Greetings from Chmiels

Greetings from warm Europe! We are definitely getting some pretty hot days here in Prague and we are again learning to enjoy summer without any air-conditioning.

Moving
Our short time in the Czech Republic is coming to an end and in just ten days we will be in Ukraine again. We used our time in the Czech Republic to already start learning some Ukrainian.

Language
We finished the Pimsleur Ukrainian Comprehensive Program (30 lessons of audio tapes) and according to the publisher we should now have achieved spoken-language communication skills at the Intermediate-Low Level. In just ten days we will see for ourselves if it is true that we should now be able to participate in simple conversations on every day topics, we should be able to order food or make simple purchases; and we should be able to establish rapport with strangers in a foreign country.

We realize that we are still far from where we need to be language-wise in order to be able to effectively minister to people in L’viv but we are enjoying each step of this learning process. We are also looking forward to starting lessons with our Ukrainian tutor soon! :)

Visas
We wanted to thank all of you so much for praying for our US visa. We were granted a one-year religious work visa and were told that it should not be difficult to renew after that year. Praise God for that. Having this visa makes it easier for us to be employed by our US mission organization, come back on furloughs etc…

We also went to the Ukrainian embassy this past week to see what we need to do to in order to get a more permanent kind of visa for Ukraine. We have never seen such a chaotic embassy in our whole lives! There were tons of Ukrainian people, everyone seemed nervous, people were pushing and yelling at each other in Russian. But we did find out what kind of documents we need to provide in order to get this “longer” visa. Right now we have to leave Ukraine and come back every three months (we can do this by going to Poland which is about an hour from L’viv).

Tomasz is 30
Tomasz celebrated his 30th birthday this month! He had a birthday party with his family and relatives two days before his birthday and then we had a little celebration of our own on the 10th. Because we both loved “French Silk Pie” when we were in the US, we decided to try to make it on our own and it turned out great! You can see some birthday pictures in our picture gallery: http://www.chmiels.com/gallery

Apartment in Ukraine
Next time we email you, it will be from Ukraine! We already have a temporary apartment ready for us in L’viv. We will be in this apartment until we find a place we would like to rent long-term. From what we heard it should be a nice small apartment but the challenge will be only having water for three hours in the morning and three hours at night!!! We were told that this is typical in L’viv unless you have your own water tank that you use during those in-between hours. We hope to have such a tank in our next apartment but for now we will learn to arrange our lives around those “water-on” times.