Visiting

Garry tells me they were 18 hours on the train coming back from Dnepro to Poland, (which left late at night) then had four hours to wait for the next train. That one was 14 hours to Starrgard, where Cezary's wife Andrea picked them up at 8 am this morning.

 Along the way they got Big Macs delivered at 3 am by Cezary's son, who met them at a stop. Garry said he slept well on the train, (trains, there were two nights) even falling asleep after the hamburgers. 

Garry says he really enjoyed traveling with Cezary and they plan to go to Ukraine again in March. He said he only watched one movie on his tablet, so I think they were talking a lot. 

 Garry arrived in Novagard this morning and enjoyed biking around town and the lake after coffee.  He's staying at Andrea and Cezary's house and says Cezary makes the best coffee.  He went for a walk later in the day and got soaking wet when it started to rain, he's hoping his jacket dries out before morning. Here's a selfie Garry took while out by the lake we used to walk around every morning. 

Tomorrow he flies to Warsaw with Cezary, who has a conference there. He bought Garry tickets for a museum and he's looking forward to seeing more of Warsaw. They are back in Novagard Saturday afternoon, Garry is excited about attending church there and seeing people we met when we were there about 16 months ago. He has a free day in Novagard before starting his flights home Tuesday. 

On his way

 Garry got on the train last night after a dinner in Dnipro at a restaurant with Cezary and some pastors there, along with Max who drove Garry in. He said they ate and talked for two hours. Max and Pastor Andrey took them to the train station. Garry proudly informed me he had all his stuff when he got on the train, wallet, passport, tablet and both phones. Neither phone is connecting to wi fi, so he called from Cezary's phone. 

I'm not sure what time they get to the Polish border, or when they get to Novogard, their destination. Garry says he's looking forward to going around the lake, our daily walk when we were there. 

Elena sent some photos from when she, Oleg and Garry picked up Valentina and baby Nazar at the hospital. As you can see, Angelina came to see her baby brother. She moved back home, bed and all, when they got home, Garry said. Elena says she's very easy to have at their house. He also said they were there about two hours before the hospital released them. 

Leaving on a slow train

I haven't written in a week, this is where I left off. Happy 30th birthday Sasha!

Garry is packing his bag, he leaves Dnepro on the train with Cezary in a couple hours. He says he has gotten everything done he planned or needed to do. Except maybe hitting the bathroom walls with some more bleach. He has convinced the girls to keep the door open, so there may be less mildew in there. They are fans of hot showers and the fan is only on when the light is on. 

Garry, Adam and Cezary with pastors

After Sasha's birthday party, Garry drove to Kirvoy Rog to pick up Cezary on Wednesday. He also had a chance to talk with Adam Nikkel, our EFC missionary there. Cezary spent the night and had a tour of the project before Garry took him to Dnepro Thursday. Thursday evening was the cheese tasting promotional dinner in Zaporosia. 

Garry said one of the girls was crying on the weekend, it turned out she was sad he was leaving. He did make them pancakes Saturday morning. Looks like the third Julia had pancakes too. She helps work with the chickens along with the two Yulias that live in the house. 

 Valentina was still in the hospital, baby Nazar was born Thursday night. He weighed 10 pounds! Garry and Oleg brought them home from the hospital today. I saw him on video chat with his mother and sister, but I don't have a photo to share yet. 

I do have a photo of another baby, our new granddaughter Elizabeth arrived Sunday night and is also coming home today. Garry won't see her until she's ten days old, since he will be in Poland for a few days before flying home. 

I was visiting our daughter and family in Morden over the weekend, enjoying the warm (10 C or 50 F) weather and a ballet performance that included her daughter. While we were enjoying a balmy weekend here in Manitoba, there was three inches of wet snow in Ukraine! Garry helped Oleg and Elena's boys and Angelina (who stayed there while mom was in hospital) build a snowman. He said it was cold, since he didn't have gloves. 

Sunday Garry went to church in the village. He said that he counted and including children, there were 40 people in church. He says that's more than when he was at Morningstar in Dnipro the week before. However, he found out that more than 20 people who used to come for the food aid in Dnipro last year have started attending Morningstar church regularly, even though there are no more bags of food given out. 

Building and birthdays

 

Garry bought lumber on Monday and got building calf pens with the students. They finished them today. I think he said they made 20, so hopefully there will be less double calf pens. Right now all the calves have pen mates, not ideal for preventing disease spread, or frostbite (wet parts of calves, like ears can be damaged, and fall off, because they like to suck on each other, slightly less of a problem in Ukraine than Canada, but it can happen). They also made little boxes for the calves to eat grain feed from in the pens.

Garry's been preg checking cows every morning. That's one of the things they can't do when he's gone. He said there were two new calves born this morning. Last night when we talked he was cooking dinner for the girls in the house, including Valentina, who is due to have her baby any day now. 

 The photo is of Oksana, who was milking this morning. She has two children now, Kolya must take care of the kids while she's working. 

Tonight (it's morning here, but evening there) he's at a birthday party for Sasha Borchuk. Looks like they are having a good time with piles of open face sandwiches, cola, fanta, tea, candies and cake. Garry was having a slice of bread with tomato, and sardines when we video chatted. I see baloney and cucumber sandwiches too. It makes me wish I was there with the gang. 

That's Max climbing a giant pile of sunflower seeds to check if they are heating up, they were a little wetter than they like when they were combined. Garry said they finished insulating the doors for the chicken barn today. The solid walls really makes it look different inside the old tent barn!

Encouragement

 

Danil

Here's Garry with a bunch of the guys (or students) that are in our program, and you may remember Danil, the oldest of our "Ukrainian Grandkids" the one who drove the van into a tree in the yard when he was three. He chattered away, on the video chat one night, showing me the toy police car I'd sent in Garry's suitcase for him. 

Garry says his baby sister, Sofia, who's 16 months old, is very cute with blonde hair. She's a little shy of Garry, but three year old Angelina, who lives at our house with her mother, climbed in his lap five minutes after he arrived. She has learned to say hello in English when he video chats with me. 

Below is one of the Yulias in our house, the one who likes music. She works with the chickens. 

Angelina

Garry traveled to Ukraine with our pastor friend we worked with in Poland, Cezary. While Garry has been encouraging our staff and students in the village, Cezary has been visiting the Ukrainian Evangelical Free churches to encourage the congregations and pastors. 

This weekend he was in Kramatorsk, which is a city close to the line to the east of Dnipro with Pastor Yura. I took some of his photos off facebook of the ministry there, they have several worship services every weekend in the city, in different buildings, some of the building are unheated, which is why so many are wearing coats.

Garry will bring him to the farm for a few days later this week, after he visits a few more churches. 

Chickens and cheese

 Here's some photos of the newest enterprises of the farm. Garry went to the city with Oleg last week when they sold cheese and other products. He goes once a week to Dnipro and once to Zaporosia to deliver orders, they take orders over the internet. 

They make and sell cheeses and frozen products like ready to cook vereniki (you might call them perogies) with cheese or potato fillings, or meat filled ones (they have a different name, but I can't think of it now). They are made by some ladies from the village that work for us, some of whom are refugees from southern Ukraine. Garry took some photos of them vacuum packing cottage cheese. He says they start cheese making with Elena about two in the afternoon and are out in the cheese house building until after midnight working. 

They are having an event in Zaporosia next Saturday with cheese tasting, here's one of the publicity ads. Garry will be there, it's a few days before he leaves on the train to go to Poland.

Here's some photos of the barn that Jack and the guys help work on in the spring with Garry. Over the  months since March, Max and the guys have finished putting on the roof, coated the outside walls, rebuilt the doors and made more pens inside. There are about a thousand chickens now, some for meat and some for eggs (they sell both with the cheese in the city). Garry sent a photo of the girls getting chickens ready for sale, but I didn't include it. 

The chickens are fed a combination of ground corn and wheat (grown on the farm) mookooka (the crushed sunflower seeds after they are pressed for oil) plus purchased protein and mineral mix.

At the farm

 Garry has sent a bunch of photos of things at the farm. The day he arrived in the village was two years after the day we left Ukraine for 3 months, or so facebook tells me. What we didn't know. Here's some cow/ calf photos he took the day he arrived. He says they all look good.

This is the shed we built two years ago for grain storage. With the price of grain in Ukraine, we have lots of wheat and some corn stored. They feed it to the cows and chickens, and hope the price goes up to sell the rest. The war affected transport and depressed the price since foreign sales always accounted for most of sales for wheat and corn. 

They were able to buy the new machine last year, I think with other small farmers in the village. They also went in on the scale put in two years ago. They were working on installing it when we left. Garry tells me that this truck is a load of sunflowers we were selling Monday. Garry says Max planted a new variety of sunflowers this year, yields were higher than other farmers, 3 1/2 instead of 2 1/2 (I'm thinking per acre but I could be wrong) but they make less oil so the price is 8000 a tonne instead of 9000, but Max thinks they are still ahead of the other farmers on them. 

Garry did some hoof trimming on Monday, and prostaglandin was given to some heifers ready to breed. He was excited to find out Max had been trimming feet and breeding cows. However, he has trouble artificially breeding heifers, so Garry is going to try to breed all 17 heifers that are big enough to get pregnant in the two weeks he's there. The hormone will bring them into heat, or ready to breed, if they are at the right place in their cycle. They sold the bull that was in the barn breeding cows a couple months ago. Today Garry was going to preg check cows, I did not hear how that went. He did call at 4:20 this morning while he was eating lunch with the students.

This afternoon he was going to go to the city when Oleg went to sell cheese, so my next post will be about the chickens and cheese, since I had trouble getting back to sleep, then slept late and I'm off to stay with some grandkids overnight shortly.