Saturday afternoon the three middle schoolers (Liza, Ruslan, and Valera), Vlada, and I went to church for a “spivka”, which more or less literally translates into “singing thing” and means “choir practice”. Several other teens and preteens, including some of the Y’s cousins, were there as well. Inna, one of the cousins, is getting married in a month, and Stas, her fiancé, was being presented to the church on Sunday, so Inna wanted us to learn two Christian love songs in Russian. We spent the better part of two hours doing so. Hopefully I’ll be able to sing them again for some other occasion. It seems a waste to have spent so much time on them for only one rendition.
Saturday night, Vlada and I went to the young people’s meeting for one of the other churches in town. There was a lot of singing, which I liked, and then we all had to go around and say what we’d been reading in our daily devotions and what God had shown us through it, which I liked less. I’m not opposed to sharing (although I’d been reading in Jeremiah and it was pretty bleak)—it’s more that I dislike being the center of attention among people who I mostly don’t know while speaking a foreign language. Vlada reassured me afterwards that I did fine. We read a psalm, had a short discussion (I was a silent participant), and then we sang some more.
Vlada had us hightail it out of there as soon as it ended in order to meet up with Kolya, her boyfriend, when he got out of work (he works at one of the TWO, count them TWO supermarkets in town…I remember when there weren’t ANY). He walked us home (it was after 11 p.m. by this point) and then came in for sandwiches and tea and getting acquainted. He is 23, one of ten children, had to drop out of school to take care of his family after his father died but finished night school, loves sport, and is active in his church. So far I approve of him (he and Vlada are pretty serious), but I’m glad to see that they appear to be waiting a bit longer before they get married. (Young marriage here is very common. Prolonged singleness—past, say 24—is not. I’ve been bemused by how often I run into people I knew in my Peace Corps days and the first thing they ask me after “How are you?” is “So are you married yet?”)
Sunday morning we all got spiffed up and headed to church (via multiple taxis, since the Y van is sadly a thing of the past). Church is much how I remember it—full of babushki (old women, literally “grandmothers”), kids who are all taller than they used to be, and lots of music. It’s definitely a singing sort of church, which I dearly love. Valera and I sang a special (it’s a Ukrainian hymn entitled “How Blessed and Happy am I”, which I doubt any of you know), there was a lot of other special music, and we sang our songs for Inna and Stas without any major hiccups (and managed to hit our high notes, of which there were many).
[Note of Interest #1: While at the church on Friday for music practice (Valera had wanted an extra music practice for our special, or maybe just wanted to mess with the sound system), I had been looking through a list of church members from 2008. A third of the members were born before the end of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to here. I am amazed at the amount of history they’ve lived through. The oldest church member at this point, in 2011, is 90 years old, which means she was born in 1921, just after the Russian Revolution and the beginnings of the USSR. She prays aloud at every single church service for the youth of the church (and many other things as well), and ends each prayer with “Praise and glory, a hundred thousand times, a hundred thousand times!”.]
[Note of Interest #2: Inna and Stas knew each other two weeks before they were engaged. They met at a Christian camp and it was apparently love at first sight. All I can say is, “Wow.” [Later update after I gained more information: Apparently their families have known each other a long time and they actually met once four years ago. Still, wow.]]
After church, Vitaly and Katya invited Olya (their cousin, age 22), Valera (who shadows me perpetually and should get his own blog post soon), and me over for lunch. They live in the apartment building next to the one I lived in during my Peace Corps days. We had a nice time, looking at their wedding photo album and a DVD of pictures from a trip they took to Kyiv the winter after they were married. Katya, Olya, and I had a lovely time discussing various weddings we’ve attended, while Vitaly just looked tired (he works 24-hour shifts at his current job, but I didn’t catch what it is, irregular days each week, and had gotten off of work right before church) and Valera was baffled how we could find this such an interesting topic of conversation (as I said before, Valera, who is almost 14 and doesn’t let you forget that his birthday is in three weeks, will get his own post), as he doesn’t ever plan to get married. (I keep threatening to remind him of this in a few years.)
In the evening, I went to the evangelical church in Novoselivka, which is the neighborhood where the school I taught in was, in order to see a variety of friends and acquaintances whom otherwise it would be difficult to catch. (See my upcoming post on Balaklia churches for more explanation about the Novoselivka church.) Valera, Ruslan, and Liza decided to all go with me, of course, and I insisted we set out a bit early in order to find good places to sit and maybe be able to borrow a hymnal off of someone (in Ukraine, you take your own hymnal to church, and in the interest of saving space, I had packed my Ukrainian hymnal but not my Russian one). The kids thought we should take the shortcut, the name of which apparently translates as “the Onion” (for reasons I know not why), which is a dirt path that cuts back through the fields (onion fields? they didn’t appear to be). Almost all the way through the Onion, I managed to trip and fall, scraping my knee worse that I’ve done in years (perhaps since the time I rode the Y kids’ scooter five years ago and attempted to turn while going uphill on cement; both they and I still remember the experience, and the scar is still faintly visible).
Since we were most of the way through the Onion and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to go to services in Novoselivka, I rejected Ruslan’s concerned suggestion that we turn back and instead, we stopped at the Ks’ house. The Ks attend the Novoselivka church, I taught several of their eight children in school, and the oldest daughter, Natasha, is a friend of mine. Also a point in their favor, Viktor, the father, is a doctor, and Guisella, the mother, was trained as a nurse. Viktor had already left for church, but Guisella patched me up and kids in tow, I continued on my way.
So much for getting there early—instead, we were about five minutes late. I joined Tanya and Lilia, a couple of the young married women about my age, who were sitting in the back. Each of them had a stroller with a baby girl inside, and both of them appeared to once again be pregnant. There were a lot of small children at church, most of whom sort of wandered in and out. The Y kids were in the pew in front of me, and despite the excessive heat (it was probably in the upper 80s, there were no fans or air conditioning, and very few windows were open), they did pretty well. Valera sat attentively and listened, while Ruslan and Liza only left a few times. However, the entire pew was full of kids, and I kept worrying that the wooden slats across the back of the pew were going to come loose and the entire pew was going to come apart. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
Needless to say, between the heat, the small children, and my worries about the children’s pew, I didn’t get much out of the service. However, I did accomplish my goal of connecting with some old acquaintances. This post has now gotten ridiculously long, so herein ends the story of my weekend.
