Russia -- 6 April 2004 -- Game Day (#8)

 

 

 

 

 

    Well, yes, it is game day; but before I can write about basketball, I have some catching up to do. 

    When I gave my much joked about advice to everyone on keeping a journal, with the goal in mind of making a more accurate record of their experiences than memory alone might provide, I cautioned that whatever they plan for their journals, it needs to be do-able. The alternative is no journaling at all, no written record. Time and events will get lost very quickly. Days will run together.

    6 April 2004  I should have followed my own advice more closely! I am trying to steal moments everywhere to record the amazing things that have happened. It is already Tuesday and I have not finished writing about Sunday! 

    So my revised plan is to enter some notes about Monday and Tuesday so that I can return later to fill in the account.

    Palm Sunday [04-04-04] ended with dinner at the Ministry Center. We have 'team time' at the end of each day with devotions and a briefing on what to expect tomorrow. Looming large in everyone's mind were the basketball games we had come to play. We knew the younger guys would be playing college (high school) or university teams, but as yet we did not know who the Dads would be playing or where the games were to take place.

    The Dads had practiced together as a team on a number of occasions in the weeks leading up to our trip; we had worked on plays, we had done conditioning drills, and so forth. And we had joked a lot about who our opponents might be. We had been cautioned frequently to remember that winning was not our real goal, although as a former athlete raised on American values about playing hard that advice felt more than a little off center. After all, Larry Bird was my guy: What Would Larry Say?

    But first, the morning of Monday, 5 April 2004:  Notes

Breakfast at hotel. Pancakes. Also, scalding coffee/ plain yogurt. 

    We had a devotional time at Ken & Marilyn Blake's apartment attached to the Ministry Center (pictured above). All the Wesleyan missionaries serving in Vladimir were there -- the Robinsons (Canada), the Blakes, two young American women who work with orphanages. Sang four hymns, which all the older guys (the Dads) knew well and the younger ones did not.

    Four of us had been asked to share, so I gave another small testimony. One of the missionaries spoke on David and Goliath, encouraging us to face the Goliaths in our own lives. He wasn't talking about basketball opponents, but in retrospect he could have been. At the time, though, we still didn't know what to expect.

    At 3 in the afternoon we traveled a short distance to to play our first games. I will have more to say about basketball later, but for now the short version on our games is this: the boys' team won a squeaker against a well matched team of their peers; the Dads on the other hand, lost -- big time. We were outclassed. Overwhelmed. Crushed. Taken to the wood shed. Thrashed. All the cliches for being humbled in competition apply here. 

    This may have been the David and Goliath moment I mentioned earlier.The photograph of me (in green) jumping center tells you all you need to know about who controlled the game from beginning to end. 

    I am not sure now, years later, why I thought I should jump -- maybe it was the Larry Bird thing again -- but the Russian guys already had a play in motion that we couldn't stop. That pretty much accounts for the afternoon. It was a complete and fairly quick take down, which I was feeling bad about until I realized it allowed us almost immediately to play as friends rather than as competitors.

    We learned later, over dinner, that this team was not only Vladimir City Champions, they were also an Army Veterans team that had played together for over 30 years. Well, now! Had we known that going in, perhaps I would have approached the game with a bit more humility.

  We played at a place call Elektropibo, which had a gym, locker rooms, and a nice room for dinner that accommodated all the guys on the teams. A quick internet search for this place seems to indicate that Elecktropibo is an industrial and/or research center with these athletic facilities as part of the complex. At the time, however, none of this information was explained to us and none of us could read Russian.

    

     After the games, as was to be our practice, we had dinner together with the other teams, all in the same complex as the gymnasium. 

 

    Dinner was already laid out for us when we arrived at the dining hall. Here Stefan (in green) is talking with Andrew (Andrei) our senior translator and tour guide. He described himself as a jack of all trades. Among other things, he made the yellow bench pictured above as well as the nativity set I was able to purchase and bring back to the U.S. He is the man in the black jacket in the Mission Center photograph above.

    I talked mostly with Misha and Yuri, two young men who had come along as translators. They spoke English very well, and they were eager to talk. I tried to ask questions of the older guys through the translators but it was tough going. The older men were friendly enough but quiet with us, which I can understand; and I from my end just flat out didn't know what to say or ask. We had been told not to ask certain kinds of questions -- anything related to politics, for example -- and not to show pictures of our own houses, and so forth, so I wasn't sure where to start.

    Nevertheless, my notes record that we had an "excellent time."

   

Russian -- 5 April 2004 Home Base (#7)

     We arrived at our hotel in Vladimir after dark following an long day or more of travel. Early the next morning, Palm Sunday, we got up early to begin visiting churches and worship services. Although we did not spend much time at the hotel, we were able to get our first daylight look at our home base. We had been told various things as preparations for our trip, but being there was different in significant ways from our expectations. That is to say, better in some ways, not in others. Subsequent experience has taught me that such variation is nearly always the case.

     From outside, our hotel was hard to distinguish from many of the buildings in Vladimir. Given that none of us could read Russian, this kind of uniformity afforded us no clear way of noting distinguishing features should we have needed to find our hotel on our own. Those of us who had grown up seeing black and white news footage of events in the Soviet Union would have described the blocky, multi-story, nearly colorless, nearly featureless concrete structures as typically "Soviet era."

 

     To be fair, new buildings were going up. We saw construction in various parts of the city, so surely this and other Russian cities experienced renewal in the twenty years since our visit.

 

    We began and ended each day meeting together for devotions, debriefings, and next day assignments in a room basically lacking furniture. My understanding is that team meetings of this sort are common for athletic teams and for teams doing short-term missions, but it was a new experience for me. These meetings were important for many reasons. I understood their value although I found myself impatient at times to get back to the room Stefan  and I shared to write in my journal.

 

 

    Many of us sat on the floor around the edges of the common room where we had our meetings. Well, that choice was more comfortable for some, i.e., the younger among us, than for others. 

    Some needed the ease of the couch and chairs.

    And some of us preferred standing to sitting on the beautiful parqueted floor. We were told that the hotel was undergoing renovation, which had begun with the common rooms and would at some time in the future work through to the bedrooms we inhabited.

 

    Some of the bedrooms assigned to us were "better" than others, but all shared the same basic layout: two single beds along the sides ending at a window with a steam radiator and a very short bureau at one end, and a desk at the other.

 

 

 

     The photograph to the left is my side of the room, which I have been able to identify by my travel bag. Our window looked out onto another building, which I believe is the first building featured above. For identification purposes (if you are inclined to look for such clues) I will note that the window in our room matches the windows in the second picture above, whereas the windows of the pink building match the windows visible from our room.

 

 

    I will also note  that what might be construed as mismatched wallpaper in the photograph of the bed to the right is, in fact, the curtain. This photograph is some other room, as one can easily tell from the carpet. That said, the diamond patterns clearly prevailed when design choices were being made lo those many years before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    In those minutes before, after, and between other obligations, the journal keeper sat at the desk at the end of his bed and wrote the things that made these blogs possible. If I had a gift as a student other than my curiosity about nearly everything natural or man-made, it is that I am usually able to make notes that will summon memories. It is quite a bit more difficult to work with notes written nearly twenty years ago than with recent notes, but the practice seems to hold up better over that time than one might expect.

 

    The only remaining information one might need to fill out the profile of our living circumstances is the bathroom that one passes to reach the sleeping area. 

    I shall leave it with the observation that we found the shower/toilet area workable and that we have seen in our travels conditions much more primitive.

Russia -- 2004 (#6)The church at the end of the trolley line

       The house church we visited at the end of Palm Sunday was about half a mile by my estimation from the last trolley-bus stop.  The streets were full of potholes, litter, and mud. In our brief time in country so far, this was the common condition of streets.

     The apartment buildings were all startlingly decrepit. One sees such things in American inner cities. Here this level of architectural wear and tear seemed to be everywhere. After a bit we turned down an alley although the street we had been walking resembled an alley. The alley was largely mud. It had grown quite dark and there were no street lights. Someone from the leadership group mentioned that the head of the Orthodox Church lived nearby. Like many things we heard, there was no way to verify the information or time to ask follow-up questions to clarify what was being passed along to us as we walked.

     Seventy-five yards down the alley we turned in at a gate in a rough wooden fence. We entered one of those small wooden houses that look ruinous from the outside although details were hard to see in the dark. The only light on the street seemed to come from the open door we were entering. We entered what is usually called a "mud room" in the US, where we removed our muddy shoes and left them in a pile.

    The mud room was cold, but the house proper was cozy warm. The inside of the house had been remodeled very nicely, mostly in wood paneling and partly in plaster. A parenthetical note in my journal adds, "real pine." The young couple who owned the house had been in the worship service we attended at the Mission Center; they were doing the remodeling themselves. The woman was one of the singers in the worship team.

     The room we held our service in lay just off the kitchen. It was simply furnished by American standards but very nice. I cannot identify the house church members pictured here but I am pretty sure there were folks gathered in the house for the service who were not in the photograph. Our Houghton ministry team -- John and Eric Woodard, Gary King, Stefan and I -- are all to the left.

    The Canadian missionary who brought us to the house led our discussion for a short time before the house church pastor, a young Russian man who had been through the Bible School, arrived and took over.

    Each person in our visiting team was asked to contribute something from personal experience that had made a difference in our lives related to discipleship. Our experiences were translated into Russian. For my part, I told about a man in the church I attended from 3rd grade until after Donna and I were married; Edgar Gray had always been for me an example of a believer who put his faith into action every day. He had a reputation for being the same person at work on Monday that he had been in church on Sunday. He was kind and generous and loving, soft-spoken and consistent. He invested himself in his large family as well as in the young folks of the church, overtly conscious that his actions and attitudes set an example. His devotion and behavior should have been the norm rather than the exception, but, as I say, he stood out. An example to follow.

     We had a sincere time of sharing. The householder played guitar and the others sang a few songs in Russian with great conviction and animation. I was touched despite my inability to comprehend the language. Then, before we left, the pastor asked that we return in a few days to talk with the young people about  "dating," an idea (as I understood it) for which there is no equivalent word in Russian. The term that was translated for us was "sexual relations."

      I must admit I had not seen that request coming. It certainly gave me pause as we pulled on our cold shoes and headed back into the darkness outside.