December 6 – Another Short Day

Apparently God thought we either needed more adjustment to the time change or that we just needed to catch-up on our rest. I didn’t get up until 1 pm. Gail had gotten up a couple of hours earlier to eat breakfast and read. She discovered that the milk that we had gotten the night before wasn’t ordinary milk. It was more like a mixture of milk, yogurt and sour cream. I guess a few more language lessons are in order.

We were notified that our appointment is at 10 am tomorrow. That’s 2 am for those of you in the central time zone. After the appointment, we will leave by van, with our facilitator, for Odessa. We should arrive in Odessa about 5:30 pm. We called the Odessa Suites and made arrangements to check in a day earlier than planned. Our next appointment will be in Odessa on Monday. Then we can officially go to the orphanage to “meet” the girls and start the period of getting to know the kids. It will be nice to get to Odessa and get settled in at the apartment, so we can get connected to the internet and our Skype phone service.

This evening, we went to a restaurant called “The Wall” they were apparently named for a 1990 Pink Floyd concert at the Berlin Wall. The big screen was showing Pink Floyd videos while we ate. We don’t speak Russian, but they had a menu in English and one of the waitresses spoke a little English, so we got along fine. After we got back to the apartment, we were watching the Kiev news, even though we couldn’t understand anything that was said, when we saw video of Omaha police cars and the Von Maur at the Westroads Mall. With all the police and FBI in the video, we knew it was not good. We called our son to find out what happened. It is so sad, that young people everywhere in the world feel that things are so hopeless and their lives are so worthless that they can think that doing something this terrible will give their lives meaning. We are praying for this young man’s family and for all youth who feel the way that this young man felt. Pray that their lives will be touched by the Holy Spirit.