It’s a foggy morning over Sumy. While it’s not quite as flat as the Cape Canaveral area,, there are no mountains or hills as far as you can see. There are, of course, slight valleys along the rivers.

We are becoming accustomed to many of the sights and customs around here. We fit in well with our black leather coats. Most wear black or dark grey clothes and black leather seems to predominate. There are also what we would consider to be extremes in dress: long pointed shoes worn by women and men, some with extremely spiked heels; skin-tight clothing on the women; brightly colored hair, usually on older women - pink, red, orange, purple. Then you have the humble babushkas in their heavy coats and colorful scarves over their hair. Many adults have some gold teeth.

You take your life in your hands crossing the street here. Right of way in crosswalks or green lights cannot be assumed. There seem to be no driving regulations in the cities (or at least they are not adhered to nor enforced), nor are there lane markings. It reminds me of the free-for-all in Bangkok. Roads and sidewalks are in disrepair. They make potholes in Utah look like pinpricks. We do a lot of walking along muddy footpaths. We ride buses when we're not walking. They are privately owned and operated vehicles that seat between 10 and 16 or so people. But they hold a lot more than that. The smaller ones have about 4-feet vertical clearance. Nevertheless we find ourselves trying to stand in them. It's an adventure!

We don't drink the water here. Without a washing machine or dryer we (Susan) wash in the bathtub and dry on a slat place between the porch window sills with the windows open.

We learned some things yesterday. The language gap between us and our children here is enormous and sometimes impassible. Love can bridge a portion of it; but on occasion that is not enough. At the end of the day we bemoaned the fact that we have gone largely unaccompanied by a translator. This forces us to deal with what will surely be the situation when we return home, but there have been moments when crystal clear communication has been crucial and we have fallen short. We know that we must assess where the children really are in their understanding of English and we need to begin now to teach them some basics and proceed from there.

We wish now that we had brought the “For the Strength of Youth” booklets we ordered in Ukrainian. We had no idea that our relationship with them would develop so rapidly, and that our parental roles would become so necessary so soon. But here we are.

The plan our children had today was for us to take them to the market to buy a present from Dasha to her boyfriend, Maxim for his 15th birthday. Susan brought to my attention the closeness of this threesome and their unity in purpose and action yesterday, juxtaposed with the events of the day before with Toli’s free-spiritedness. Here they supported Dasha with a single focus on her pursuit. We struggled in communicating limits on spending and the appropriateness of certain gifts. We learned from this and will do better next time.

On the walk back to the school, Dasha saw some other children smoking, which is not unusual here, and told Susan that none of three of them smokes or drinks alcohol. Most adults and many children smoke and virtually everyone drinks vodka. It’s nice to know there are a couple of things we don’t have to worry about. On the other hand we are concerned about the apparent dulling of senses that has come to the children because of the ubiquity of what is clearly intended to be pornography, as well as risqué images that to our standards are clearly pornographic. On our first taxi ride in Kiev to the church there we noticed several religious icons on the dash board of the car. Just above them hanging from the rear-view mirror, however, was a picture of a mostly naked lady. It’s seems to be an accepted part of their culture that is offensive to our standards.

We did some grocery shopping today. There were approximately a gazillion (plus or minus a few) varieties of sausage from which to choose. We couldn’t read the labels, so we picked one fairly randomly. We'll let you know if it is any good.

When we returned to the apartment Susan cooked up some barley soup and egg salad sandwiches for dinner. Once the Dodges arrived, we watched the “Testaments” movie together and explored the DVD to see that the Ukrainian presentation was voiced over in Ukrainian with English subtitles. We will likely have the children watch it on Sunday. We chatted until almost midnight and retired for the night.