Russia (#11) "Aht - LEECH - nah"!

     As an element of our preparation for this missions trip to Russia, we were told that our responses to the country and to the culture would likely change over the ten days we were there. We could expect, broadly speaking, to think everything is wonderful early on before finding all that "goodness and wonder" replaced by overwhelming negatives -- a kind of manic/depressive experience. That up and down roller coaster should, finally, even out, find a middle ground, allowing us to see the country for what it is, neither all good nor all bad. This last state of mind would allow us to see Russia realistically, objectively. The caution for us was that some would not have enough time in country for their perspectives to even out.

    One doesn't have to leave home to know that there is enough "bad stuff" virtually everywhere to complain about if one is disposed that way. Complaint-worthy stuff can be comprised of many things on a trip to a foreign country -- being outside of one's comfort zone, discovering that few things meet one's expectations, actual hardships of one sort or another, or, even, boredom. 

       All this to say, my personal experience in Russia, as it has been with all the countries I have visited, did not follow this pattern. For me, it has all and always been "aht-LEECH-na" ("excellent," according to our Russian phrase sheet), as I told my student questioner at the Pedagogical University. Oh, the privilege and joy of being there!

      Even posing for a group photo in front of a statue of Lenin, whose patched, pasted, and strangely preserved body lies in state in a mausoleum alongside Red Square in Moscow, was a once-in-a lifetime treat. I'm not sure where the little boys who joined us in the photo materialized from but, I guess, everyone enjoys a serendipitous photo-op! 

     We were told that many of these soviet-era monuments had been torn down, but the ones that remain -- and there are many -- remind us that politically inspired hero adulation is tenuous and fleeting.

   We were fascinated, or course, by the gym floors that infused vivid color into our days. In many of these gyms we also found the Russian Olympic Bear mascot from the 1980 summer games that the US pulled out of over human rights concerns. These bears adorned many walls in the athletic venues we visited.

     On other walls in these athletic spaces we found whimsical cartoonish figures meant, I suppose, to lighten the mood and encourage the young athletes. Here, in down time before or after games, the boys found a training room with these figures. Stefan took on the climbing rope challenge and was rewarded with an encouraging thumbs up from the big dog on the wall.

     At some point among these astonishing sights and opportunities, it began to dawn on me exactly how extraordinary it was for us to be in Russia at that moment of relative peace and congeniality. The Dads among us, having grown up in the Soviet era, had to regard this experience as nothing short of miraculous. 

      I would have this sense constantly in the days to come. 

     I remember early on our first day in Russia, as our bus was driving away from the Moscow airport in, we passed a police station. In front of this small station were two uniformed solders sweeping the walkway with short handled brooms made of bundles of sticks or limbs. But for the uniforms, the long military overcoats, they might have been mistaken for the babushkas one sees frequently tidying up.

    I was not fast enough with my camera to capture that scene. Like so much from that trip -- and from life as we might experience it -- I saw a richness that passes too quickly to be captured or saved, but for which I will always be grateful.

    All notions of basketball prowess aside -- the idea that our primary task of making friends and being ambassadors of good will, our mission, was growing in me. It seems right to me now, all these years later, that what we understand of what we are doing in God's service must be grounded in the common details of place and time -- a grounding that fills us with unspeakable wonder.

Russia (#10) 4-6-2004, An afternoon at the Pedagogical University

    My notes for this day are proving to be insufficient -- cryptic, sketchy. On days like this, there are too many holes in my cryptic jottings to be entirely filled in. So much for my own insistent admonition to the group to set aside time for the journal and keep the information basic rather than ambitious. Nevertheless,  on the afternoon of our tour of the old city, we traveled for a game at the Pedagogical University, and a number of things stand out in memory.

    One thing that stands out was the playing floor -- pink in the center from foul line to foul line, a darker pink in the key, yellow in the side lanes, and green along the sidelines -- a real eye catcher. In addition to vividly functional, colorful paint, the floor showed its age. It was safe, but occasionally the ball would bounce oddly on a pass or a dribble. It reminded me of the old Boston Garden parquet floor with its "dead spots" that gave opposing teams fits . . . nice to look at but tough to play on.

    While the whole gang made the trip, only the boys were scheduled to play. It was a tough game. Our high school sons played a university team, which made for an interesting match-up. Our guys played well but ended up losing. My notes say we lost by 3; Skip's official email home for this day notes we lost by 2 after leading most of the game. Either way, we lost, so who's quibbling: it was a good game, fun to watch. 

    I remember finding a seat in the balcony that overlooked the court, where I chatted with Andrew before the game about what we had seen that morning and about the Pedagogical University. Just before the game started, Andrew said he'd be right back and he left. 

    Almost immediately I found that students began filling in all the neighboring seats, including Andrew's. That was OK -- except that I didn't know what to say to my new neighbors; my page of "common Russian phrases" didn't seem all that useful. Just before he excused himself, Andrew told me that a student behind him wanted to know what I thought of my experience so far in Russia. I pulled out my sheet, located the word for "excellent," which I believe phonetically pronounced "Aht - leech - nah," which I said with enthusiasm. I hope it was heard with the measure of intensity and clarity I had intended. But starting a conversation once Andrew left was not likely to happen.

    The other memorable tid-bit from that afternoon, as I noted earlier, was the multicolored gym floor. It was quite spectacular.

    None of the photographs I have in my possession quite capture the way those colors dominated. After the game, as a gesture of our friendship, our boys gave the Russian players a bag keepsake gifts, and then everyone posed for pictures.

.

    The real point of the encounter was that the Russian team joined us for dinner at our hotel. We had a translator at each table to facilitate conversation. The idea was to"break the ice" with these guys, to let them see us a people rather than competitors, and to create interest that folks from the Ministry Center could follow up on.

    

     My notes for the day make no mention of what we were served for these friendship dinners. But my notes do record that at our devotional time that evening, Andy Norton asked us "Why are you here?", to which Mason Sorsensen immediately answered, "To see a pink gym floor for the first time!"

Russia -- Tues 6 April '04 -- a day of leisure (#9)

    Given that there were 19 American guys in our group with many talents, gifts, professions, and skills to offer beyond the Dads' team clearly fading basketball skills, it is not surprising that the folks at the Ministry Center had arranged to assign different men, different groups, to a variety of different tasks. John Woodard, our IT guy extraordinaire, was in high demand setting up IT systems and fixing computers at the Ministry Center itself. He was also our official photographer. John Horton and Mason Sorenson, as pastors, were sent to meet with other pastors in the city. The coaches among us were sent to meet with Russian coaches. And so forth.

    All this to say, our experiences in Russia varied depending upon where one was needed. That meant for me at least a morning of leisure touring Vladimir on the Tuesday after Palm Sunday. The tour began after our American breakfast, of course, which consisted of short, fat hot-dogs, hollow noodles, hot coffee, and yogurt. I was becoming convinced that the "average Russian" knew about as much about America culture as the "average American" knew about Russian culture.

    Being neither pastors nor skilled technicians, a group of us were given the opportunity to walk the "old village" Vladimir. That is, we were given a tour of the original, once-fortified city by our interpreter and tour guide, Andrew, who described himself as a "Jack-for-all-trades." 

      On reflection I will note that several "themes" appeared to run through what we saw in the "old village," also referred to as the "old city." One of these themes took the form of architecture expressed through old buildings that are curiously compelling, storied, and beautiful in their own right. Who knew, for example, that Vladimir has the greatest number of extant 12th century buildings in all of Russia? Many, such as the church pictured here are built of white stone; others are built of brick or even wood.

    For this walking tour, Andrew pulled me aside and asked me to relay to our group certain information that he would tell me. As his English was very good, I am not sure why he wanted assistance nor do I know exactly why he chose me as his relay, but it was a pleasant surprise to have gained his trust in this way. 

    As has happened on visits I have made to other countries with long and complex histories, I quickly understood how extensive my ignorance actually was.These structures mirror other characteristics of the old Russian culture that are beautiful, compelling, and storied as well.

 

    Our tour began with a nunnery/convent and the church it is attached to, dating from the 12th Century. Neither this nor many old city buildings were actually open to visitors, so we toured mostly outside.

    In the old city we saw many one story wooden buildings, too, with elaborate window decorations. Andrew told us to think of  the windows as eyes, which are a gateway to one's soul; the window decorations, consequently, are designed to ward off evil spirits, to keep these dark forces from the inner parts of the house. Although early April was not yet the season for leaves, mountain ash were growing at the corners of many of these old wooden houses for good luck. The mountain ash or Rowan trees can be identified by their compound leaves and their clusters of berries that turn orange or red. They carry a long history of bringing luck in the folk traditions of many cultures.

    A second theme that ran through our tour of the old city were the ever present signs of Christianity, many cohabiting with these folk superstitions, which attest to traditionally deep beliefs in the supernatural. My impression was (and is) that centuries of hardship, war, scarcity, and centuries of oppressive government under both the Czarist and the Soviet systems have led to a strong sense that "fate" usually gets the last word.

    The "Golden Gate," built in 1164, is the only old city gate remaining. The Copper Gate and the Silver Gate were destroyed during siege by one foreign army or another.

 

     A third "theme" I note in many aspects of old architecture is the persistence of suffering, particularly suffering as a consequence of war, of which there have been many.

    In the years surrounding our visit, the Russian Federation was engaged in military conflict in Chechnya, which, we were led to understand, caused worry among the parents of young men. I assume this conflict was little reported by the western press as I knew nothing about it prior to our visit. 

    In addition to the Golden Gate, which was intended to defend access to the old city, were remnants of the medieval earthen ramparts, essentially a protective wall that once encompassed the whole city (see below).

    

   In list form I will note that within walking distance we also had opportunity to visit the old city water tower [the brick building with the cone-shaped roof below] and a museum beneath it housing the "youth agricultural learning center."

 

 

     We passed by St. Nikita (the Martyr) Orthodox Church established by St. Vladimir. My notes refer to it as the oldest church in Vladimir, which makes it very old indeed, although it seems unlikely that the present structure is the original one. But for the onion dome, the present church building strikes me now as then to resemble a Victorian house. The green of its exterior is a particularly Russian color, and its windows display the kind of decorative features found on many old wooden houses.

    Further on we visited the library where Andrew had studied as a student and the building that had housed the Vladimir Communist Party Headquarters where Andrew's father, now retired, had worked. As sensitively as I could, I tried to ask about that time; the question ran along the lines of "Did your father lose his job when the Soviet Union broke up?"

    Andrew answered rather circumspectly that his father, like many older Russians, missed the stability and relative predictability of life under the old regime. They had known nothing else.

    In retrospect, I think it was beginning to dawn on me that one large benefit of a short-term missions trip extends well beyond what a missionary might actually "do."  Even before playing most of our games I knew that basketball was, after a manner of speaking, "incidental." The real benefit of our trip was personal. Whatever benefit there may have been to our missionaries and to the contacts we made, my world had been exponentially enlarged.

     The last words in my journal for that tour were "Wow -- What a morning!"
 

 

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.

Russia -- 04-04-04, Palm Sunday, Later the same day (#5)

 

     I am sure I didn't appreciate at the time just how jarring it would be to experience, however slightly, such a rapidly changing set of scenes and circumstances. In less than 24 hours we had left the relative familiarity of western Europe for a world that was simply "other," unfamiliar. And we were in constant motion, so there was almost no time to "take it in" -- whatever that might have entailed. 

    Everything about our quick "tourist visit" to the Orthodox service on Palm Sunday brought this otherness into sharp, though confusing, focus. The Assumption Cathedral itself commands the highest point in Vladimir. It stands atop a bluff, where the view of the river and the vast plain below is extensive. The city of Vladimir extends across the plateau atop the bluff where the Cathedral stands sentinel.

     The reasons for building on the high ground are clearly related to security, to self-preservation. By the time an advancing enemy army reached the base of the bluff and began to make its ascent up the grade to attack, ( I'm thinking anytime before the use of air warfare) the city would have had considerable advance warning, perhaps days. And warning -- time to ready the defenses -- was crucial, then as now. The city would be "saved" by the church, after a manner of speaking. Historically however, this "lead time" did not always work. Vladimir was destroyed by invaders more than once over the centuries.

 

      Next to the Cathedral was a monastery. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the Church would have been preserved as a "museum," and the monastery was converted into a military barracks. No doubt many churches were destroyed under Soviet rule, but many also were secularized as museums due to their artistic, architectural, and cultural significance. 

    In this way and for this reason, many Orthodox churches were able to reopen after the Soviet Union broke apart. This, without modernizing -- a piece of the ancient past reappearing almost overnight. We in the west might have expected Orthodoxy to have been wiped out during the decades of Soviet rule, but it was not. 

    Nevertheless, it is into this presumed religious vacuum following the disintegration of the USSR that many religious groups, including our own, arrived. I do not wish to suggest that Global Partners should not have gone in -- far from it. What I am suggesting is that the situation (political, cultural, social, historical, and religious) is harder to assess and respond to from afar than we in the west might imagine.

  . 

       Beyond the former monastery is a much smaller chapel built by one of the Czars for private services. Though on a much grander scale, it reminded me of the small churches (or chapels) built by the upper classes in England for private services. Religious services for the locals, for the masses, were all well and good -- even necessary -- just so long as the aristocracy did not have to mix.

    Our quick walk-through of the Assumption Cathedral left me with many questions about all sorts of things, not least of which was how one ought to reconcile the role of tourism with ministry.

    Nevertheless, once we had gathered outside the Cathedral, our group split up. Two ministry teams from our main group, one headed by Mason Sorensen and one headed by John Horton, both pastors, headed out in vans. 

    The rest of us walked back to the main road to take a trolly-bus to the Wesleyan Mission Center for a Palm Sunday worship service. We were glad to get back on the trolly-bus, out of the weather: The wind was cold, cold, cold. Many of us had not dressed sufficiently just as the man at the airport had predicted. I was grateful for my wool stocking cap.

    Although it was conducted entirely in Russian, the service was a delight -- mostly young people and middle-aged adults.

    During the few moments given to "greet your neighbor" I greeted a teenage girl standing nearby who was embarrassed and quickly turned away. I had more success with kids -- the 5th grade daughter of a young Canadian missionary couple, and two unattached boys (street kids, someone suggested) who looked up questions in a phrase book to ask me: When did you come? How long are you staying? How old are you? It was a good exchange, I think; I had found my comfort level.

    Our missionary contact, Pastor Blake, brought a message from John 18 -- in English with a translator converting his words into Russian. Although John 18 makes a lot of sense for Palm Sunday and the run-up to Easter, I remember nothing about the sermon. No notes beyond the Bible reference and no visual memories apart from Pastor Blake smiling as he spoke into the microphone.

    From the Ministry Center we piled into a van for a short ride to a restaurant, where I dutifully noted "chicken, with ice cream for desert." Back to the hotel at 3:30. Pick up at 4 by the Canadian missionary and his 5th grade daughter, whom I had met in the service, to go to their house for "tea" -- pigs-in-a-blanket, shredded carrots in vinegar, peas, and potato salad.

    There is a lesson of some sort here: my notes on food are extensive but the sermon is entirely overlooked.

    At tea we met three Christian students, Russian, who belonged to yet another gathering place -- a house church where we would be heading next. We tried to express friendliness despite the language barrier. But whether it was jet-lag, language barriers, the culture shifts and expectations, or the quick changes in location I was struggling. Some in our group were much better at these interactions than I proved to be. 

    I can't remember a longer Palm Sunday before or since. After tea concluded, we got on yet another trolly-bus and rode to the end of the line. The tracks ended at a concrete barrier -- that kind of "end of the line." It was starting to get dark as we hiked across muddy lots and down muddy streets on our way to the house church, a first journey, I see now, deeper into the heart of Russia.