The post Soviet Block is a very large Russian speaking population where there is a great interest in learning the English language. The tape library is a great resource which could be very helpful to all, particularly the Christians there. Ukraine is one of the largest countries and possibly has the most pro-US sentiment.
Few Americans get beyond Kiev, the capital, however, and due to economic conditions few locations are ideal for tourism.
I have corresponded for some time with a Ukrainian man who developed an Interlinear Russian/English Bible for the computer. He works at an English language school where Ukrainian pastors are trained and was very interested in this ministry, as I was in his.
It was suggested that I visit, and a number of things conspired together in my life, and as I was at the point of losing vacation days at work because of not taking enough over the past few years, and we had just hired two new guys so I was no longer having to do three jobs and they could get by without me, and because of other things such as just touched upon in the personal info section, was feeling I really needed one, to really get away, and I decided to. There was another, primary reason for going there too, I plan to publish a book anout it...
I have posted some photos from the trip. I stayed with Sergey's family, Olga is his daughter and was my translator and the other people in the pictures are with their organization.
There is a great need there for solid teaching, people there have a hunger but also the same skepticism seen elsewhere due to scandals and excesses, and they seem all together to need more background understanding of what Christianity is all about. Most people who do not claim to be atheists claim to be Ukrainian Orthodox, and it is very much like Catholicism here in the US, where there is the full range from casual sometimes attendees who know nothing and seem to care little about the faith, to those who are sincere and devout.
Economic conditions in the cities are not as bad as Americans imagine, but money is in great shortage. Government salaries are unstable and often late, and a typical salary is 80 to 100 hrivnas per month (there are about 4-1/2 hrivnas to the US dollar). The primary cost to a visitor is that of getting there, prices for everything else are generally much better than in the US.
I was invited back again to teach English in local schools, any native English speaker could help them a lot, and even though my Russian was quite poor, it didn't matter to them.
It was quite a wonderful learning experience for us all, particularly myself. The bottom line outcome of the trip was disappointing however from the perspective of this ministry. It is a similar situation with people in India and Africa with whom I have corresponded. More letters come in from all over the world than I can even answer, postage costs make lending them tapes impossible, and I wish there were some similar local resource I knew of to which I could refer them. Everyone wants to start a tape library ministry like this one, but there are inadequate resources available to them, necessary for equipment and materials and routine operation. For us to provide anything useful would require American funding for these things to get them started, and substantial additional American volunteer effort of time.
A potential partial solution would be for a volunteer from there to come here to prepare a large set of tapes to send or bring their ministry to get them started. But checking into that, the US Government makes the pursuit of such an idea costly and time consuming, and severely limit the number of immigrants, and again it comes down to resources, finances and time.
I have been able to suggest other resources in some cases, and a more practical approach to reach a place like this (as well as the rest of the world, wherever there are computers with internet access !) would be to do as Firefighters For Christ (http://firefightersforchrist.org) has recently done, convert their messages into an audio format so they can be played over the Internet !
Though I would love to do it, this also would be too much of a time consuming project for me at this time… By the way, they have an outreach to Russia, and are now preparing for their 5th trip there…
(Also FYI, no donations given to the ministry were used at all for this trip, it was funded by my own personal finances and wonderful Ukrainian hospitality for which I am very thankful)
