Dead people in the doorway

Yes, dead people in the doorway. We have some strange experiences here in Kiev, but the strangest happened the other day. It's been major subzero temperatures here in Ukraine these days (more about that later), so one morning, when Torben and I needed some bread, we went back and forth about who would go down to the store to get some. He lost, so he was off to Forshet. About 15 minutes later, he returned with a very strange look on his face. Here's the story.

He had gone down the elevator and out the door of our apartment building and there, lying about 5 feet from the doorway, was a coffin with a dead old lady in it! People were standing around the coffin holding pictures of her. We don't know how she died, but we heard from Viktor, one of the Ukrainians here, that she must have lived in our building and died the night before. I guess they do the whole coffin in the doorway thing as part of the Russian Orthodox tradition. So now, every time I go out of the doorway, I'm afraid of seeing dead people.

Now, speaking of the cold, you know it's cold when...

1) You step out of the door and your everything in your nose freezes
2) Your fingers and toes are numb with cold while you're sitting under a blanket in your apartment
3) The gas in the base van freezes
4) Everything in your fridge is frozen solid
5) There's a thick layer of ice on the windows of the buses
6) In a city of 3 million people, space heaters are completely sold out

With temperatures around (including windchill) - 21 Fahrenheit (around -28 Celsius), Kiev has been COOOOOOLD!!! Something like 27 people have died from the cold in Ukraine alone. Russia has numbers up in the 70s. Insanely cold. And not a space heater in sight. But finally, yesterday, Laura, one of the ladies here on the base, loaned us an extra space heater they had. So, we're fine here. Thankfully, it's going to get warmer here in the next week or so. Up to 20 F.

One last thing I want to tell you about, on a more serious note. I went to an orphan hospital last Friday with one of the ministries here. It was a truly heartbreaking experience. It's these babies who just lie in their cribs all day. Two of them had Down's Syndrome, so it's very doubtful someone will adopt them. The others mostly just had bad colds. But there was a lifelessness to their eyes, something I've seen before in the abandoned babies my parents fostered for a while. No one has ever loved them. They don't focus on your face when you hold them. And they cry and cry when you put them down. As I was holding them, I thought of the Bible reading we did in the 3 month Bible school I went to in Malaysia (SBSCC) and how many times God told his people to take care of widows and orphans. These sick little babies (and the millions around the world like them) were who he was talking about. It broke my heart to see them and to know that most of them will not ever be adopted. In Ukraine, a parent can abandon their baby, but still have rights to them, so the child cannot be adopted out. So, there are millions of babies without a hope of having a loving family. They have a very hard life ahead of them. It's so very very sad. I know that going there once a week and holding them for two hours isn't doing much, but if somehow they get the sense that someone cares, that Jesus loves them, it's something.

So, there's my life this past week in a nutshell for you. More adventures to come!