We hope you all had a blessed Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior! We are still trying to figure out when to celebrate Christmas as a family when on the one hand December 25th for most Ukrainians is just a regular work day (our youth group students go to school, people go to work) but on the other hand the German Lutheran Church likes to celebrate Christmas in December so there is a church service on Christmas Eve and then again another service on Christmas morning, then Christmas dinner at church... Since people are not used to celebrating Christmas with their families, it makes sense to them to spend it all in church.
These services and Christmas celebrations are really just for the older people (because everybody else is at school or work) but we as church workers of course have to be there too. So this year we had our Christmas dinner at home at noon on the 24th and opened most of our gifts in the evening on the 25th (when we came home from church). It was not bad so maybe that will be our new family tradition.
Our friend Valerie, who is serving as an ESL teacher with Peace Corps in Ukraine, came to Lviv to spend Christmas with us this year. It was great to have her. Hannah enjoyed having one more person around to help her celebrate her first Christmas :)
This year the youth also (for the first time!!) collected money to give to someone else. In the past they would sometimes collect money but it was always for their own use – to buy something for the youth group, go someplace etc. This year we as a group collected money to buy some things for two blind orphans.
These two orphans (both their names are Roman) study at a boarding school for the blind here in Lviv. When Tomasz talked to the school director, she said that when the boys turn 18, they will need to leave the school and as for now they do not have any place to go :( The younger Roman is 14, the older Roman is 17. Even though we do not know how we could help with the boys’ future, we pray that through doing something for these two guys now, God will give our youth and our church a heart for people like them and who knows what other doors God could open that way.
The director gave us a list of some things that the boys need right now (jeans, shirts, sweaters, shoes...). Our youth group will try to buy something new as a Christmas gift for the boys but the two Romans could also use some used clothes if the clothes were in good shape. Maybe even some of you have clothes that you would like to send to Ukraine. If that would be the case, these are the boys’ sizes:
Roman – 14-years old:
Suits, Coats, Sweaters: size 34 (US)
Pants: about 32 inches (waist)
Shirts: between small and medium
Shoes size: about 7-8 (US)
Roman – 17-years old
Suits, Coats, Sweaters: size 42 (US)
Pants: about 40 inches (waist)
Shirts: large
Shoes size: about 11 (US)
Some other December news...
At the beginning of December Tomasz went to Odesa for a DELKU (German Lutheran Church in Ukraine) Pastors’ conference. In the picture you see the new bishop, Uland Spahlinger (from Germany) and also a Polish pastor (next to Tomasz) who is serving a congregation in Eastern Ukraine. Please pray for the DELKU denomination and the new leadership. Our prayer is that DELKU would be a church body that would be honoring to God.
In the picture, you see Tomasz bringing his full-size digital piano to church. It is a big blessing to have a car in situations like that (and many others) and we are very thankful to have a reliable car to use. But we also have a prayer request related to our car. We have Czech license plates on our car because it is really hard for a foreigner to buy and register a car in Ukraine. But now we are told that with a non-Ukrainian car we can only be in Ukraine for two months and then we have to leave the country. You are allowed to cross the border and come right back but it is still really time consuming to take a trip like that because there are really long lines at the border. Our two months since our last border crossing will be up on January 26th but we have absolutely no time to travel to Poland this month. We are trying to decide what to do. We tried to get as much information as possible and it does seem like there really is the two-month law but at the same time when we asked some other missionaries who also have non-Ukrainian cars, one of them said that he had never followed this rule and it had never come up as an issue at the border. He said that he had been over the two-month period nearly every time and no official had ever even said a word about it to him. So please pray for us to have wisdom to know what to do. We are also renewing our passport registration now in January so that too is something to pray about. All those fun things living in a foreign country :)
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PRAYING!!!!! 
Hannah celebrated seven months on December 18th and is getting to be a big girl.
You can see more Hannah pictures at http://www.chmiels.com/HannahJoy . You will find pictures from each month there and also a link to her Picasa gallery (http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahJoyChmiel). Besides pictures of Hannah, there are also some ministry pictures in the gallery.
Thank you for your friendship and support.
May God bless you and your families in the New Year 2010!
Tomasz, Miriam and Hannah
