Road Trip to Yaremche

Alec and his companions slide into Yaremche, Ukraine.

We actually got real snow for the first time this past week. Last year there was tons of snow in mid-November, so we had a couple more weeks of no snow this year. We got about 5 inches of snow, pretty much all in one morning. Judging by the weather forecast it looks like it's not gonna stick around too long.

Winter returns to Ukraine.

 The big thing this week was transfers. We lost our native Ukrainian missionary and one of the sisters and picked up a couple American missionaries. All of the members were super super sad to see the Ukrainian go, They definitely much prefer working with natives than with Americans. But, oh well, we're all they got. 

On Friday we did a kick-off activity for #lighttheworld (super crazy that Abbie auditioned for the video, I've seen it like a million times by now so that would have been super weird.) We basically invited everyone from English practice and the members -- and did some Christmas stuff. One of the ideas for service for the first day was to write a thank you note (or something like that) so we had everyone come and write thank you notes and then we made some salt-dough ornaments and got some paint so everyone could paint an ornament and give it to the person they wanted to thank. I left my SD card at home so I don't have any pics of this, sorry.

Anyway I don't think anyone actually gave the thank you cards to anyone, but it was fun and a lot of people came so it was a success. We also made some pretty good hot chocolate (thank you Martha Stewart) and we have tons of leftover, so I'll be able to use that insulated cup y'all got me. Thanks again for the package, by the way, lots of good stuff in there.

And then today for p-day we made a pretty good trip to a town called Yaremche, about an hour and a half away. It's basically a little touristy town right in the middle of the mountains with like skiing and other stuff like that. We're not allowed to go skiing but we did do some souvenir shopping and walked around a bit into some nature. There's some decent views and with the snow it all looked pretty cool. We also had a super cool dog follow us around. and of course I got a pic in my hammock. I just had to walk through a semi-frozen creek to get to the spot.

Anyway that's about it for this past week (there's probably more stuff that happened but I don't have my camera so I don't remember it, lol.) Hope y'all have a good week!

Scene from Yaremche.

Alec