We arrived safely in Uganda yesterday.

Like every leg so far, it’s a unique experience. New sights and smells to explore at every turn. We were picked up from the airport by our friend Kimi and driven to Noah’s Ark. Yesterday was mostly just getting briefed on the orphanage and some of its 110 resident children.

Justin spent lots of time photographing the kids while I just felt overwhelmed at the scale of this place! We also caught up on some much needed sleep after two days of travel with limited sleep.

Today we began the process of interviewing and really getting into the stories here. Considering we’re here for such a short time we haven’t gotten as much done as we would like so far but we’re confident by the time we leave we will have stories of life change to share.

We came to the Ukraine with little idea of what we would encounter. Of course, Hungry for Life staff prepared us as best they can for the practical details of Ukraine: where to get internet, what kind of adapters we would need, where we would stay, what to do with laundry, transportation and the like. And we had a briefing on the culture, the history and about John and Nadya, our project partners here.

But that was all we knew. The heart of this ministry in the Ukraine was completely unknown to us. So now I reflect upon the last two weeks (my, how the time does fly), and I sum up the Ukraine with one word: stories. Everywhere we look, every time we turn around, there was a story. Being a journalist I am already a firm believer that everyone has a story to tell. And obviously everywhere we have gone the object has been to find specific stories of spiritual and physical transformation of people and communities.

But it seems that here, the stories just pour out of every nook and cranny. And each story has had an impact on me. The people here suffer so much, and those that help sacrifice so much. If salvation was a matter of how much each person sacrificed, Heaven would be full of Ukrainians.

We’re still processing all that we’ve seen and heard, and we hope to share some more stories from the Ukraine with you shortly. In the meantime, we’ll be traveling again for the next few days. We take the night train to Kiev then two more flights to our next destination of Uganda. Please pray for safety as we travel, both by land and air. Pray that all our luggage makes it with us and that we have no problems with customs.

I wrote this blog post Thursday evening after a very long and difficult day. We left first thing in the morning Friday for an orphanage and were out of internet service for two days.

First of all, I have to say to all of you thank you SO MUCH for all the emails and comments. I honestly cannot tell you what the encouragement has done for my soul, especially on this night.
We have had probably the most emotional day I can think of having in a long time. Actually, it’s probably the most emotional day both Justin and I have ever had together given the sheer volume of tears cried and heart ached.

The saddest part of the day for me was finding out at the end of the day that a young girl in Haiti who we interviewed passed away. She was only 13 years old and was suffering from a very large cancer tumour on her face. When we interviewed her, there still seemed to be hope that she would get better. Then when we were working at Hungry for Life this summer I found out the doctors had stopped her treatments because they said there was no hope anymore. So I prayed for a miraculous healing. But God has decided to take her home instead. It is hard to believe she’s gone. I talked with her and hugged her and interviewed her dad only a few short months ago. This was very hard news for me to take.

The internet here is in the room Pastor John and Nadia are sleeping in, and Nadia came in the room just after Justin told me the news and I started to sob. She called Mary to translate and then Pastor John came in and prayed with us. They both praised God that Dachemie was in a better place now, and John shared with us an encouraging story about a woman here in the Ukraine. We will be meeting with her and I will write about her story soon after we interview her this Sunday. But he told me her story because her mother died and, because of that one death, four people have come to Christ. So you never know what will happen as a result of Dachemie’s death.

This morning we went to Shishkano, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. All the places we have gone to so far have been poor. But Shishkano is the poorest of the poor. People live there who have no hope, no future, and no faith. It was sad to see. The village is crumbling and held together with a few mud and stick walls. We met an 87 year old woman who cares for her Down Syndrome daughter in her 40’s. They live in a pit of a house. Garbage was everywhere, flies covered the little food we could see, the smell of decay and urine and garbage filled the air. The inside was dark in light and in spirit. It seemed there was not much hope there at all.

Then we met with Pasha, a man anyone who has been involved with the Ukraine will know of. He is a paraplegic, and his two widowed and sick sisters care for him 24 hours a day. In the Ukraine there is no respite care, no nurses that come to visit, no programs to improve his mobility or stretch his muscles. He lays in bed every day of every month for the last three and a half years since his car accident left him immobile.

Tonight we hosted a banquet at a local restaurant for invalids living in Nikopol (the town we are staying in). There were 55 men, women and children who came to the dinner. Mary says some were war veterans, others had mental disabilities. I met a single mother with two kids. She brought her daughter Anya, a 16 year old girl with mental development problems. The child looked like she was 9 or 10 years old. The mother told me it is so hard to take care of her and her son, and she longs to live in a place like Canada where there is better care for families with disabled children.

At the banquet some of the team members shared their testimonies, a local pastor gave the salvation message and nine people became Christians. Then we handed out food and hygiene hampers. Many of those who came walked with crutches or canes and the 20 kg bags of food would be impossible for them to carry home. So with the team money they paid for taxis to take many of the guests home, and some were driven home in the vans we use to get around.

Justin helped one couple get into a taxi at the end of the banquet. The husband was paralyzed on the right side of his body. He had to swing his whole body to move his leg or his arm. The effort he needed to get down just a simple roadside curb was hard to watch, Justin shares. He got the injury from serving in the army, and he’s been that way for 15 years. His wife had a hard time helping him. Justin said it was hard to imagine how they cope.

It was hard to watch all of that. Sometimes I have very little patience for people who choose to do drugs or alcohol and then get trapped in it because I figure at one point in their lives they had a choice. For people who are born with legs that don’t work, with brains that are broken or other physical ailments, I find it much more of a challenge to handle emotionally because they did not have a choice. They were so helpless, these people. And there is basically no social system here in the Ukraine to help the disabled.

Even though this was a very challenging day, we saw God. We saw His hand on the lives of those we met. I wish I could say something more profound, but I feel drained and I need time to sort this all out in my head. Thank you so much for reading.

After three planes, a ten-hour car ride and a total of 36 hours of travel time we made it to the Ukraine.  With a team from Canada, we all arrived safely last night to Nikopol. Justin and I feel blessed to be here and already we’ve heard some heart-warming stories from team members as we worked together today, sorting clothes to give away.

My first impression of Ukraine was a warm gust of air as I stepped off the plane, weather that felt like fall in Canada, sunny with a hint of crispness. The airport was nice and we had no problems getting through Customs.

The car ride gave us a chance to see some of the capital city and countryside before it got dark. As we drove through Kiev, it was interesting to see how dressed up people were just to go to the market or to take their baby for a walk. Our HFL leader, Mary, said that Ukrainians feel valued if they dress nice, and even if they are very poor, they try to have at least one nice outfit. From what I could see out the windows, as we past through little towns, there’s a real mix of aged buildings from Ukraine’s tattered past combined with more modern establishments, such as gas stations that could be dropped into Canada and fit right in. The buildings are symbols to me that Ukraine is trying to move forward by modernizing. Team member Peter Rempel says that when he first started coming to Ukraine the airport was just a shack. Now it too has modernized with an elegant glass front and modern features inside.

We stopped for dinner at a hunter-themed restaurant complete with a stuffed wolf and camo paint, and had a delicious borsht dinner. After dinner it quickly got dark and most of the team members drifted off to sleep as the van bounced along the fairly decent road. The project partners here in Nikopol, John and Nadia, are Mary’s sister and brother-in-law, so it was all the more special to meet them and be welcomed into their beautiful home where we are staying. The guesthouse absolutely took my breath away. It’s a brick and concrete farm house that has been lovingly renovated by Mary’s family. Every detail, from the crown molding to the wooden staircases, has been done with excellence in craftsmanship and care. Nadia has been so welcoming, and we have feasted like kings—and it is only day one! She told us at lunch that this is her way to show her appreciation for a team coming, and that she wants to do everything to the best of her ability to honour us as guests in her home. She obviously puts a lot of love into everything she does and already I am starting to see why people who come here on a missions trip seem to come back again.

The team will be doing many projects over the next 12 days, including hosting banquets, doing church renovations, cleaning a rehab home, home visits to widows and the bedridden, a visit to an orphanage, handouts of 300 food bags and 300 hygiene bags, and lots of clothing distributions. We will have a chance to tag along with the team for much of the time and we look forward to seeing how they connect with those people that everyone else has left, forgotten or neglected. I praise God there are people willing to give of their time and money to help the poorest of the poor and that we have the chance to gather stories of how hope has come to the Ukraine through Christ’s followers.

Note from HFL: Justin and Lorene will have limited access to the internet while in Ukriane, click here to view the Chilliwack Group’s Ukraine blog to get more updates.

We’ve got a bit of time before our next flight and discovered a free WiFi connection in the McDonalds here at the Frankfurt, Germany airport, so I wanted to write a brief update.

It’s hard to believe we are so far from home now. Justin and I left for the Vancouver airport at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday morning. It is now almost 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night back home, but here in Germany it’s almost 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning. People are having breakfast and coffee, watching the sun rise for the last half hour or so.

Our first flight took us from Vancouver to Toronto in four and a half hours. On the flight we did devotions and I opened up my Bible to Psalm 24. I think the first two verses are going to be part of my daily reading as we travel.

‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; For He founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.” – Psalm 24: 1-2

I love this passage because it reminds me that no matter where I am in the world, it is the Lord’s territory. If I’m in Chilliwack or Cranbrook, if I’m in the Ukraine or Uganada, the Lord is there also. It’s funny how these passages that seem so simple can have such impact when you’re faced with new circumstances.

Our second flight felt incredibly long with the seven and a half hour flight from Toronto to Frankfurt. Anyway, just wanted to briefly update as we continue on our way. We’ll be sure to share some of our first impressions of the Ukraine and what we’re discovering when we get settled and find internet at our destination in Nikopol, Ukraine.

People say it changes you to go on a missions trip. They’re right. Although as I reflect on what it means to be changed, I suspect that might be the wrong word. Wrecked is more accurate. It really does wreck you, this whole missions thing.

There’s a part of you that gets left behind when you leave a mission field. I don’t really feel whole anymore in the way I did before. I guess it’s because I know what’s out there in a much more personal, tangible way. I can close my eyes and see the high mountains of Peru. I can breathe deep and imagine the smell of rain falling in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. I can slide my tongue on the roof of my mouth and taste the fresh cooked fish in Ecuador. In the silence, I can hear the sound of worshipers in the open-air church in Haiti.

Once you can see a people that live in need, and hear the cries of a school teacher as she laments the life of her students, and smell the stench rising from the dump where salvaging is a way of life, and touch the hands of a servant of God, and taste of the life that abject poverty brings, it’s hard to shake out of your senses when you come back home.

My head has has been filled with these places, these people. And my life – a life pieced together with comfort and convenience – seems less than what it was before. The smells and sights and sounds of my life seem more an echo than the real thing now that I know what is beyond my own little comfortable world. And it takes me apart to know that my world is so much smaller than I once thought.

My senses have been wrecked. And I praise God for it.

Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for your kingdom’s cause
As I walk from earth into eternity
- from ‘Hosanna’ by Hillsong United