Time is FLYING!!

So its been about a week or so since I last wrote.. I have finally gotten some time alone at the computer where I can think.

Things here seem to be going a super speed. It feels like each week flies by too fast. We have so many activities planned and spend so much of our time with the students and with our group it feels like the days just zip by! It is so much work, but also a ton of fun! We are getting to invest in so many students lives and hear their thoughts about faith and religion and share ours too. The students here are so open to talking about spiritual topics and almost expect to talk about them when they are with us now.

Most of the time that we spend with our team is doing activities together.. like walking in the park, planning out our week, exploring the city of Karaganda.. Whatever we are doing, we are having a good time.

The past two or three days have been extremely hot here. The temperature had to be between 95-105 degrees. It was insane. However last night it got very cold in the middle of the night and I had to get up and grab some more sheets so I didn't freeze. Hopefully tomorrow will be a normal temp.

Also over the past week I have gotten the opportunity to share the Gospel with two students. Both of them are Muslim. One more serious than the other, but it was still great to be able to have a conversation with them about these spiritual things. I am hoping to be able to meet with them a few more times before we return to the US.

Well that's all for now.. I have to get up a 6am to watch the Flyers play game six against the Blackhawks.

GO FLYERS!!

Settling in..

Hey everyone! Sorry its been a while, but we have been awfully busy here meeting students and getting settled in!

Over the past week I have been leading English Clubs, getting into discussions with students about religious topics and getting into the Word a lot! Everyday we are expected to read through the book of Ephesians at least once. It really sweet and I am definitely going to know that book better and any other by the time this trip is over.

I also have gotten to know one of the students here very well. He is a Christian and loves to talk and hang out. I was able to meet with him this past Monday and talk about how we both became followers of Jesus. It was really encouraging! Around these parts the people like to just walk around and talk, maybe stop at a cafe and grab some tea. So that is what my friend and I did.

Over the next few weeks we will be focusing on growing in our faith and most of all trying to reach students with the word of God. I know it will be a challenge to put myself out there and be continually asking students to hang out with me and also trying to bring up spiritual conversation. But it definitely seems like it will be easier to do here than in America... 1. because I am half way around the world.. if that doesn't motivate me.. idk what will 2. the people here are very friendly to Americans and will probably love to talk about these types of things.

I have learned enough Russian to go into a store and purchase things and ask people to help me. Most people know we are American by the way we look and will blurt out all the English words they know when the pass us haha. One of the most frequent terms we here is HELLO AMERICA!! We usually respond with Previet Kazakhstan!! its great!

Another thing that I have noticed is that after speaking to people who are bad at English it brings my level of English down so pretty soon I won't be able to speak Russian or English!! YAI!!

One last interesting fact that we all found out... while eating dinner at a restaurant in Kazakhstan, if they begin to play live music you will be charged for it when you get your bill! We all got charged about 3 bucks to listen to this woman and man lip-sink Russian songs for a half hour haha. who knew...

Adios!! Hope those Flyers turn it around it game three..

Staff Meeting and English Club

This morning I woke up at 6am to watch some of the Flyers game!! Fortunately they won and I didn't waist my valuable sleep time.. STANLEY CUP FINALS!!!

However my day would quickly take a turn for the worse... After I left my friend Andrew's apartment at 730am, my friend Matt and I caught one of the many busses that fly around the city. We grabbed the correct bus, but we were headed the wrong direction. Unaware, Matt and I continued on further away from our apartment and farther away from Karaganda. We managed to say the name of our apartment complex to the bus driver and he immediately began to laugh and motioned to us that we had gotten on the bus on the wrong side of the road! Just what I needed to hear at 8am! Ha ha, but it was a great way to see the city! We ended up getting back to our place around 915.. after the bus had made a complete circuit around the city.

After that our team met up and talked about Isaiah and the vision that God gave him when He revealed Himself to Isaiah. We talked about how awesome that must have been and how we all need to have a vision for Kazakhstan just as God does. With this vision in mind we came up with goals to help reach the people here. It was exciting.

Later in the day we were able to go to our first English Club, which is where we will be teaching English. There were about 10 students at this specific club and they varied in their ability to speak English. We taught them about family. We were able to engage them in questions about marriage, divorce, polygamy and other pressing topics for this area. The response was great and they definitely thought about these topics in a deep sense. We invited all of the students there to come to our team's movie, sport, and game nights!

Now its our teams time to hang out!! The people here are great and I can't wait to meet more students!

Third Day

Today we went to church. It was a nice Russian church that had a similar format to ours back in the states. The preacher spoke about David and his love for God. It was a good message, but hard to understand because of the poor translation. I was also thinking about how I feel very comfortable here already. I was thinking about how I feel that way because I know that my real home is in heaven and it shouldn’t really matter where I am here on earth.. After church the people invited us to have tea with them as a sort of initiation into their church. It was great!

After church we went to an Italian restaurant. I had spaghetti and it was delicious! Then our whole group went to Andy’s place and talked about events we will help host. We learned a lot about each member of our team and are getting along great!


So I had a lot of free time these first couple days.. so I could write a lot, but I will try to update you with the most important stuff once a week or so!

Second Day

So I just woke up after sleeping on my bed on the floor. Not really comfortable, but I was so tired it didn’t matter. Yesterday we got to meet a bench of Kazakh people that are friends of Andy. Sirgee, Luba, Sasha, Dimee, Marianna, Stas. They were all great and some of them worked with the company. Most of them could speak English very well, but some couldn’t. They were all very friendly and talkative. We went on a tour of Karaganda and it was great… until it started raining. But we say many of the monument and historic places of the city, Miner’s Museum, Statue of Lennon, and Central Park. It started raining harder as the day pressed on and getting colder too. By the time we were done we were all freezing and cold, but still in good spirits. That night we went to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It was delicious. The restaurant name was called Princess. It was really funny though because we were all so tired and acting stupid.

Travel and First Day

The flight from DC to London was packed. Slept a little, but mostly watched TV, listened to music and read. I also prayed for our trip a lot too. London was quick and boring… The only cool thing was seeing a Tesla Roadster in one of those euro car auctions. From London we flew to Almaty, KZ. We landed and went through customs. God was definitely looking over us because we had no problems getting through and non of our bags were lost!

We met up with Andy Allen, who I could see smiling at us every time the door opened where he was waiting past customs.. made me laugh. Andy was great to see and really refreshed our team’s spirit. We loaded all of our luggage into a taxi van and piled ourselves in around it. There wasn’t quite enough room in the taxi, so Mark and I had to stand. The van took us to a family’s house in Almaty. They had enough room to host us all for the night. When we got there we were in a bumpy gravel alley, it was pitch black, and all you could hear were dogs barking everywhere. Quite a welcoming. We all hopped out and took our stuff inside and fell asleep. We got to bed by about 3am.

The next morning the guys who were sleeping in the living room woke up around 6:30am because the family was up and about getting ready for school. That was fine with us though because it felt like it was 8:30 pm to us. We all sat in the kitchen when everyone was awake and had pancakes, waffles, juice and coffee. It was a great breakfast and I ate way too much. Afterward a couple of us went to the local mall to buy some groceries for the train ride that was coming up later that day. In the mall we say a mall cop walking around with an AK-47 which was pretty shocking haha. After the mall we all loaded back into the taxi and took off to the train.

We got to the train station and unloaded all of our stuff and headed onto the platform. There we waited for Andy to bring us our tickets. It was weird because a lot of people were around and most of them were staring at us, which Andy told us is not considered rude here. Here there is not a concept of your own personal bubble. It seems like the people are happy to see Americans and are just interested in what you’re doing.

Anyways, on the train we had four to a cabin. In each cabin there were four beds, two on each side bunked. There was also a table in the middle where we could eat and play cards. The train ride was 16 hours long, which seemed like a lot, but wasn’t too bad. I actually loved the train ride. There were always beautiful mountains to look at in the background (they looked like the rockies!!) and good friends to enjoy them with. We played poker and hearts a lot. Later on we walked to the café train car and ordered some tea and played poker. After a while a young Kazakh man asked us where we were from in the US. We said Pennsylvania and he said he was from Penn State! It was crazy! His name is Amir and he was an energy engineering major. He was very nice and helped us with our English. We talked about Penn State for a while and he told us that he lived just north of Karaganda, so we will try to meet up with him sometime during our stay here.

Also while we were on the train earlier in the day, we stopped at a little village. The village had tons of vendors selling random stuff. Josh decided to buy a dried fish that was hanging on a rope. I tried it and it was pretty nasty haha, but worth it.

After that we all went to sleep. I fell asleep pretty quickly because I was really tired, but woke up around 4:30am when the sun started to come up. I was in the top bunk and laid there watching the sun come up over the mountains out of our window. I also prayed for our trip while I was laying there and knew God was going to use us in amazing ways. After the rest of the team was awake, we all got our stuff ready to unload off of the train and waited for it to stop. The train pulled into Karaganda and we all unloaded on the middle platform and had to walk across several tracks to get to the road. There we were met by several other people in our company. We all got into some taxis and headed to our apartments.

We got to our apartments and it looked like the projects.. but worse haha. It smelled like mildew and poop in the stair well. We got up to our floor on the sixth floor and went into our place. Surprisingly it was really nice inside. There are 3 bedrooms and 1 bath. We all unpacked and got settled in. After that it was like 8am and we were not doing anything until 12am so we decided to go exploring. The five guys in our apartment headed out of our place and entered the streets. There we were, 5 English speakers walking the streets of Kaz with Russian phrase books. It was a funny sight. We wondered into a hardware store and spoke with two older ladies there and fumbled through our books to tell them we were just looking. Eventually they understood.

Soon we left there and tracked on to look to a supermarket. We found one around the block and went in. Immediately we attracted attention. Many of the security guards followed us around there. There were literally 5 guards walking two steps behind us while we shopped. It was weird, but we kept on shopping and actually broke up into smaller groups just to see what they would do haha. Eventually when we were checking out we saw the master guard standing at the end of the counter with a sub machine gun staring at us. That was interesting and a little scary. We went back to our place and shared the meal that we had bought.

Leaving Tomorrow

Last day in the US!

I have spent the last two days getting every vaccination known to man. My arms feel like they are going to fall off. But I guess a little pain now is better than getting polio...

I still need to pack up all my clothes and things that I am going to be bringing. But that will only take me an hour or so.

Joe, Leslie, and Josh are all headed to my house to spend the night. Then we will all drive to the Philadelphia International Airport tomorrow and head out!

Our team will arrive in Kazakhstan on the 20th and eventually reach Karaganda, KZ on the 21st.. after a 19 hour train ride!

Well I've been praying that this trip will really be a blessing to the people of Kazakhstan and I know it will be!