Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Dolphins, Friends, and Russian Songs

Last weekend Brandon and Katie had a friend come up from Mariupol. Sasha came on the train early Saturday morning. He spent all day on Saturday with our team and then left with Brandon and Katie on Sunday evening.

A couple weeks ago a new outdoor dolphinarium opened up in the main park in town. Sasha was a good excuse for all of us to go see the show together. Lucy was still under the weather, so David and I offered to keep Canaan overnight. We picked him up and headed to meet the Hindmans, Prices, and Sasha at the show. It was great and thoroughly entertaining! The show included 4 sea lions, and 4 dolphins performing their best. Two of the dolphins gave up halfway through their routine and their poor trainer left them to swim around, misbehaving, which was quite comical. Who would have guessed we'd have a dolphinarium in Kharkov, Ukraine?!























On Sunday our whole team (minus Lucy and Max since Lucy was still sick) went to XT3 (Hetezay) to worship with the congregation out there. The service is in Russian, so David and I struggle to understand little fragments of what they are saying. Nevertheless, it's encouraging and we're all worshipping the Lord together.


Later in the afternoon, after Dougle and Lucy fed us all enchiladas, we all sang together. Sasha brought song
books up from Mariupol for us to use and then led us all in singing. It was really good to sing together in Russian, even though we weren't perfect at it, sometimes stumbling over the words and/or tune. In 2002, Brandon met Sasha in Mariupol when he was an AIM student. Brandon worked with him while he was in AIM and Sasha became a Christian. When Brandon and Katie went back to Mariupol again in 2007-2008, they worked with Sasha more, training him to be one of the leaders in the youth group. Today, Sasha is helping "train" us in Russian songs-- what a neat story. We pray stories like Sasha's will come out of the work we'll be a part of here. We know God has amazing plans for the Sashas, Natashas, and Nicolays here in Kharkov!

During our singing together, Brandon and Sasha even taught us the Russian version of "The Sea of Galilee" so I thought I'd share it with you here.

4 comments:

Russell, Alison and Grant said...

Sounds like you guys have been having a great time! Love the pics!

Mihills Family Blog said...

Love the story about Sasha!! And I loved hearing you all sing in Russian. I actually found myself singing along!! :-)

Love you,

Debbie

Kris said...

We use to sing The Sea of Galilee forwards and backwards almost every week. It was crazy! And I actually only know it in Russian.

jacobnz2 said...

Man that songs hard enough in english......