How can we give an update without including our little monkey Abbey! She still doesn’t walk more than 3-4 steps, stops and praises herself. Love them baby girls!
It was 5yrs ago this week that we moved to Ukraine from Texas. A few pictures from this week. We said good-bye to Deb’s parents (and Jesse!). They were here for 3 weeks, we had a great time. This past month has been full of family visiting other missionary folks as well. Deb’s parents, Shane’s mom, Priscilla’s folks for a few days, and Cheryl’s parents too.
Cheryl’s parents were visiting from Canada and her father was struck by a vehicle in Kiev. He ended up in hospital with a broken femur. To make matters worse, he’s also battling cancer which heightened the injury and situation. After a week of waiting and last minute arranging, he was flown in a leer jet back to Canada via the insurance company – accompanied by Canadian medial staff. Cheryl flew ahead of them in preparation for their return in Saskatoon. His name is Blake.
Clark taking Noah for a spin. We brought this little ATV over from Texas. It’s 6yrs old and still clicking along somehow, minus some parts both stolen and broken!
Off to Cherkassy tomorrow with Igor. We’re visiting our friends at eKreative, a development company similar to Cypress our business in Texas. They’ve been helping us on a few projects. It’s 2hrs south of Rz. Our Cypress office is mostly finished on the 2nd floor of the Cafe. We’re hoping that we can start using it this June, doing some support and smaller type jobs to help the guys in Texas and create some jobs here in town.
Speaking of the Cafe, we haven’t heard anything for weeks. Ukraine has all but shut down over holidays and just getting back on its feet.
Our needs are two-fold, document and equipment, and they both represent another $8-10k of investment.
Documents Needed: ($4-5k)
- Gas meter installed by gas company (now on 5 months waiting)
- Local Business Permit (supposed to take 2 weeks, now on 9 weeks)
- Fire Dept Doc (paid 50%, but can’t finish until business permit in hand)
- Electricity Meter changed from house to business (same as above)
- Inspection Permit (for food sales).. no idea what this will take.
Equipment Needed: ($3-4k)
- Coffee Machine (hoping to lease with coffee vendor)
- Freezer
- Fridge
- Vacuum & Cleaning Supplies
- Start up ‘stuff’ like first month (snacks, drinks, pizza stuff).
Geega, or Deb’s mom Noline, her first game of pool – she was a shark!
We are aiming to open the Cafe for “Coffee” only asap, maybe as early as June or July at latest. If we can get things organized and ironed out we can just add the Pizza portion once gas is situated. Even if gas is turned on sooner than I think, I believe it will be wise for us to just get open with some minimal offerings.. doing it all it going to be just too overwhelming I think (to do well anyway). The town is so ready for this, it’s going to be so cool! I think we need a soft serve ice cream machine. They are about $1000 and wow, how great would that be, we’d be the only ones around with that – and I’d get really fat.
Our first meeting downtown this past Sunday. Pretty relaxed, Coffee and snacks, we had one visitor. Teaching Martin how to run sound! Time for Ukrainians to step up and take hold of what God desires to do here.
Thanks for checking in, especially if you bow your heart and lift us up – we need the Lord’s strength and endurance to keep moving forward with joy.
Oh also please remember us in prayer for our personal documents. We’re still working through Deb and kids Permanent Residency. It was chugging along nicely until they wanted a bunch of new things that required us sending things to the US and back. We also found an error in Broderic’s passport and had to replace it. That has slowed things down and now all Debs medical documents completed 3 months ago must be redone.. it’s like chasing your tail I tell you! Broderic and Bron went to Kiev today to get medical things done for their residence.. next the 4 little ones.. fortunately Abbey I don’t think will need these things.. yeah for being born in Ukraine! – Bruce