Chmiels in Ukraine

Dear friends,

Привіт! Як справи? Or should we say “Greetings from Ukraine”? We made it -- we are living in Ukraine! We left the Czech Republic on June 1 and arrived here in L’viv the next day. We took the train this time and we were quite happy with how smoothly everything went. The only downside was that we went overnight and had to switch trains couple of times so we did not get any sleep.

Apartment
Right now we are living in a temporary apartment where we will be until we find a more permanent place to rent. So far we have seen seven different apartments. There is something good and something not so good about each. So please pray for wisdom for us to know which one will best serve our family and our ministry. To get a better idea of what our life is like these days, make sure you visit our gallery and look at our new pictures and new videos -- http://www.chmiels.com/gallery.htm.

Language
We also started our Ukrainian lessons last week so now we spend a lot of time practicing writing that Cyrillic alphabet. We can read print fairly well but cursive is a whole different story.

Thanks for Praying
We wanted to thank all of you so much for your prayers and your encouragement during this time of many new beginnings. Please pray for wisdom for us in all we do and say. We have always been told that even though Russians and Ukrainians make you feel welcome, they are slow to open up and a new person always needs time to earn their trust before that barrier of being an outsider is torn down. But it is very different to learn about this in theory and experience it firsthand. So please pray that God would guide us through this time of “being new” and would give us patience and love for the people we hope to minister to.

Let us know how you are doing! Your emails are a big source of encouragement for us. The only thing is that when you write back, please do not include our email in your reply. We pay for our internet by the downloaded megabytes so it would be better if we did not have to download our email again with every reply we get. Thanks!

Have a blessed week,

Tomasz and Miriam