A day off

Hello from Charlene and Karlynn, the delinquent bloggers

Today is Sunday and we have a long anticipated day off. This, combined with the fact that we actually have internet access resulted in this post. The Mukachevo internet is sporadic at best, so we apologize for our seeming lack of communication.

This past week we have been staying at Marina's place. She is an English teacher, but is also an excellent cyrillic alphabet and guitar teacher. We have loved getting to know her better. She lives with her parents, who don't speak English. The food is amazing, but we cannot eat the amount required of us. Fortunately, Marina has dealt with Americans and Canadians before and understands our cultural differences. The food we eat is homemade, including noodles for soup, apple juice and our favourite salad: cucumber and tomato. We have surprised her with our ability to drown many flavours of Jaffa juices due to the high temperature and lack of drinking water. In addition, we have singlehandedly eaten her seemingly endless supply of cherries.

We spent our days running English Club for teens. Every morning we planned the days program of games, bible study, singing and english conversation activities. Then we had lunch and executed the days program of games, bible study, singing and english conversation activities. It never went exactly as planned but we learned lots and hope that we made a difference in the participants' lives. English club ended with sightseeing or sports which was a good opportunity to build relationships with the people. After English Club we had dinner at our host families and ended the day with team devotions and debriefing.

We went to church this morning at 11 and listened to an enrapturing Russian sermon. Singing Russian songs was somewhat difficult. Many of the sounds are not easily pronounced by the average English speaker. Not to mention the fact that the cyrillic alphabet hinders our small progress. However, even though we could not understand the language, we felt part of the local church community. They made sure to make us feel welcome and thanked us as a church for coming and serving in Mukachevo. A number of English club participants came to church as well and we had a hard time saying goodbye to them. After many hugs and a few tears we parted ways. We were surprised at how close we felt to these people after knowing them for one short week.

This Tuesday we leave for the Reformed Youth Festival in Svoylava, a 40 min drive from Mukachevo. We hope to update you on this next weekend.

We love and miss you guys and hope you are enjoying your summer.
Love Karlynn and Charlene (otherwise known as Charlynn and Karlene for those who have trouble pronouncing English names)

Prayer requests:
-That the people we met in English Club will continue to learn about God through the support of local Christians
-That our team will grow in unity and love for each other and strengthen each other in the faith
-Strength for our team as it's hard to leave everyone after one short week