As I promised, here I am once again updating this poor, forgotten blog! :P
I want to tell you about Gayle and Lena. Gayle and Lena are two Christian missionaries who come to the internat once a week, on Tuesdays, to visit the girls. Aside from us, they are the only people allowed to come visit the girls at the internat on a regular basis. We met them a week ago, on Tuesday, and I thought they were fantastic!. These lovely women usually bring some fun materials to play with the girls, but Gayla explained to me that one of her main purposes there is specifically to teach the girls about Jesus, which is think is sweet. With a few exceptions due to some of them having a few connections outside of the internat, most of these girls never get to church, and if it wasn't for Gayla, they would probably have never heard about God. They always try their best to bring joy to these girls in their mission, and it is obviously very effective because the girls ABSOLUTELY LOVE THEM!
Gayle is a woman maybe in her late 50s (??? but don't count on my horrible estimation of people's ages), and she has a personality that is hilarious, admiring, and intense all at the same time. She is very sure of herself, incredibly dedicated and committed to her cause, and completely unmoved by the dangers that her mission brings to her. She from the United States, and she has been doing this sort of missionary work in Ukraine for 13 years. During that time she has often been harassed and watched, even to the point of having her phones tapped and her emails read... Yikes! Ukraine has been through a lot of political struggle, so it half doesn't surprise me lik that she would be targeted as suspicious. After all, like Gayle herself pointed out, a lot of people here find it very difficult to understand why anyone would want to come and visi these girls, especially for as long a time as she has, and her stay here may thus look suspicious to the authorities. In any case, Gayle is unafraid and she continues her mission, even despite her very poor command of the Ukrainian language (which I find very surprising, considering the amount of time she has been here!). When I asked her whether she was affiliated with any particular denomination, she said she was not; she works out of her own little group.
Lena, from what I could gather, is Gayle's translator. She is a young and cheerful local woman with a great smile and lots of spirit. She knows how to speak English fairly well, and she is a joy to talk to. Together with Gayle, they have taught the girls a number of Christian and positive-content songs in both Ukrainian and English... and you are about to take a little peak at that on my next post!! (I would add the videos here, but they take forever to load and I would have to wait for them before I can publish this post)
I really like having Gayle and Lena as resources, and I have a few questions to ask them and maybe some plans, but I will not disclose them until I am sure that it can happen. Lena is also going to leave for a month on a vacation, so I might wait until she gets back. There are many other things in the works with Jen and Jess, so that will take precedence for now.
In addition to visiting the girls at the internat, Gayle runs a bible study on Tuesday evenings. Jen went to it this week and she said she liked it. I personally don't think I will be going to it on a regular basis, but maybe I will stop by next week or the following just to experience it and to meet the group.
After talking to Gayle for a while, three of the girls did a choreographed dance for is (to no music!), which I thought was very cute. I will post this video also in a later post... We just have to be patient with this slow internet! Hahahaha...
Love you all. Miss you all. God bless.
No comments:
Post a Comment