Lviv

Two of my friends took me on a day-trip to Lviv on Monday. I am ashamed to say that despite having Ukraine as my home for 20 years I had not yet been there. It was a worthwhile trip. Lviv wasn't totally destroyed by the war so some of the old European style buildings and streets still exist.
We traveled by electric train from Rivne to Lviv. Thankfully it was the fast one so it only took 2 1/2 hours. It was a fun ride, most people slept and we managed to move to a different car after the first hour so we had a little more leg room (it was pretty much knee-to-knee in our original car).
Our first stop was the cafe Veronika. It is a worthwhile destination. A very worthwhile destination. The best cake I've ever had in my life!
They also had croissants and other pastries and chocolates, but the cake was fabulous!
I had the Hungarian cake which was a chocolate torte with layers of meringue, walnuts and some kind of pudding like filling covered in ganache. My little piece would have sufficed for two quite easily, but I managed to eat it all by myself. It was a great way to start the day and left my mind in a whirl of cake possibilities. My only regret from this trip is that I didn't get a picture of their display case.
The rest of the day was spent wandering around Lviv. We visited the souvenir market and just wandered around downtown.
It is hard to capture the charm of the city in a few pictures. Particularly with my fantastic camera skills. But I did my best to catch some of the old world charm. I've missed seeing old cathedrals and the architecture of Europe.
I can't say that I've missed the cobblestone streets though. My teeth are still rattling.
It was interesting to see how in some ways Lviv is still stuck in the post war period. Comparatively Rivne is much better kept up. But then we don't have old buildings that we are trying to retain here. It is much easier to slap a new facade on a building than it is to keep up one that is a couple hundred years old.
It was a great day. The perfect getaway from all the stress of trying to pack up and move. Thanks Julie and Brenda!

Camp

Time flies. I don't know what happened to last week, but let's just pretend that I just got back from camp today, ok?
I guess I uploaded my pictures to facebook and thought that I had updated my blog too.

Camp was a great! We had perfect weather and a good group of people. I got to spend lots of time swimming and hanging out with my family and one or two friends that I hadn't seen in a long while.

Camp 120 was held on an island in a particularly wide stretch of the Dnepr River. Each morning began with a meeting or service or church or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. After breakfast, of course (and for me, a swim or two). Several of the guys took turns preaching/giving a talk with the themes centering around serving God and living for Him.
For me it was particularly encouraging as God used their talks to remind me that I just need to focus on serving Him in the here and now and He'll take care of the future (which for me is a trifle uncertain at this point).

The island that we were on was rather a sandy hill rising out of the water and it was a bit of a climb to get to the top. Thankfully, there were lots of young guys who could carry all the paraphernalia up the hill. Including the well water that the guys went and got every morning for our drinking. And the river water for washing up (no electricity or running water, of course). Here's the guys coming back with a load of fresh water. You can see how wide the Dnepr is, there was this little island across from us, yet another island in the distance and in the far distance the shore. And I never did see the shore on the other side because it was blocked by another island, so I don't know how much further that was.

We also had our own private little beach with a pier, so that we didn't have to fight our way through the reeds (which would have totally prevented me from swimming since there are snakes in the reeds and water rats).
I did a lot of "life guarding" for my nieces and a couple of other little girls--mostly that consisted of being on the beach or in the water while they were down there. It was a bit separated from the rest of the camp so good to have an adult eye on them. But normally that wasn't much of a problem, since with 75 of us on the island, there was usually an "adult" ready to go for a swim.

I was in my sister's church group for meals (and in her family group for tents which means I lived a life of luxury in a six person tent that I shared with her two youngest girls). We had a very nice cooking set up--by far the most advanced of any of the groups (there were three groups). And Pris is an excellent organizer and cook so our meals were not the usual camp fare. She managed to keep fresh vegetables and meat on the menu for four out of the five days we were there!

All in all, it was a refreshing time away from work and computer and internet and phone. It was a nice reward after finishing the English work on Doctrine on Christ and His Kingdom.
And God used it to encourage me and bring me back into alignment with His peace.

Playing Catch-Up

Sorry, didn't meant to leave you hanging like that. I had meant to do another post before I left for camp, but was so caught up with work that I wasn't able to. I ended up working every day before I left for camp, which I went a couple days early to attend a seminar (which I ended up working through) with my mum and spend a day with my sister's family before we all headed out to camp at 6am Monday morning. I still didn't finish everything, even with working on Sunday, but I got the rough draft done and mum finished it up for me--for which I am very grateful!
Camp was a great experience! My nephew and nieces have been talking about it for years and it was so much fun to finally go out to the island and see what they were talking about. We spent five days on an island in the middle of the Dnepr with no running water, sleeping in tents, cooking over an open fire and swimming as much as possible! I had a blast! (I don't have a lot of camping experience, so I wasn't sure how it would go, but since I was hanging out with my sister's family and she knows how to make it as comfortable as humanly possible it was a good time.)

Other than that, I wanted to post this link. That's a blog you may want to follow for the next six weeks or so to receive updates about my dad's bike trip across Russia. He is starting today or tomorrow. We would sure appreciate your prayers and you might find it interesting to see what this 67-year-old man is doing for a "hobby". :)

Office Update

Today was a hard day.
After much deliberation we decided to go ahead and let one of our girls go. This isn't entirely unexpected, just a month earlier than we had planned. But it was still hard. Lena is a single mum with a little girl and a fairly unsupportive family. And of course, knowing that made it all harder. She has been with us for a couple of years and has always been willing to take on whatever projects I throw at her, despite being a very timid person.
I'm very involved with all of our people, and we are a close group. We really work to have a good atmosphere and encourage good relationships between people, so this is hard on some of the rest of our staff as well and I am sure morale will take a dip as they realize that the future is already arriving.
I would appreciate your prayers for me this week and for our staff that we would keep our spirits up and remember that disbanding the office is really a good thing because it means we are coming to the end of this project. And pray for Lena and her daughter, Darina (7). Lena needs a new job, but it is difficult for her to find one because of needing to look after her daughter and having difficulty finding day care options. Lena is a teacher by profession.

I would also appreciate your prayers for mum and I as we give it our best effort to complete the English version of the doctrine course this week. There were some set backs and I am a little behind, but we really need to complete it this week, so please pray that God will bless us with the ability and stamina to do that. Everyone else's work depends on us completing it in English, so there is a fair amount of pressure here.
Thanks.

Another Day, Another Dollar

Oops, another week goes by and here we are at Friday again. This week just flew by somehow! I guess I was a bit sick for part of it, and that always makes me lose days. But between that and trying to finish up the doctrine course and get some packing out of the way--and of course, spending a weekend gaming with my "little" brother while his wife was away--time flies!

I'm not finished with doctrine yet. The last lesson is requiring a little more work than I was expecting--well, that and being sick for two days, tends to slow me right down. But the work is coming along and I just sent off another lesson yesterday for translation. And am hoping to finalize one today as well. It is exciting to see the work all coming together! I need to finish it all up by the end of next week so that we can keep on schedule. Thankfully mum is helping a lot, otherwise there is no way I would be able to pull it all together! Every course has roughly 12 lessons (this one has 13), and introduction, and often several appendices (this one has about 10), a textbook and a course guide. The textbook for this course was completed long ago because we used it for the Basic Bible Doctrines, which is the first part of this course. The course guide includes the exams as well as any supplemental material, alongside a discussion plan for each lesson. The course guides almost always have to be written from scratch. If they counted as books, I could say that I've written a lot of books already!
Right now all that is left for this course is to finish Lesson 13, write 2-3 more seminars for the course guide, finalize the appendices and write the exams and answers. Oh, and finalize the Introduction, which I am planning on doing immediately after finishing this blog entry. After that, I'll send the remaining pieces to our two translators, the English versions of the workbook and course guide will be formatted in InDesign and printed for me to look over for any mistakes or formatting errors. Right now the workbook looks like it will be about 600 pages, and I'll need to at least glance at every one of those pages to make sure nothing catches my eye, as well as check specific things for consistency. And I'll need to do the same for the course guide, but that is only about 100 pages.

And yes, I need to get this all done by the end of next Friday. Well, all of the English part. It will take the office about another two months to work through and finalize the Russian part. I always feel bad for how long it takes me to do my work on these things, but then I realize that there are four people doing the same thing in Russian that mum and I do, plus we have to actually edit the lessons for content and verify that it is what we want to teach, rewriting as necessary.

Tomorrow we are having a picnic with our office for 4th of July. It is a nice casual opportunity to have them over again before we are done for the summer.

Oh, and the other reason I need to get all my work done on Doctrine by the end of next week is that I am going to a camp with my sister's family the week after that! I'm very much looking forward to that opportunity to be with them and have a little rest.