Alas, but today’s update is a tale of woe. It was the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the epoch of incredulity, the season of Darkness. Dare I say, even the winter of despair, with nothing before us, and we were all going direct the other way. This paragraph was written for the literate among you.
Why all the overstated drama? I have taken the first major step toward true Borg assimilation. I am now the owner… gasp… of a cell phone. I can see my would-be friends around the world wringing their hands and cackling at my disconsolation. “Finally, he’s become one of us...”
My cousin Fred told me, “Wait as long as you possibly can to get a cell phone.” It isn’t my fault, Fred, really. It’s the Kyivian phone system. They forced my hand. I haven’t had a working phone line in four months. How can a world class city of 2.5 million people not have a cooperative phone company? But it’s true. I told people they could contact me through email or through skype. But to no avail.
You may not have experienced my unbridled hatred for cell phones (it’s okay for Christians to hate cell phones, just not the people who use them). It stems back to a distaste for regular phones. I remember hearing about the first car phones and thinking aloud, “What gives? The car is supposed to be a place you can escape the phone.” Then, like cancer, cell phones began appearing everywhere. First with drug dealers and divorce lawyers, then to day traders. Finally it invaded the lives of regular folk.
On our missions base, our prayer times and services continually pastiched with the telltale chirps of self phones*. Just this morning, after worship I stopped playing the piano and the first sound was not a prayer, not an amen, but the electronic ditty of a mobile that I’m sure was an emergency. (sarcastic italics not available in all email formats) It happens in church on Sundays and in restaurants on Saturdays and every day in between. These are people I love who love God too but can’t give Him priority over their ringers.
I’ve been reluctant to join in this sort of cacophony. So after I gave up on our line being repaired, I relented aloud that I needed to buy one. Tim, a good friend, told me, “I have an old self phone you can have. It’s not reliable and shuts off sometimes when you walk around with it in your pocket, but you’re welcome to it.”
Free phone? Beats throwing money away for something I didn’t want. I accepted the offer. My roommates were delighted that I brought the beast home. But the phone didn’t work at all.
“No, this is perfect.” I told them, somewhat relieved. “I can honestly tell people I have a self phone without being bothered day by day by the noise of it.” And I dropped it in my coat pocket.
Later I was walking home one of the girls (don’t get goofy ideas. We live in the city and I walk home all the girls) and pulled out the gizmo. She told me, “Oh I have a self phone just like that, except the back keeps sliding off so I bought a new one. You can have the old one if you want, it really does work.”
So now I had not one but two cell phones. I took the back off of Tim’s phone and put it on Krista’s phone and it stays fine. And while Krista’s phone worked but she couldn’t find the charger, Tim had a charger but no working phone. So I created one working self phone from the two cast offs, a virtual Franken-Selfphone.
And so I’m making the best of a necessary evil. All the same, I feel like I’ve violated some sort high principle. What if this is the first step toward spiraling down some moral abyss, where next I’ll start drinking coffee, then start eating tofu, then at the very bottom, I’ll buy a Macintosh computer. Just keep me in your prayers.

* “Self phone” is a brilliant spelling variant of “cell phone” that I recently saw on a memo written by a non-English speaker.

¶ 4:51 PM //

¶ 10:51 AM //

Girls at the orphanage

¶ 10:42 AM //

This past Wednesday marked my first year as a full time missionary in Kyiv. This causes me to wax nostalgic a bit, so I think I’ll do a first year retrospective. You know those lame tv show episodes that consist almost entirely of clips from previous shows? That’s just the work of lazy writers and low budgets. I won’t do that.
When I first arrived here, I had only met a few people by email, and knew very little about what I would do. Don’t get me wrong, I did all the research I could. But there are some things you just can’t know about.
Soon after I arrived, I met a guy from Norway who’d been here for a short time. I had the stars in my eyes of an Indiana Jones wannabe on a new adventure. He warned me, “It’s fun here at first, but trust me, three weeks from now, you’ll want to go home.”
Extended missions trips always have that kind of a honeymoon phase, and then when the newness wears off and the frustration of trying to live in an unfamiliar culture hits you, then many people go into a dark “I hate this place and I just wanna go home” period. Then that normalizes as you get accustomed to the foreign culture and you take the joys and frustrations as they come. Budding missionaries take note. This is normal and to be expected.
So I understood what Mr Norway meant by three weeks. I know when I was in an outreach in China for a month, I loved it and I really loved the people I was with. But I was happy to come back to the universe I understood. Just trying to understand Chinese people who were trying to speak English was mind numbingly tiring after a while.
But I never hit that dark time here in Ukraine. In fact, by the time three weeks had gone by, I really felt like I had found my place here. I had plenty of great friends and was leading worship already. There were frustrations here and there, but I really came to recognize that at least for an extended season, this is where I belong. I wanted to tell my Norwegian friend that it was all cool, but he’d already gone home. Poor fella.
Just for fun, here’s the quick list of the worst things that’s happened to me in Ukraine in the last year. Bit by a dog, slipped down a metro shaft, got pick-pocketed, ran out of peanut butter, got really really cold a bunch of times. Worst, after four months of no phone service, I’m forced to get one of those how you say, “self-phone” things to communicate. But despite all of this, my scars healed, my sweaters came in the mail, my wallet was recovered, and most importantly, my peanut butter was replenished. I still have all my limbs and most of my sanity. God is good. In fact, the worst experience, when my dad passed away, happened while I was home in safe ole America. Even that shows me how good God was to let me be home when it all happened.
So this is for you dreamers who think God’s calling you to something bigger, but you’re not sure about leaving the safety of your known world. He’s there, always, and He understands the language. He’s figured out the science. He’s already preparing you for the new job. He knows the ending of the book. He knows where the money will come from. It’ll be okay. Just watch your step when you get off the metro...

¶ 8:06 AM //

¶ 8:00 AM //

Public transportation is a wonderful cheap way to get around. But this photo doesn't do justice just how ugly and smelly and smokey this bus was. Truly an amazing vehicle.

¶ 7:50 AM //

     In the baby hospital, they normally serve the orphan kids a baby bottle of (I hope) liquefied oatmeal.  It’s been called other names.  “Swill” comes to mind.  I guess that’s okay when the child is an infant.  But if the baby is over a year old and has teeth and all, they really need something more.
     Last time I was home, I confessed that on occasion, we sneak bananas to the hospital kids.  One of my supporters (I’ll respect their anonymity) has a soft spot for Oleg.  Before I left, she gave me some money specifically to buy bananas for him.
     “Holy Cow,” I laughed, “With this, I could buy him a banana every day for a year.”
     “Well okay,” she said, “You can get the other kids bananas too.”
     So it’s becoming my habit to always buy a bunch of bananas on the way to the hospital.  Side note:  I don’t have a clue where the little grandmas (babushkas) are getting bananas.  Roadside venders in America sell things they grow in their gardens.  But bananas in Kyiv?  It’s a mystery.
I’d been talking to Inge about my concern for Oleg.  I don’t seem him developing like I should.  He’s getting bigger, but he just lays there in the crib.  He’s a year and a half now, and while these babies are always behind for various reasons, he’s not even crawling.  I personally give him a lot of attention when I’m there.
     The time came for me to give Oleg his first banana.  As soon as I walked up to his crib, his face lit up and he laughed.  That’s always a good sign.  I picked him up and told him (in English) “Oleg, I have a special treat for you.  This is called a banana.”
     I propped him in my arm, and peeled a banana, putting it in front of his face.  He looked at it and turned back at me smiling.  New toy?  I even put it up to his lips with no response.  Just smiled at me.  Fun game.  He was saying.  We’re pals.
     “Okay kid, this is not a microphone.”  Then I realized, living in a hospital room, he’s probably never seen solid food before and never seen it eaten.  So I broke off the top half of the banana (already touched his lips) and set it aside.  I had him watch me eat the rest of the banana.
     Understand that I wanted him to see EXACTLY what I was doing.  You know how mommy teaches you not to chew with your mouth open?  I couldn’t do that.  Making as much performance as possible, I had Oleg watch me bite the banana.  He watched as I chewed the banana to shreds.  He heard my continuous color commentary about its scrumptious banana goodness.  In psychobabble, we call this “modeling.”  Later someone will have to model for him “proper table etiquette.”  With that show, I got no credibility.
     It worked.  He took several hesitant bites and I watched the funny expressions on his face.  Oh, that I had pictures.  But they’re in my head.  After playing for a bit, I set Oleg on his belly in the crib.
     You know what he did next?  He propped himself up on his arms to look outside the bed.  He has weak neck muscles and was wavering back and forth, but he was definitely holding himself up.  He even skidded himself forward.  I couldn’t believe it.  I called Inge over.  “Look at this kid!”  And there was great rejoicing throughout the room.
     It’s such a privilege to be there with a child when they hit landmark moments like “first solid food” or “first tentative step” or “first projectile vomiting.”  No, scratch that last one.  Definitely not a privilege.   Working with orphans and abandoned babies, you see so much buried treasure.  And there’s more below the surface.  They’re wonderful, precious kids and yet they’re forgotten, even discarded.  Nobody’s keeping their baby books and photo albums, first haircut samples.  Only guys like me get to be in on these life celebrations, and only when we’re there at the right time.
Thanks to all of you who support me and pray for me and provide bananas for me.  I don’t want to be all sappy, but God really made me a big old saphead.  It’s so fulfilling to help unlock the world to these little guys.  Days like this, I really, really love my job.  If only they’d let me take him home for a while…

¶ 5:13 PM //