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