This is the seventh entry in the series I am writing about my trip to Ukraine?–?I didn’t have daily internet access while there so I recorded each day for later publishing.  And later [much later actually] is now.

Today I started out by going to the children’s hospital and holding babies in the morning. Took the Mushuka (spelling? – Ukrainian bus)

• 

  held a baby girl about 3 months old who had been taken from her mother just the day before because of poor care.

• Held Konstatine who we had brought medicine for.  Konstantine had a problem with swallowing that would be easily solved by medication.  The hospital didn’t have the funds to pay for this medication and there was no one else as Konstantine’s caregiver.  The medication only cost about $150 USD – easily provided by our team!  Without it, his future didn’t look too well.

After that I went to one of the shops with the girls. Most Ukrainian shops are kind of neat being basically in an apartment building in stalls (kind of like what our flea market would be) – usually in the center of an apartment complex. You have to watch where you walk because of open sewers. While walking there I noticed slits in the basements of some of the apartments….they came across to me as a “defense” architectural feature where machine guns could be pointed out (but maybe not the case?).

After lunch the entire team went to a place called the Beuleuka (spelling?) home. It is a place where handicapped and deformed people are shipped out to by the city. It’s one of five such places that Ed’s ministry has got involved in helping. The first thing that hit us was the smell – it was hard trying to ignore it but it was ever present like a third person. People living there have all kinds of deformities and/or handicaps.

We passed out bananas and chocolate bars and just spent time with them. The place itself is in a terrible state of disrepair and honestly I don’t know how anyone could live there but Ed says you should have seen it when he first visited it! A lot of renovations and repairs have been done since he started helping out. Now there are other local churches involved in visiting, holding services and even bussing people to their services.

Ed introduced us to one of the inhabitants who was one of the first to receive Christ and is on fire for the Lord. Ed says he calls him a pastor because of all the spiritual care he gives the other inhabitants. Their spiritual fervor is amazing and they are probably closer to God than I ever will be. It’ll be neat getting the chance to meet them again in heaven someday!

After supper together with the team we all travelled together to downtown Krivoy Rog to try and find a place to do something fun together (i.e. play pool, bowling, laser tag). There was one place that had that kind of stuff but it was closed and so was another place. So we ended up going to the Grand Central pizza parlour again and enjoying coffee and a sundae. Nothing fancy but just a night out together with the team.