fun time for the young men, esp. the Christian young men.

This man was beaten and imprisoned for 3 months in a tiny windowless cell. Among other things. Then they took him out and stuck him in the back of a truck which had two gas tanks. It was the middle of December in Siberia. Bitterly cold. They drove him way out into the middle of nowhere until the tank of gas was gone (in the far east there is a lot of middle of nowhere) and dropped him off there, telling him that if he believed in God he could call on his God to help him now! He had no matches and was not dressed above basic winter wear. Eventually he was able to build a shelter and warm up a little there. He prayed and prayed and God showed him some animal tracks and gave him an idea about how to set a trap for them. He desperately needed the fur to keeps his toes and fingers from freezing. He caught a number of the animal in his trap and used them to beef up his clothing so he wouldn't freeze. He later found out that these animals (I'm not sure what they were because it was all in Russian) were the most rare and expensive ones in that area! During his time there he caught over 300 of them! Bit by bit he was able to make his way back to civilization finding hunter's huts on the way that had provisions in them that he was able to eat a little from.
He eventually, after 7 and a half months, made it back to Khabarovsk and found the officers that had dropped him off there. They were of course terrified to see him and played it off that it had just been a joke and they had intended to go back to get him, but of course he knew this wasn't true since he stayed in the same place for several weeks and no one ever came back. He ended up selling the 300 furs that he had and making a small fortune off of them.

This man underwent a terrible year or two as a young man (probably between 18 and 20), but he stayed true to God and God also stayed true to him. Think of the delight God must have had in showing him these animals and helping him catch them, the most rare fur in that region!

God truly doesn't promise that it will be easy, but He does promise He will always be there with us.

Getting Better

Melissa's comment reminded me that I should mention that I am getting better. My cold is almost gone and having figured out a system to heat my apartment until they turn the heat on I hope to stay well for at least a few months. :)
So, Melissa, you can come here and I'll take care of you and give you a back rub. :D Bring the girls, of course! And the boys for that matter. ;)

On a more serious note, yesterday we found out that one of the key leaders of the CBLT ministry in Russia had a heart-attack over the weekend. This man is a key part of the ministry there and or our plan for turning the ministry over to the Russians. There is lots to pray for there: his speedy recovery, someone to oversee his many ministry involvements while he is ill and perhaps to take over some permanently, of course, someone to oversee the CBLT ministry that he was doing. And I'm sure you can think of many other aspects in relation to his family, witness, the church and ministry.
We are also still urgently looking for someone to take over another of our missionaries' positions in Russia. One of the missionaries had to step down this summer and we have not yet found a replacement for him.

Prayer Answered

Vienna's surgery on Friday went really well. She behaved well and her parents survived with only a few extra gray hairs. ;)
The doctors were happy with how it went and she'll have a check up in three months. If you want to read more check out www.radiantchristians.com where you can also find pictures of the cutest 2-year-old niece I have! :D

Vienna's Surgery

Sam, Melissa and Vienna


Just a quick prayer request.
My niece, Vienna (Sam and Melissa's oldest), is going in for surgery to correct an issue with her kidneys and urinary tract today. They'll let her go home right away and all, but please just pray for her and her family, esp. her mom, Melissa. Pray that the surgery would go well, while a quick procedure it is still delicate and she is only just two. Pray that it would take and she would heal up quickly--there is an 85+% success chance for her. And that the damage that has already been done to her kidneys would be minimized or healed (after all, God is still God isn't He?).
Pray for Sam and Melissa as they take her in to the hospital and watch over her as she is anesthetized. It is unpleasant to watch your baby be put under. And of course, while they are taking care of Vienna, Melissa's family will be taking care of Ziva, so you can pray that that would all go well too.
Thanks.