Rainy Ivano

Tuesday
Raining heavily again today, everything is a real mess. The roads are so bad because the holes are now full of water and every time someone goes through a puddle it washes more gravel out of the hole and it gets bigger and deeper. We planned to go to an old peoples home about 65 km away. I had been there before. We took a bag of clothes and new testaments as well as glasses.We were very well received by the staff. A charge nurse was in charge, a very nice woman of about 40. She was excited that we had come and eventually got the people together in the dining room where we sought to fit them with glasses. Sadly many of them need + 3 or stronger, but we only had up to +2.75. However we probably fitted 8 or 10 of them plus some staff. There are 25 residents and I was pleasantly surprised at how happy and clean the people and place was. We asked what their greatest need was and they said bed sheets and housecleaning supplies. We will try to get some used bed sheets to send to them and will get some cleaning supplies locally. We were invited to Vadym’s for supper again and spent a nice evening with his wife and baby.Howard feels he is getting a cold so we did not stay up late so 2 Tylenol and off to bed.
Malcolm & Howard

Wednesday April 23, 2008
Today is the same as yesterday, cloudy and a slight drizzle. Before long though it turned to a steady rain again and rained all day. O for Sunny Manitoba !!!Well today we had arranged to meet Halia at her apartment at 9am. We arrived on time and found the table set with a full breakfast of potato pancakes, regular pancakes etc etc.It didn’t matter that we had had breakfast, we HAD to eat again !!
Halia is still willing to give us addresses of places we could visit as well as places that had received clothing so that we could visit and distribute Bibles and speak.She then accompanied us to the garage to retrieve the 37 boxes of winter boots that had been sent by Eric Fowler and were waiting to be distributed. There were so many boxes that we had to rent a large van to move them to the Meeting Room.Just to give you a little scenario of how difficult things can be I will tell you what we had to do to get the boxes into the room.Firstly, there was a car parked right in front of the double locked gates to the building the room is in. Vadym went to see if they had the key for the lock on the gate. No key , the manager would be back with in May!! Now the driver of the van gets a bar out of his van and with the help of a hammer, the padlock is smashed off. (We bought a new one later!!)There were double doors into the building but the bolt on the one would not release the door, so out comes a big screw driver to pry the door open and all this done in a steady drizzle of rain!!! Then Vadym had to go through the offices and find whose car was blocking the gate and the man eventually moved his car. We spent about 2 hours emptying the boxes of the boots and piling the boxes on top and inside every cupboard we had, eventually getting them all unpacked and the boxes collapsed so as to make the room ready for meeting tomorrow.What to do next? I felt we should try to mend relations with Andre at Solidarity and so we went over to meet him It was just like old times and although the meeting that is still going on is not something we can fellowship in, thankfully, the gospel is being preached and some have been baptized. We then headed home as Howard had completely plugged up with a cold. I made him a cup of Neo Citron and he is sleeping as I write this letter. We both felt that the day was spent in things that needed to be done and felt God’s presence in both meetings.

Malcolm & Howard