Trip to Donetsk, Ukrainian Food

Donetsk is halfway between Zaporizhia and Lugansk, the two cities we have already traveled to this month, so it will feel like familiar territory as we travel there tonight; a driver will be waiting to take us another 90 minutes out of the city. As in the rest of eastern Ukraine, Russian is the primary language, which will be make it much easier for us to communicate with the children. The town we will be in, Thorez, is actually only 15 miles from Russia.

I will be hard-pressed to do Ukrainian food justice in a blog post. It has always been important to me, since my favorite food growing up was vareniki, one of several Ukrainian staples that have been in my mother's family since her great-grandparents were all born here; cabbage borscht and stuffed cabbage rolls also hit our table occasionally. I am on a mission this month to sample as many kinds of vareniki as I can. They are basically what Americans know as perogies, and here they are usually eaten with smetana (a thin, tangy sour cream). So far I have gotten the following types (but there are dozens available in vareniki restaurants): meat, egg/veal liver/heart, cottage cheese, potatoes and mushrooms, potatoes and cheese, cheese and raisins, strawberries, bilberries, cherries, and mixed berries. Ukrainians also like to stuff blini (crepes) and pelmeni (wontons) with similar fillings and eat them with smetana. Come to think of it, they eat a lot of things here with smetana. Another good Ukrainian culinary proverb: "A pat of butter never made anything worse."

People close to me know that I make kefir every day at home, and I'm certainly not going without it here. It is served in restaurants and as easy to find in stores as milk. Most of it is pasteurized, but I've been choosing "bio-kefir" and loving it. It is available with different milkfat contents, too, but even the 1% is so rich and creamy you'd have to taste it to believe it!

Our week in Lugansk region was pretty wild, with something different going on every day, but we always were able to slow down comfortably when we got back to our hotel in its delightful Restaurant Mir. This place was a true haven, and it is my favorite restaurant in the world if you take both price and quality into account. It was decorated with nets, rigging, and fake sea creatures, the service was very professional and friendly, and I would qualify the quality and presentation as gourmet. The menu was so deep that I didn't come close to trying half of the things that looked good in a full 7 days, surely the longest sequence of daily spectacular food that I have had except at Mayca's mother's house in Spain.

What is more, I don't think we ever ordered any dish more expensive than $4; that was the price of most of the seafood dishes, otherwise they were $2 or $3. Here is Julie showing off some cheese curd cakes covered with jam (it is always runny in Ukraine) and smetana.

Another side benefit of being in Europe is that excellent western European cuisine is also available. We have had Italian gelato twice and homemade pasta twice in very authentic restaurants, and across from Saint Andrew's Church and the SDA is a French cafe that could honestly have been teleported from Montmartre (except for Ukrainian staff and bilingual Ukrainian menus). We have also found an amazing variety of seafood in addition to the obligatory caviar; sushi restaurants are everywhere, although we have not tried that here yet.

My favorite soup is okroshka, a creamy, lukewarm cucumber and meat soup flavored with dill. It is pictured here with some delicious vareniki and smetana from Puzata Khata (literally, fat-belly hut), a ubiquitous cafeteria-style chain with tremendous selection where most dishes cost $1 or $1.50.

My baked pike perch dish with Julie's beef medallions in background. Note the "Khortitzya" brand on ashtray: the name of the Mennonite colony that included all the villages we saw, and also the most popular brand of vodka in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainians normally order a multi-course lunch, and the menus are divided into soup, salad, first course, and main course. There is a section just for sides, and these are paid for separately, even things like smetana and bread; also, every item on the menu indicates exactly how much you get in grams or milliliters, which is very useful. The courses seem to be discrete phases of the meal; once when Julie ordered a soup and a sandwich while I ordered a first and second, we got our food staggered and took turns watching the other eat! A fixed price menu like this one let us get one of a few selections for each course for just $4.50.

Successful Third Appointment

We spent last night in an apartment occupied by a girl from Manitoba who is here teaching English and studying Ukrainian. It is about 45 minutes by bus and metro from Independence Square, but the price is right and it's close to the Blakers. Speaking of the Blakers, we hung out with them most of yesterday, although Art and I went downtown midafternoon to pick up our suitcases that had been in storage at the last apartment. We ate lunch together at an Uzbek restaurant, played San Juan and Roll Through the Ages, and overall found lots of good things to talk, laugh, and pray about.

This morning we showered (this is significant only because yesterday we didn't!) , watched another fantastic Mars Hill sermon from their Trial series on 1 and 2 Peter, and headed downtown in time to get lunch at a vareniki restaurant before our appointment. We were actually ushered into the sanctum 10 minutes before our scheduled appointment time. Waiting on the stairway landing isn't the greatest, but the SDA office is really the cheeriest government office I've been in, and both of the ladies who have worked with us there (Masha and Victoria) are always kind and merry. Both of their offices have a comfortable, L-shaped, tan couch for prospective parents with a coffee table to spread files out on.

We were shown several healthy sibling groups, even from Zaporizhia of all places. There was a lot of joking about our taking one group of four; I think Julie and Masha both enjoyed seeing me getting nervous! For the third time, though, God made our decision very clear. We both felt great from the first time we saw this group of three aged 8, 9, and 10 (two boys and one girl in the middle) and no hesitation or reservation in asking for a referral to them. There do not appear to be any obstacles like there were with the last referral, and their orphanage's social worker was very positive when Masha called her. They just became available for international adoption on Independence Day weekend.

So, all in all, it was a big answer to prayer today, and we are going to keep trusting God for each step. Tomorrow's step will be to pick up our referral papers around 4:30 p.m. and then catch a 12-hour train to Donetsk, the home of Viktor Yanukovich (the controversial pro-Russian president of Ukraine), Shakhtar Donetsk (last year's European champion soccer team, owned by Ukraine's richest man), and Ukraine's giant coal and steel industry. It feels good to be off the bench again, and we are very excited about these children.

Back from touristic break

We are back in Kiev in a coffee shop after a very restful overnight train ride. It was nice to play the role of tourists, and we had a very successful trip considering that we did all the planning for it the same day that we left. Yesterday we were able to do an additional visit to the village that my Thiessen ancestors lived in. Our guide was Victor Penner, a Mennonite whose family remained here in spite of Soviet persecution and may well be related to me somehow. He is extremely knowledgeable about all the local villages and history, having been one of the researchers for the definitive resource on Mennonite history in Ukraine. Looking at his picture, I wouldn't be surprised to see him walking down the street in the Manitoba town my mom grew up in. We took hundreds of pictures in our two days in Zaporizhia, and I hope to come back again with a little more time. Even though we saw a lot of old Mennonite gravestones in a couple of cemeteries, most of them were removed and used for building foundations, so it is unlikely that I will be able identify ancestors' graves. However, it is fascinating to walk or drive on the main streets of the villages where they lived. We visited 6 Mennonite villages and saw countless old houses, commercial or community buildings, and gravestones. One village is now a thriving industrial part of the city; 5 Mennonite factories (originally for carriages and farm machinery) were consolidated into what is now the biggest auto maker in Ukraine, which still uses a lot of the original buildings. Other nearby Mennonite villages range from thriving suburban to sleepy rural to completely disappeared (it is assumed that their building materials were recycled in the 1940s while residents were in exile in Germany).

Mennonite houses are made of high-quality clay brick, with unnecessarily steep roofs originally designed to shed Prussian snow, thick pillars at corners, always two windows in the gable of the short side facing the street, cross-shaped brick pattern from alternating short and long bricks, and decorative layers at ceiling level.

Stan and Ju on the old ferry landing from Nieder Chortitza (where property records from 1847 indicate that my Thiessen ancestors lived) to Schoenwiese (in the distance, where the Mennonite factories were located).

The 600-year-old oak tree where the first Mennonites in this part of the world camped on their arrival. Only the leftmost branch is still alive, but it is surrounded by daughter trees.

Monument to Mennonite victims of Stalinist terror, including Victor's grandfather, made with granite from the Janzen Quarry

Touring in Zaporizhia

We spent 5 hours today touring around historical Mennonite sites in the Zaporizhia area, where all my maternal ancestors lived in the 19th century, so we are pretty wiped out but happy. Round-trip overnight train fare (with a compartment to ourselves each way) and a night in a fantastic little hotel costs the same as staying in Kiev, and we're getting a charge out of the new environment. I'll post some pictures later.

The important news is that, thanks to the hustle Julie mentioned in her post, the document we needed arrived at our facilitator's house today and he was able to translate and notarize it. This means that we will be shown sibling groups that include children older than 8 (and possibly others that may have become available since Wednesday). We also have a firm appointment time: 4 pm on Monday.

Second Appointment

First of all, thank you all so much for all your prayers. This process has taken more courage than the two of us have put together. This morning as we walked to our appointment I just kept telling myself that all God was asking us to do was take the next step.

We sat down in the SDA office at about half past noon. We were shown pictures of a few single kids in our age range, but all of them were doing summer visiting programs in different countries and wouldn't be back in Ukraine until next week. There are sibling groups that are available for adoption, but they don't fit into the age range we were requesting (ages 6-8). As we discussed our options, it became clear that we either needed to A. select a single child and wait until they returned to Ukraine at the end of the month to visit them or B. waive our opportunity at this second appointment, change our paperwork that states our requested age range and try for a sibling group with one or more of the kids older than eight years old.

To make a long story short, we went with Plan B. We've requested our third and final appointment (only three are given) for Monday. We don't know what time it will be yet; we should find out by Friday.

Since we got back to the apartment, Stan has been working nearly non-stop orchestrating a rush order on a home study amendment that should arrive in Ukraine by Monday. Pretty impressive, huh? Special thanks to our home study agency and our parents who are making this all possible.

What have I been doing since we got back? I made lunch, updated my journal, and had a small meltdown (not necessarily in that order). The suspense is really getting to me. Did we make the right decision? What would our family be like with older kids? God promised to give wisdom when we ask for it, so I guess I have to trust that he has given us what we needed today.

Independence Day and another big day

Today is Independence Day, Ukraine's 19th birthday. We have enjoyed fantastic music from a massive stage set up on the square (although we wore earplugs last night in order to sleep); as I type this, some of the most beautiful choral music you can imagine is floating in through the windows, but in the last two days we have had some of the most popular pop groups in Ukraine (we got familiar with some the current hot songs from listening to music videos in our hotel restaurant at lunchtime), folk rock, comic operetta, opera, orchestral music, and a variety of traditional dancing and music.

Being out at noon today was spectacular. The city's main street was closed, and there were different activities going on in the street, for example a BMX bike obstacle course competition. There was blue and yellow everywhere, with a true atmosphere of celebration all over Independence Square and Khreschatik Street giving you the sense that people appreciate independence most who remember what life was like without it.

It is clear from the city's monuments and conversations we have had that the suffering under occupying powers is still very vividly remembered. Just in the last hundred years it is easy to think of a quick list: unspeakable atrocities during the Russian Civil War, the political famine of 1932-33 when all Ukrainian wheat was taken by force to Russia resulting in the death of over 6 million Ukrainians, a brutal Nazi occupation (see the history of Dynamo Kiev for an interesting story of how soccer played into that), the deportation of entire people-groups by Stalin, and the Chernobyl disaster including the Soviet cover-up during the early days when a lot of people were needlessly exposed. Their enthusiasm about independence is a good reminder for us to be grateful, too.

We went back to the square in the evening for about an hour and a half and saw even more impressive acts: opera, orchestra, folk ballet, and lots of traditional dancing (the most interesting was one where two rows of women stretched long colored ribbons between them and then interwove them as they danced between and under each other's ribbons). At the end there were fireworks possibly precision launched with compressed air, since there was no noise and no trail before the airburst, which was consistently just above the building tops, about 10 stories high and 50 yards from us.

Tomorrow will also be a big day, our second appointment at the SDA scheduled for 12:00 local time. This time we have a better idea what the event will be like, but at the same time we are not sure what to expect. We are less optimistic than the first time about getting to see several reasonable choices, and we don't have the same excitement or the mystique of being there on our anniversary. We are very aware of how unable we are to control this outcome and counting on God to drive the whole process and to guide us whenever we need to make a decision.

But faith is moving without knowing

Can I trust what I can't see to reach my destiny?

I want to take control but I know better.

God, I want to dream again, take me where I've never been.

I wanna go there, this time I'm not scared.

Now I am unbreakable, it's unmistakable.

No one can touch me, nothing can stop me.

Forget the fear; it's just a crutch

That tries to hold you back

And turn your dreams to dust.

All you need to do is just trust.

- Fireflight

Dynamo and Folk Architecture

A couple things we had wanted to do if we had time in Kiev have come together in the last 24 hours. Last night we attended a soccer game between Dynamo Kiev and Dnepro Dnepropetrovsk. I could hardy believe the prices; the seats in the best sections were only about $6, and the stadium is only a short walk from our apartment. As in a baseball game, the atmosphere is a large part of the fun, but the action was so much clearer and more exciting than on TV that there really is no comparison, and I had a blast.

A few stats to show the caliber of Dynamo Kiev: They were winners of the European Winners' Cup twice while I was growing up (when I of course thought of them as a Soviet rather than Ukrainian team) and they came close to winning it last year. Historically, they won more USSR championships than any other team, and in the 18 years of the Ukrainian League, they have won 12 times and been runners-up the other 6. Their captain is Andriy Shevchenko, the 3rd highest scorer in European soccer history and voted the world's best player in 2004.

We got to see Shevchenko do one trick right in front of us that I had never seen before: he received a high pass off the back of a heel, looping it forward over his head and leaving 3 defenders behind. The visitors had a shot off the crossbar and a reversed penalty call in the first quarter, but Dynamo dominated overall. Some near misses included a scissor-kick attempt from the penalty spot, a curving corner kick that just went over the crossbar, a shot from within the goalie box deflected by a defender on the goal line, and a 95th-minute direct kick that bounced down off the left end of the crossbar. So the game ended 0-0, but it was an amazing experience. We got a laugh as we stood to leave thanks to a fan who eluded security to shake Shevchenko's hand at midfield and received his hero's jersey as a reward, to massive applause.

Today, we took the metro and bus to the outskirts of Kiev to spend the afternoon in Ukrainian Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, a huge open-air area that has brought windmills, whole farmyards, a village school, and a couple of functioning churches and set them up with authentic tools, furniture, and decoration to show village life from the 18th and 19th centuries. There are over 300 structures on the 370-acre grounds.

There are also demonstrations of traditional arts and handicrafts that visitors can even try: pottery on a foot-driven wheel, archery, egg painting (with wax), and zimbal and bandura players. Handicrafts of spectacular quality are available

for purchase. There also is a one-street neighborhood showing a typical 20th century house from each of the oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine. This visit gave me a new appreciation for Ukrainian culture and an idea of what some things might have looked like for my ancestors that lived in rural Ukraine. It also was nice to get out of the city into a very natural environment again.