New students

Just before I left for Canada we got a new student, Tolik. I asked Garry last week, and he's still there. Sometimes guys come and after a week or even a day, they go back to what they were doing before, even if it's living in the street. Garry also told me that Valera (the new one that came in the spring)'s younger brother who came for a weekend in July is also going to be a new student.

Two old students are coming back. You may remember that Julia (or Yulia) and Dima left in the fall for Kiroy Rog and got married there in March while the team was here. Garry and Eugene went to the wedding. Well, being independent has not turned out so well for them and they have been asking to come back periodically as they have not found jobs that they could do. So we will have three married couples living in the three apartments this fall. Kolya and Oxana, Julia and Dima and Alyona and Nikolai.



If you follow Garry (or Victor) on facebook, you will have seen that our very newest student, Denis arrived early in the morning on August 20th. Alona's water broke at two am and they called for an ambulance which arrived 20 minutes later. The little 2.4 kilo guy was born a half hour after they got to the hospital. Nikolai rode in the ambulance but had not seen the baby yet when Garry and Victor arrived there in the morning, so they all met him together. Apparently Nikolai was so excited he had only put on shorts and sandals before leaving and had no shirt when they got to the hospital.

Ironically, they had planned to have Victor go with Alona to her appointment on Wednesday to find out what to do when she went into labor, since her due date was supposed to be early September, but we don't need to worry about it now.

We got some used baby clothes and a crib and stroller donated by students from English Institute and church members from Morningstar in Dnepro for the new baby. They were excited to help out. Garry had better pick up the crib sometime soon.

Finished chopping corn

While I enjoyed one more week in Manitoba (with one to go), Garry finally finished making his silage pile for the cows. He was hoping to finish by Tuesday, but a breakdown on the chopper made them wait from Monday to Thursday evening for the part to be made by a machine shop in Dnepro. They finally got it Thursday evening and got back to work later on Friday morning after putting the machine back together.

 They were selling wheat Friday morning (from the storage building that had to be loaded into a truck) so they had some delays getting the chopper back together. They plan to buy a bigger better plow that will work on the new tractor with the proceeds of selling a couple loads of wheat.
Luckily the chopper held together for 14 loads Friday and the last 18 on Saturday and they covered the pile with plastic. Garry tells me they will need to fix a few things for next year, including the blower that shoots the silage into the wagon.

 He tells me there is definitely more corn silage to feed the cows than last year, but he says it's hard to tell how much more. Quality is much better however, you can see more grain in the silage than last year (corn silage is made by chopping up the whole plant while it is still somewhat green, cobs and all, the more grain the higher protein in the mix of cobs, leaves and stalks). 

The other cornfield and some short rows in this field that they left standing will be combined for grain in the fall. While some parts of this field were very good, some were not good, mostly because they were unable to get it all watered when they wanted. This new field is large and slightly uphill, so the water did not flow as well as they thought it would. They are limited by the amount of water pressure in the irrigation pipe, and they can only pump water at night when the water is being pumped through the lines. Next year they plan to purchase a water pump that will be movable (on a wagon) so they can make more pressure and get up to ten times more water on where they want. If they can get a small irrigation gun to shoot water onto a field, they may even irrigate some alfalfa, and get more hay off less acres.

So the irrigation project is a success, but it could be better. The guys have been busy rolling up the irrigation lines. The big lay flat is rolled up and put away for next year, and they have pulled up all the plastic tape from every row and a truck is supposed to come pick it up to recycle and they will pay for us for it. They will also take the bales of plastic tubing from last year that are sitting near the house. It is not reusable, we have to buy miles of it every year. The rest of the irrigation equipment is stored away for next year.

I was talking to Garry this morning before I left for church in Steinbach; afternoon there, of course and he was off to breed a cow in Molazaharina. He said he'd already bred a cow in that same village earlier today after church. He was also telling me about the lady last week who didn't want to pay after he bred her cow because she said that it should be free because he'd already bred her this year. Garry said fine, then don't call me to breed any more of your cows! She finally decided to pay 200 instead of 250 grivna. I guess he'll go back sometime. Hopefully, that cow is pregnant.

Meanwhile, here in the center of Canada, we are dealing with smoke from the west.

Chopping corn

I am writing from hotter than Ukraine Manitoba today. I arrived Monday evening after a couple of nice flights and a delay of over an hour because the Toronto airport was shut down because of a thunderstorm shortly after I arrived there. I got bumped up to a business seat over the ocean, next to an older lady who did not speak English.
 All in all everything went well and Jess, James and Abby met me at the airport. Tuesday morning I helped get ready for Abby's second birthday party.





Afterwards I went to Steinbach and watched a double header in softball and have been hanging out at the farm... except for a thrift shop run to buy two dollar jeans to take back for the students.

Garry has been busy back in the village chopping corn since Tuesday morning. That's right, he's already making that bunker full of corn silage (last year he chopped about a hundred more acres to make less corn silage). He told me that they were still chopping around the headlands on the big field Thursday, getting about four wagon-fulls each time around the bigger corn field. He said it takes ten minutes to fill the wagon, but fifteen for the wagon to come back empty from the barn, so sometimes they have to wait.





 Victor sent me some photos. As you can see, the new New Holland tractor is pulling the old New Holland chopper. So far it has worked beautifully, with no problems.

They decided to chop the bigger field because they will pay by the acre for combining grain and there will be more grain per acre on the smaller field since they got the water on it faster. Garry does not think they will need to cut the whole field to fill the bunk, so they would combine the rest of the field when its ready in the fall. This is the field where you go out the end of the village and cross the narrow dam by the pond to get to it, so it does take longer to get there with the wagons than it would the irrigated field from last year, which is why it was the original choice for making silage, until the corn was a little better there.

Irrigation is a wonderful thing, other farmers are making corn silage out of corn that is only about six feet tall. Ours is at least ten, with two cobs on many stalks.

Not a computer geek

Geek was one of the slang words I taught last month at SEI. It's been "one of those days" (that's an idiom, not slang). I am supposed to be the computer savvy one of us (when the boys went home to Manitoba we lost our tech support) and yesterday after updating this blog and a couple others I am in charge of, I tried to send our supposedly monthly prayer partner newsletter in a new format.

 I am ashamed to say it has been at least two months since I have sent one out. Sometimes I send it at the beginning of the month, but often it's whoa, this month's almost over and I haven't written one... so it comes near the end.

Normally I just write an email once a month, bcc it (that means it hides the addresses) and send it off, but I was trying to add all the things that are supposed to be written on it (legally as EFCCM mission associates), so I decided to make the newsletter an attachment, like other missionary updates we get. I wrote it in Publisher, but still kept it simple. Outlook wanted to attach it as a cloud thing, so I went with it and sent it off around 11 pm our time.

I noticed that I had gotten a couple undeliverable messages right back, so I went into my groups to delete them. One person had passed away and the other might have changed email providers without notifying me, I try to change them as soon as I get them.

This morning I got up before six- Garry was going out to rake hay- and found a couple of emails from people who could not open the file when I checked, so I decided to go back to a plain e-mail and copy and paste the important stuff at the bottom, I even got the logo to work this time. I had fooled around trying to get it into the original newsletter for an hour before giving up last night. I did get it inserted on this blog yesterday, it is so you know who we are associated with.
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I sent it off in my new (old) format and then noticed the same two messages about undelivered emails were back again. I went back into my groups and deleted them again, and clicked on save this time! If you would like to be part of our prayer partner group, and find out how to pray for us each month, drop us an email, and I'll try to add you to the lists.

 Of course if you are a regular reader of the blog, you might know what we are needing prayer for better than we do!

August already?

I am not sure where July went... I came back near the end of June, we went to the conference in Kiev, we taught English and then went down to the sea with Clay and then it was August. Next week I am off for Manitoba again, leaving Garry here to make corn silage in two weeks.

As soon as they finish hay, they will need to start pulling up the irrigation lines. It looks like there will be lots of silage and then dry corn to combine later. While the sunflower fields are looking a little dry, the corn fields are still very wet and we have not needed to buy much water during July. Wet ground does not dry out as fast, so it looks like we are done with water for the year in the fields.

The third cut hay baling was slowed down when it kept raining, they made some hay that got rained on a couple times after they cut it, but its been dry since Monday and they are hoping to finish soon. The guys (and Leila) are really appreciating the hay elevator that came in the container a couple years ago, we finally got it working, so unloading is much easier now. All the rain made a good cutting, there may be almost as much as first cut, and fourth cut will be taking advantage of all the moisture in the ground, so it will be good too.


We had a relaxing couple days with Clay at the Sea of Azov before Garry dropped him at the airport yesterday. He got to experience some of what its like to live with three 20 something girls Tuesday night. They couldn't stop laughing and chatting and helping by cleaning up; usually before you are done with your knife or cup it's in the dishwasher.