Week-ending activities

    Friday night's activities were planned at almost the last minute. But from my view, they went smoothly. Since we aren't doing the normally scheduled English classes yet, it was more of a game/conversation night. We did read and discuss an article about Joni Eareckson Tada at the end however and I think it will lead to some more discussion later on.
     I should note that David Purvis arrived back in country Thursday night so I wasn't the only English-speaker at the meeting. We started out with a game called Alias (not named after the TV show). It was a simple game similar to Catchphrase. After we played a really long game of Uno. The Ukrainians like to add new rules that I'm not familiar with but they are good additions.
     Seeing how David interacts with people shows me that I have a long way to come in learning to teach. I have a certain set of knowledge that I need to add to (hopefully with some of his experience) to make my time here successful. Camp showed me some of that and now I just need time actually teaching to get there.
     David and two students had to leave early. So they didn't get to be part of the reading and discussion. We re-read (for most of us at least) the story of Joni Eareckson Tada and discussed it a little too. One thing we didn't have time for at camp that we did this time was translate the paper into Russian after reading it in English. Other than not knowing Russian, I really liked that idea. It seemed to help them with their comprehension of the story. We still had to go through each paragraph and explain the confusing words. Their collective lexicon is growing but each person still needs different words explained. After the article we watched this video to help explain Joni's story a little more. I'll be transcribing that when I get a few minutes free time. It was noisy at the office and most people couldn't hear the video.
     Now, I want to take a moment to talk about small victories. Every time something positive happens that I've been dreading, I relax a little bit more. This whole trip will see me slowly relaxing and getting more used to living here. Each of those small victories is proof to myself that I can live and function here.
     By nature, I don't like change. Yeah, yeah, I know. Then why move to Ukraine? Never mind that. I answered that in my first post. Right now I'm talking about surviving change and thriving in it. Finding things that I can do on my own successfully (like buying groceries or riding the subway and not getting lost) is very meaningful to me. It'd be easy (for a while at least) to just stay in my apartment and not go out except for church or events. A sort of modern-day hermit in the big city. But when I find I can do something on my own, in a strange environment, it means a lot to me.
     For example, today I went out and bought fruit for the English club meeting all by myself without help. I even navigated the busy sidewalks and streets without trouble. Yesterday I went on a self-guided tour of a historical part of Kiev. I didn't get lost or in trouble. I rode the subway and didn't miss my stop. I even started to understand the names of the stops along the way as they were announced. Each of those is a small victory for me. It's proving to my brain that living here is just like living anywhere else in the world. There are certain activities that I need to complete each day and the only difference between here and home is unfamiliarity.
     Yeah, that's not really profound. But I like simple things. If I look at the big picture I tend to get overwhelmed. It's better to let the person who created the picture worry about it. I'll handle the daily things one at a time as they come.
     Oh, one last thing. Do you realize how small this world is? The missionary family that lives upstairs has kids enrolled in the same school as the Eide family here in Kiev. They even know the Eide and Purvis families. I learned that earlier this week. But Friday morning I got to visit the school and play basketball. Kiev Christian Academy is located in the northern part of the city and is about a 25 minute marshrutka ride from my apartment. It's a fairly typical school building but it reminds me a little of an old highschool that hasn't been remodeled in over 20 years.
     OK, that's all. Have a great weekend.