Our base celebrated Christmas together on December 26th. In Ukraine, Christmas is on January 7th so we celebrate early so that everyone can be with their families on the holiday.

Since Lance and I love games and just having fun in general, we have tried to incorporate games in our family nights at the base. Of course there is always a feast and we always feast first.

Working together to decorate a tree… with toilet paper!

After the feasting has finished, we games can commence. Lance led the different games of writing captions for Christmas comics, contest for decorating a mini Christmas tree and a Christmas ornament relay. Everyone participated, kids and adults alike.

After our game extravaganza, the kids had a little Christmas pagent to put on for us. Everyone enjoyed seeing the kids perform, who doesn’t like seeing kids dressed up as sheep?

The evening ended with our own Christmas exchange, we drew names the week before and everyone was prepared to give a gift to their special someone. Of course in order to open the gift you had to guess who gave it to you. We were thankful for the time together and the past year, we are all looking forward to the upcoming year!

Instead of telling you about what we did for a staff training time, I thought it would be more interesting to share what we learned.

Mary Jean Powers came to Ternopil for a week in which three days were set aside for staff training. She also spent time with our leadership team and with just Lance and I. The thoughts I will share with you are from our staff training time.

~We should be active blessers, blessing people should be normal and natural

~Things that God wants to use the most is where Satan attacks the most.

~Distractions take us away from people, hope and what God has for us.

~You need a strategy of how to keep your purpose and blessing.

~You won’t be able to disciple others until you are practicing spiritual disciplines.

~God has called us to be interdependent. Philippians 2:1-13

~Don’t just ask “What time is it?” We should follow the Greek word ‘kairos’ meaning “What is it time for?”

~Exodus 20:8 commands us to remember the Sabbath, and Sabbath is a day of rest.

~The Chinese word for “busy” contains the symbols for “heart” and “kill”

~To serve God is to do what he asks, not necessarily doing good things

~Jesus walked everywhere, he didn’t hurry, he didn’t run. Heaven is not in a hurry.

~Genesis 2:1-3 The first day that Adam was alive, was a day of rest. God gave him a day of rest before he “earned” it!

~If we forget to rest, we can forget who we are, we forget our families, we forget to be curious, to explore, to play, and how to have fun.

~It’s not honorable to exhaust the home of the Holy Spirit

~Honoring the Sabbath is to lay to rest the previous week and not drag it into next week

If you are interested in Mary Jean’s work and ministry, you can check her out at: Get The Word Out!

While everyone else was dressing up and collecting candy in the states, we celebrated Thanksgiving. Sometime ago, we decided to pick a new day for a day of Thanksgiving. This was for two reasons, at one point there were more Canadian staff than American and Canadians have Thanksgiving in the beginning of October. We needed a day somewhere in the middle of the two Thanksgivings. The second reason was, we thought it was funny to choose one holiday unique to a particular nation and have everyone celebrate it despite where they were from. The American holiday of Thanksgiving didn’t have much meaning to anyone else besides Americans. When we created a new day and made it all about being thankful, it had a new meaning and everyone could really get into the holiday. As a base, we chose the last Friday in October to be our day of thanks and this year that happened to be Halloween which is not celebrated at all here.

Besides the feast of food, we introduced some new games. We hung apples from string and had an eating contest. The kids loved it and even some adults got into it. This was the first time that we had played games during a family night. We had pumpkin bowling where we had to roll a small pumpkin down into squares with point values. This was a fun time filler for everyone. We played another game before we moved into sharing what we were thankful for.

Now we did not just stand up and share what we were thankful for, everyone does that. We had everyone sit in table groups and within their groups, share what they were thankful for and then come up with a creative way to present what the group was thankful for. We had some great presentations! We had a group rap, we had some creative readings and a few skits. Everyone enjoyed the process of sharing and laughing with one another.

Singing a rap

Dramatic reading

The evening ended with a dessert contest. When I originally announced the contest, I told people that the dessert had to have pumpkin in it. A few people had big eyes and worried looks on their faces and I suddenly remembered that pumpkin is not a common food in Ukraine and most people don’t know how to cook with it. I reworked the required ingredients to include pumpkin or apple. After all the scared faces and worried responses, I was the only one to submit an apple dessert entry!

The judges were very full by the end of the night!

We randomly selected two judges who had a nibble of each. There were seven entries; two pies, a pumpkin chiffon cheesecake, two types of cupcakes, some tarts and my apple pie. Since there were two judges, there were two winners. The pumpkin chiffon and one of the pumpkin pies won! There was a plethora of dessert options for everyone to choose from!

How in the world do you set up a mobile medical clinic, you might ask. That’s a great question.

We had 8 days of clinics in 6 different villages, there were two villages that we came twice to.

There was one doctor, one nurse acting as a doctor, one pharmacist, three medical students scripting or working in the pharmacy. There was one other American nurse working at triage, one Romanian nurse doing triage and helping translate, 2 translators, one CNA acting as an optometrist, and there were about 8 people that were not medically inclined that were either a) acting as a medical person or b) helping in the logistics and admin of the clinic. There were also other translators that changed each day and people who acted as crowd control, trust me that was an important job!

The Medical Team

It takes a lot of people to help run a successful clinic!

The clinic requires bags and bags and bags of drugs. Lots of drugs, we have a miniature pharmacy station at every clinic. We had lots of supplies that were needed or were there for “just in case” since you just never know what you might see in the villages.

At the start of the clinic, someone goes around the village to announce that the medical team is coming and that they should bring their whole family to such and such place. We pull up in our two vans and a trailer and quickly set up.

A half full trailer

Every location is different, sometimes it was just one giant hall and people rotated around the room to the different stations. Sometimes there were different rooms that they had to float between, it just depends on the place.

They got a pulse!

Checking blood pressure

Waiting to be seen

The different stations start with a waiting area. Every member of a family gets a number. Next is triage. This is where they take blood pressure, pulse, name, age, and write down the major complaints. Then they wait some more for the doctor stations. They take the little slip of paper they got at triage to the doctor, he reads it, asks some more questions, maybe the doctor asks to have an EKG done on their mobile EKG machine. (There’s a separate station for that.) The doctors generally always look into their ears, listen to their hearts and breathing, check throats, maybe freeze a wart and then prescribe some medicine.

The doctor stations

Say “Ahhh”

The major complaints were headaches and back pain. Many of the people we saw were very, very poor. Many of them were gypsies whom are never treated well in the hospitals. There were more than one instance of someone having had a heart attack a week ago and was sent home from the hospital with only a few pills. Nothing else. Most gypsies are afraid of the hospitals because of how they are treated there and therefore have many health problems.

Waiting again

There is also the optometry station. Triage may prescribe them to go and get some glasses. Lots of people needed reading glasses. We had a bunch of glasses donated and so simply needed to find the right fit for each person. I was amazed at how many people desperately needed glasses but did not have them. Quite a few people cried when they could read for the first time.

Reading numbers

Waiting some more

After seeing the doctor, the next station is the pharmacy. Everybody gets vitamins, many people receive Tylenol or something similar, there are many people who received high blood pressure medicine, lots of people had worms and so got medicine for that. We had many instances of scabies and ears that needed to be cleaned out. We actually cleaned out a piece of wood from someones ear and saw a dead fly in someone’s ear. (They didn’t believe us when we said that and didn’t want their ears cleaned.) There were several ulcers that needed to be dressed and other various wounds that needed cleaning. Sometimes we gave out canes to the those that needed it.

All ready to deal drugs!

At the pharmacy

Cleanin those ears out!

The goody bags

We did a few house calls to some that could not come. Once to a man who was dying of cancer and once to a lady with diabetes and was not able to walk very well.

The last official station was a prayer station. There was almost always someone who stopped people on their way out the door to pray for them. There were several people who gave their life to Christ and wanted to know more about God. This is a very important station.

Just thought I would let people know that my dear friend and colleague, Joanne de Gruyl has started her own blog. It took us awhile to get everything figured out, but we managed and now she is able to update her family and friends back home.

She returned about a month ago from a trip to India and has lots to share. You can read all about her travels and adventures on her blog, click HERE to read all about it!