Visitors from Abroad

View video of singing group

Valya Prylyudko shares the following report of a visit from Brady and Stephanie Smith, missionaries in Switzerland, and a group from Marseilles:

Brady's idea was to rent a van and come to Ternopil all the way from Kyiv by themselves. We have a saying here now that the road covering comes off together with the snow. There are a lot of holes everywhere, and you have to be very skillful to maneuver not to lose the wheels! So Volodya and Igor just hired a van, which took us (me and Taras) to Kyiv and back. We found Brady and Stephanie in Boryspil airport waiting for us and actually for another group from Marseilles. We had to wait for another hour and a half, so it was about six when we finally left Kyiv. So everyone was pretty tired when we arrived in Ternopil about two in the morning. Since Alicia and Brett are already in the church apartment, we had to split the group into three teams. Igor Pasichnyk graciously agreed to give his wife's one-room apartment (Natalie's still in Italy) to Brady and Stephanie. Myroslava opened her house for the three men from Marseilles, and Alicia and Brett welcomed two girls.

Even despite their travel fatigue, Brady and Craig started their classes the next day (on Tuesday). As we had agreed before, the theme of our studies was how to reach people beyond the church. Every night we gathered at six and had a wonderful time together. Oksana did a marvelous job translating both speakers into Ukrainian! Between two lessons we had a snack together and some time to share. They spoke of how we should be Jesus' witnesses and servants to bring people from darkness to light. I was especially impressed by Brady's message about Jesus' mission to liberate us from sin and how we used to be slaves to sin and now are slaves to righteousness. On Wednesday we arranged a meeting with students of the French department in our university. Again our guests split into three groups to embrace as many students as possible. I enjoyed listening to French speech trying to understand what they were speaking about. I could visualize the spelling of some words, and I was especially good at figuring our the names:) The students had enough courage to ask questions and were very open. We were also happy to see that every student in the group I was in with Craig had the Lord's prayer in their textbooks. So they read and commented on it. At the end of the lesson our guests sang two Christian songs and invited the students and their teachers to our weekend festival of Christian hymns. We could see the students' radiant faces as the French-Swiss group sang together. They also clapped their hands to the rhythm and sang along. On that very day our guests went straight to the center of the city and sang a couple of songs at Ivan Franko monument, and our young people distributed the invitations to the concert. Later we fond out that more than tow hundred had been distributed. It was a windy cold day, so when they returned to the church they were pretty cold.

One boy from our guests named Konstantin was of Ukrainian origin and actually he grew up in Ternopil (though he was born in one of the villages an hour away from Ternopil) had his 20th birthday on Friday, so the Marseilles group went to his home village to meet his grandma. Taras drove them there, and later said it was a very emotional time. Brady and Stephanie stayed in Ternopil and were invited by Myrosya and Mykola for lunch in their house.

Saturday and Sunday were the climax of our time together, since we sang and heard a lot of Christian hymns in four languages (French, English, Russian and Ukrainian). Some of the songs were performed by the French-Swiss group, others by our Ukrainian group, and the most impressive were the hymns sung by the joint Ukrainian-French-Swiss group! We wish more people had come to the festival! Somehow people are losing interest to God's word.

Our guests left on Sunday evening on the overnight train and were met by Olya Shandruk and her husband Sasha. They showed them some of Kyiv sights and saw them off in the Boryspil airport.