On another note...

I thought this was a cool picture. I just love the view out our apartment windows, and obviously, this pigeon loves it too!!




















Here's a bunch of our students piled into our teeny little apartment. From the left, we've got Sergei, Vasya, Sasha, Sveta, Shakhnoza, Nika, Tanya, Krzysztof, Alyona, Marina, Katya, and Denis. Aren't we all beautiful? :)

Chernobyl

It's a serious day in Ukraine today. It has been 20 years since the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The World Health Organization estimates that 9,000 people have died as a result of the radiation released in the explosion, while Greenpeace claims that the number is more like 93,000, including the continuing diseases and deaths.

Services were held all over Ukraine to commemorate the victims. We took time in our base staff meeting today to pray for the victim's families. I read online a few minutes ago that the government hastily covered the remains of the exploded reactor in a steel cover to contain the deadly chemicals back in 1986, but now that cover is starting to disintegrate and is leaking. Now, the government needs to build a new one, which could cost millions of dollars. So, we spent some time praying about that as well.

When we were in Yalta, Ukraine last year, we saw some people who were born extremely deformed because of the Chernobyl disaster. I think it was only then that the event that I had only read about in history books became real to me. People born without limbs, with their faces horribly deformed, all because they were born too close to the Chernobyl area.

Yes, it's a sobering day here in Ukraine.

1, 4, 26, 108, 47, 7, 5, 3:30am

What do all of those numbers have in common? This week's lectures!!!

It's the coolest thing ever. So awesome. There's this technology where you can link up with people in other countries through the internet and see each other. It's really new, at least in YWAM, and we're calling it Genesis. There are several bases around the world that now have it. The main purpose is to link bases so that speakers can get into difficult or closed countries through the internet. It's not that easy (though it's getting easier) for people to get into Ukraine, so we can have different speakers speak through the Genesis technology. A few weeks ago, we hooked up with a base in Lausanne, Switzerland, and had a guy speak to us at one of our base meetings from there. We could see and hear him and he could see and hear us.

So, this week is our first time using Genesis for DTS lectures and guess who our first speaker is! Loren Cunningham, YWAM's founder! He's speaking to us from Lausanne, Switzerland. But not just us!! Here's what those numbers mean.

1 - speaker, Loren Cunningham
4 - locations hooked up at the same time - Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela, and Ukraine
26 - nations represented in the classrooms
108 - the amount of people listening to Loren speak (at the same time!!)
47 - the amount of Koreans of those 108 people, the majority by far!!! (Second is the 15 Americans.
7 - the number of DTS's plugged in because Amsterdam DTS is on outreach and hooked up with Venezuela, another DTS is with the one in Switzerland, and the Belarussian DTS is with us!!
5 - languages being translated to or from - English, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian
3:30 am - what time it was in Venezuela when lectures started!!

The coolest part of this morning's lectures was right before he started speaking, when we all prayed together for the teaching. Just that feeling of being connected with people all over the world at the same time as we prayed to God. He's just so big!! That He's working in all of these people everywhere. It's amazing.

Iiiiiiiiittt's baaaaaaaaaack!!!

Early morning, April 7, 2006. A young woman wakes from a too-short night of sleep. Her husband gets up first and sticks some bread on the toaster. (Dramatic music rising.....)

From the kitchen comes a loud cry of "NOOOOOO!!!!!!"

The snow is back. And not the simple, pleasant flurries. It's a full on blizzard out there. It's back with a vengeance. (Loud sigh..............)