March 17, 2014
Monday morning saw our family heading for the airport, each with a small suitcase and a backpack. It was interesting how God was working out details for us as we processed the “necessaries and the possibilities”.
The necessaries were that on Saturday the decision was made to get across the border, for we and a few others did not have a easy “way to evacuate” if everything went bad after the “referendum” in Crimea. So Saturday evening I was able to find cheap flights for Monday a.m. Friends from Sumy were in town for the weekend, and we were able to arrange with them to take Calvin (our cat) back to Sumy to live for the next couple weeks at our old apartment with friends.
We arrived in Warsaw, Poland with our teammates, climbed into the rental van and headed off to the Baptist Seminary which would be our home for the next week or so.
Our days were spent doing the mundane things – kids doing schoolwork, ru
nning errands, helping teammates with various projects, working on ministry items etc. Of course we did a fair amount of trying to figure out what was coming next and what the next step was for us as a team and as individual families. The time out of the pressure cooker was well spent, and provided for people the opportunity to make some decisions. As a result, a few families opted to return to Canada & the US earlier than planned, and others, like us, decided to return, at least for the time being.
And of course, we had to take an opportunity to go and see a bit of history. Warsaw is a beautiful city, and we enjoyed taking a day or two to see the historical sites and other areas. Here are a few photos from our time there.
Our plan, prior to going to Poland had been to spend a week in Germany with Lanae at the end of her year at Bodenseehof Bible School. Well, since we had already booked the flights a while back, and changing would have cost money, we flew back to Kiev on a Monday, and flew out to Germany on Tuesday. The saying “desperate times calls for desperate measures” comes to mind at this point. We saved money initially, but ultimately spent that because of travel fatigue and other factors….. should have just changed the flights!
