Phone Line & Internet Installation at Cafe
This week we finalized an agreement with the telephone/internet company for the Cafe. You can see here the trench dug which goes under the main street in our town. It is a big deal here to get a new line and port for Internet, they are very limited. We’re thankful not just for the line, but that it cost $400 instead of their original ‘offer’ of $1,500. Plus we got TWO lines, which will be great for WiFi and business use upstairs.
We’re still on hold with opening the Cafe, needing funds for chairs, tables and kitchen supplies. Once we get about $2-3k the plan is to buy some nice wood and make our own tables/benches I think. We continue to pray and ask God to provide, He knows our needs. In the meantime we have a few events lined up this fall in the Cafe, including Deb leading a wives meeting every month, and the monthly men’s breakfast. We can’t wait to get that pizza oven going though!
It’s been exceedingly hot this week, temps reaching 100F. The weather has cooled a bit today, so refreshing. Clark and Noah retreating to their pool, found these $10 tubs the other day.. Deb and I were wishing they made them a bit bigger for us!
Preparing for Cement Slab - Sport Court!
We are progressing nicely outside with our cement slab. We’re calling it our basketball court, the kids in the neighborhood are seeing it come together. When it’s finished, it will most undoubtedly be the main attraction in our neighborhood (and maybe even town). It’s amazing to me that a town of 10k doesn’t have a single flat, paved or concrete area for tennis, basketball, roller blading, road hockey etc.. With 5 boys, and living on a hill, we had to something about that. So we pulled out the vineyard that was producing nothing but wine making grapes that rotted on the vine, and leveled out an area with a tractor, and voila.. the beginnings of our backyard dream!
I didn’t realize however that digging out that much dirt would cause another significant project to surface.. the need for a big retaining wall! We’ve done a lot of the work ourselves, digging foundation, pouring cement with mobile mixers, wheelbarrows and sweat. Alyosha has been researching with me online the best way to do each step, we argue and eventually meet in between western and Ukrainian standards:) We’ll hopefully have it poured and ready by September.. I want to install some outdoor lights and get all of us away from the glow of the computer or DS screen, and expending energy outside. We’ll have roller hockey, basketball, volleyball, and when it freezes, an ice rink. Go Canada! I suspect the trampoline kids will be migrating over to it as well, it’s going to be a magnet for kids of all ages – we’re excited to see how God will use this thing!
This week the church is serving together to host a VBS downtown. They have 50 kids daily. It’s been really great to see our own older kids down there serving, and younger ones coming home with excited faces and hearts.
We’re continuing to pray and asking around about school options for the younger ones this fall. Please pray with us that God would place them exactly where He would desire, and give us the wisdom to navigate. Also pray that Russian / Ukrainian language classes would be established soon, we have some teachers considering it from Kiev but it’s a big step for them to come so far out into a ‘village’..
My residence application is now at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We aren’t sure (and they won’t tell us) if we need more documents, or how long we will wait. In the meantime I had to take my truck out of country last week for a new stamp, that was interesting, and I came back with a lighter wallet but that’s for another time. It would be so cool to get this residence.. currently I have no way to prove I’m legal, and can’t leave the country and return or will face difficulty.. sort of in limbo on that front.
Thanks for checking in –
Bruce & Deb