It’s Sunday morning and the guys have gotten into things fast. Yesterday was spent keeping them awake until the evening to get them over jetlag. Today, most of the group woke up at 4 AM waiting until everyone else woke. Then they hurried off to the church (we are about 1 km away) for a quick band rehearsal before services started. The guys got to supplement the church’s worship band (they didn’t have a drummer or guitarist for the day) and do a song from the concert line up (it was kick’in!!).

Tonight will be a community concert and tomorrow we’ll be doing a concert for a local vocational school. Then on Tuesday we start going to the prisons (5 prisons, 5 days, 5 concerts) including going to the oldest juvenile prison in Poland.

Please keep all of the concerts and logistics in your prayers. Pray for those that will be at the concerts and for the band as they present the Gospel through blues music.

I haven’t forgotten about all my blogs that I want to write about Ukraine however I’m just so excited. I’m sitting in Warsaw, Poland waiting for the “Kyle Dillard Band” (Kyle is the worship director of our home church, Lake Forest). I just got an SMS that they are in Europe with only one more flight before they are here in Poland.

This is going to be an awesome time as we are going to be doing Blues music in places that know something about blues - Warsaw prisons. CreativeWorks, a ministry of GEM, has connections with a local church that does work in these prisons. Using the music of Blues, we’ll be able to tell and show the Gospel. It’s going to be great. Also as a bonus, I get to see some great guys from my home church that I haven’t seen for almost 1 1/2 years. Awesome!!!

So I’m in Ukraine and let’s just say something didn’t settle well with what I ate our first day here. The nice thing is that there are drug stores everywhere around here. All you do is go into one, tell them your symptoms and they recommend something for you. So out I walked with the bottle shown above. I have no clue as to what it is but it worked. I feel much better. This is extremely different than Germany where you almost have to have a doctor’s prescription for aspirin so it kinda weirded me out.

On another note, please continue to pray. We have had a interesting time here in Ukraine between some sickness (me and another team mate), some interesting roads (I’ll show more of that later), housing situations have been in flux and we have not had as much time as we would have liked to configure our new Mobile Outreach Center than we would have liked. As a matter of fact, the only reason I have Internet right now is because while our team is doing some street ministry in a town north of Kiev on this Ukrainian Holiday, Sasha and I are working diligently to get the computers just ready for our classes that begin tomorrow. Praise God with us that our major hurtles have been overcome and we are now just putting the final touches on the systems.

I will probably not be able to get back online until I return to Germany in just over a week so take care and I’ll update you later.

- Courtney

PS - I did get converse with a young man who is going to be attending our classes this next week. While he is a computer programmer, as he puts it - he has this deep need to hear more about God and he knows that while we are teaching computers, we will also be talking about God. He just came to know about Christ in this last year and I am hoping to talk with him more and more this week.

Just a quick note to ask that you people that believe in prayer, please pray for Krista, Alex and I as I am on my way to Kiev to do a computer outreach event with a team from the US and Canada where we will help train people in basic computer skills. Pray that Alex and Krista are safe and have a good time while I am away. Pray as this will be the first time we use our new concept of a Mobile Outreach Center which means that instead of installing a permanent computer center, we will have laptops and an environment that was not designed to be a computer center.

This is also a note to say that posts will probably be infrequent (as they always seem to be) but this time I have an excuse as I will probably not have much Internet access. Thanks

While we are still doing full time work with eDOT, we are working on learning more and more German so that life is easier as we can talk to our neighbors, go to the store easier, etc.

Just wanted to share a couple of different online helps that might be good ways if you want to learn or work on your skills in a different language (and it doesn’t have to be German). Be sure to check out LiveMocha.com where you can learn, practice and share with others in this community of learning. It pretty neat how it works.

Also, check out MyHappyPlanet.com which is kinda like the “MySpace” for online language learning communities.