I flew into Kiev on July 31 and spent the night at Kiev First Church of the Nazarene. The trip from the airport, which I'm told should take 40 minutes, ended up taking 2 hours. Traffic, I think, is a global pandemic that should be addressed so that I can get to places faster. In any case I met up with several people who had been in kiev for about a week working on getting things ready for NYC (I'll explain in a moment) and hung out in victory square. Good times were had by all and I got to meet a lot of cool people I would get to know better in the next week or so.

NYC stands for Nazarene Youth Conference and is a chance for youth from various regions to get together every four years or so. When I was in High School the US/Canada regional NYC packed out the Houston, TX conference center with several thousand High School students. The Eurasia regional NYC had 270 people from 26 countries and was held in an old communist retreat center (some of the rooms had broken saunas in them) 40 minutes out of Kiev.

The theme of the conference was One Mission and through that lens we looked at the Kingdom of God and what that should look like. Before the conference the communications center put together 4 videos on that topic and one more while we were there.

The first night there one of the pastors there got a bunch of people together and we went swimming in the lake at 10pm, things only got better from there. We also got to spend a day in Kiev seeing some of the sights, like St. Sophie's church and the WWII memorial. The latter of those was intense as the USSR lost about 30 million people of the 60 million total lives lost in the war. There were several villages that were completely destroyed and 2 or 3 that lost all of the men in the village to the war.

During the conference the com team worked on putting together a video that was part recap of the week and part clips of people talking about what they think the kingdom of God is like or should be like. It's always a little stressful trying to put a video together that fast, but I was really happy with how it turned out.

After the conference a group of about 30 people stayed a little longer to participate in ministry teams. 3 teams went to three town in Ukraine to work with the folks in the area. I ended up going to a town called Kosatin where we stayed in a Nazarene sponsored drug and alcohol rehab center with 14 or so guys. While we were there we helped out with several projects in the community. One of the days we were there we visited a mother and child home that has been open for about a month. We brought them food, clothes and toys for the kids and got to talk with the director of the center for a while.

In the afternoons we spent time hanging out with kids in the park. We played darts, charades and took pictures with the kids. I say we, but most of our team sat and watched while the Pastor's wife and a few of the leaders at the rehab center worked with the kids. That's being a little harsh we did join in when we could, but only 3 of the 7 people on our team spoke Russian.

A quick note; one of the leaders at the center has an amazing story. When he was 9 he started smoking, at 13 he started drugs, and at 16 he started heroine. If I heard the story right he's been clean for two years. However a year ago he jumped off a bridge while swimming and broke his neck. The doctors said that he shouldn't be alive, and when he lived they said he wouldn't walk. While I was there he was walking around all over town with a cane.

On top of all the work we were doing in the Kosatin community I was also working on a video project about how the Ukranian rehab centers is funding itself. In working on this story I got to ride in a combine while it was harvesting wheat. I also took the train to another own and talked to a guy at a furniture shop, whose profits would go to support the rehab centers.

I had a really good time while I was there and met a lot of cool people, but I am very glad to be home. Thanks for all your prayers and keep all the people from Ukraine in your prayers.