it's a small world and my Ukrainian "twin"

Of particular interest to the Riverview crowd, but the rest of you may find it interesting as well:

Vitaly (19) and Oleh (15) went to a youth conference in Kharkiv today at one of the churches there. The topic translates roughly as "a Biblical look at attitudes between guys and girls". Both of the boys seemed to have a good day, and at any rate, Oleh was much more sociable and less of a brat than he's been since I arrived. (Viktor commented that the boys hadn't heard anything different there from what they hear at home, but somehow the conference seemed to have made more of an impression.)

But what I found the most interesting was that the conference was sponsored by Almaz Church, which is one of the GCM churches in Ukraine. Having attended Riverview, which is a GCM church, in undergrad, I visited the other two GCM churches in Kyiv, City on a Hill and Spring of Hope, whenever I happened to be in the city on a Sunday. I never managed to visit Almaz, primarily because I didn't know where it was and its services were on Saturday nights, which never corresponded with my train schedule, but I knew Eric and Cindy Thomas and several other missionaries who would have been involved to varying extents with the ministry at Almaz.

Basically, it's a fairly small world, at least if you're an evangelical in Ukraine.

~*~

This afternoon, I went to a neighboring village with my friend Natalia to visit an English teacher who's a friend of hers to see if she'd be interested in participating in my research. We had tea and cookies with her friend and her friend's cousin, and then we visited the village Orthodox church. Natalia does a lot of work with the children and teens that go to the Orthodox church in Balaklia, and she had wanted the teens from the church in the village to meet me. However, only the priest's daughter showed up, so Natalia, who's been taking a course in Orthodox theology, explained what the different icons represented in the church and why they were arranged the way they are.

It's been great to get in touch with Natalia again. We're a lot alike--if you can imagine a Ukrainian Orthodox version of me (who is also taller and blond, but we're built about the same), that's Natalia. She's a bookworm who lived and worked abroad in Germany for a couple of years and now teaches German and Ukrainian at the local college. She loves to travel, but she also feels deeply at home in Balaklia and enjoys life there. She's active in the local Orthodox church (pretty much the only devout Orthodox person I know personally in Ukraine), and she loves to talk and laugh. (She's also able to talk about history and theology for half an hour straight...yes, we are indeed a lot alike!) We think on the same wavelength, despite coming from different cultures, and hanging out with her is always a lot of fun.