This was a short video from the opening night at the Youth Conference in Odessa, Ukraine. Sorry for the poor quality but I had my small camera with me and no video camera. What is hard to see is that there’s almost 3,000 people in the crowd. It was awesome!

As we come to the end of our time here, we took some time to run around Odessa. We had a good time but spent a lot of time crammed into Marshukas (small buses). We had to run to the train station to make some arrangements for some of our team and got to see that area of town. Then we made our way over to the beach area and enjoyed watching a jet ski pull people on an inner tube. Then we made our way back to camp.
When we got back we did hear some good news about the conference – last night we had a famous Russian evangelist speak and many were invited from the community. We found out that over 150 people made a decision to follow Christ and over 50 people made a decision to become missionaries. Isn’t it awesome!!!
Well, we are still looking at the different ways for why God has had us here and look forward to see how the contacts we have made develop in the future. Take care and thanks for the prayers.

We are in the middle of our seminar RIGHT NOW! And I’m blogging about it during it using my cell phone. Technology is advancing at a rapid speed. Think about the possibilities for evangelism and discipleship. Isn’t God awesome in how He can use all things for His glory?!?
God bless.

For the past two days we have awoken to an extra companion in our room. He sneaks in after we go to sleep. He’s very friendly and brings many gifts with him (fleas). Honey, if you are reading this than please know that I’m going to need some itch cream when I get home.
I thought I would take a moment and tell you more about the youth conference we are at. Over 3000 youth and youth workers showed up for the conference (they were expecting 2500 – oops). They come from many different countries that were all at one time a part of the Soviet Union (obviously not now). The common language here is Russian but when people pray they usually pray in their mother tongue. This is the first time that they have been able to get together EVER. The conference (actually called a congress or Kongress) is put on by the Baptist Union. We are at a camp here in Odessa, Ukraine that in communist days was a camp for training and bringing up the Communist Youth.
Now the American in me wants to say that that is so ironic as my American value system says that Comunism is wrong however there are many here who would disagree with me (and they have legitimate reasons to support it). But the grand thing is that we are brothers and sisters in Christ first and we believe in a God who is bigger than democracy or communism so we can stand together and worship Him.
Praise God or Slava Boga (although I’m unsure of the correct spelling).

Here’s our translator Roman (and a system administrator for a Bible school here in Ukraine) working on getting our powerpoint into Russian. Luckily I don’t have a big part in actually presenting. I’m more there for the question time.
OK, let me tell you some about our time here. We left Germany by train early the other morning. We made our connections just fine and made our flights from Zurich to Budapest to Odessa just right too. Now once we arrived in Odessa, it was a situation of “I thought this other person was handling that.” So we waited a total of three hours (which in the grand scheme of things is a short period of time) in the airport. During that time Gordon got some great reading done and I was able to get our Ukrainian phone card working and call our contacts to see what was going on. We were then picked up and told that they really didn’t know where we were staying that evening as every one else was staying in tents out on the beach. We ended up staying with this nice old couple who knew only one word in English – husband. We got to sleep on these futon things in the hallway and dining room. The next morning we were awoken to them leaving food for us for breakfast as they went off to work. We ate an d then waited and waited. No one knew when we were to be picked or by whom we were to be picked up by. Shortly before 1 PM our contact called and told us we should be picked up shortly. I think it was shortly after 2 PM that we got picked up. Now in Ukraine, we don’t normally wear seatbelts mainly because you can’t find them. But in this case they were there but useless as the seats weren’t even bolted to the floor. This was a fun ride especially as I got to ride sideways in the back. We arrived at the camp just in time to meet up with eDOT’er Andrew and our translator, Roman. We then promptly left the camp to pick up fellow GEM’ers Kelly & Nathan who work with the GEM youth team. Finally after some dinner, we made it to the camp and got to go to the opening night ceremony.
Now if it seems like all I’ve talked about is the bad things (did I mention our toilet leaks?), then let me fill in the blanks: on our trip from the airport to the old couples’ home, our driver also picked up a man and his young son. After talking with him, we find out he is one of the organizers of the event and heads up a lot of the stuff happening in Russia. Gordon has been working on a course to help disciple people after they decide to become a Christian and it’s just been translated into Russian. Who better to do a review of the course than this man so we left a copy with him. God ordained? We think so.
Last night at the opening ceremonies, the rows of chairs where we sat only had three chairs per row. Since there were five of us (Nathan stayed back to watch our stuff – well, he actually just slept) there was an open seat. A young woman sat in it and she speaks multiple languages including English, German & Slovak (Kelly lives in Slovakia). As we talked, her church in Kiev is starting an International outreach and invited many of the Baptist churches in Slovakia to a conference in September but were afraid no one was going to come. Kelly, who is a part of a Baptist church, had not heard of the conference and is going to see that the conference gets known in Slovakia. God ordained? We think so.
We’re looking forward to more of the contacts and interactions that we will have over this week. Pray with us as we look for more of these God ordained moments. Pray that we will be bold as most of the people here do not speak the same languages as we do but you never know who might, so we must be bold.

So I’m in Ukraine and let’s just say something didn’t settle well with what I ate our first day here. The nice thing is that there are drug stores everywhere around here. All you do is go into one, tell them your symptoms and they recommend something for you. So out I walked with the bottle shown above. I have no clue as to what it is but it worked. I feel much better. This is extremely different than Germany where you almost have to have a doctor’s prescription for aspirin so it kinda weirded me out.

On another note, please continue to pray. We have had a interesting time here in Ukraine between some sickness (me and another team mate), some interesting roads (I’ll show more of that later), housing situations have been in flux and we have not had as much time as we would have liked to configure our new Mobile Outreach Center than we would have liked. As a matter of fact, the only reason I have Internet right now is because while our team is doing some street ministry in a town north of Kiev on this Ukrainian Holiday, Sasha and I are working diligently to get the computers just ready for our classes that begin tomorrow. Praise God with us that our major hurtles have been overcome and we are now just putting the final touches on the systems.

I will probably not be able to get back online until I return to Germany in just over a week so take care and I’ll update you later.

- Courtney

PS – I did get converse with a young man who is going to be attending our classes this next week. While he is a computer programmer, as he puts it – he has this deep need to hear more about God and he knows that while we are teaching computers, we will also be talking about God. He just came to know about Christ in this last year and I am hoping to talk with him more and more this week.

Thank you to all of you that prayed for us while we were in Ukraine. It was an amazing trip. It was awesome to see and hear how God is working in Ukraine – using technology to train leaders and for outreach purposes.

The first part of our time in Ukraine was an eLearning Center (eLC) Directors meeting. We have over 18 (actually more now but that in a moment) eLCs in Ukraine and most of these eLCs are in churches scattered across the country. eDOT invited those church leaders who are involved in using the eLCs to come to Kiev (Ukraine’s capital) for a time of encouragement, more training on how to use the eLCs more effectively and for them to meet each other. Our goal is that they will be each other’s greatest resources and to hear how each of the centers are being used is just amazing. Some are a part of ministries that are focused on outreaches to orphanages, some are focused on adult education, while others are focused on reaching local ethnic communities. How they use the computers is just slightly different in each context but they were able to share these differences with one another sparking new ideas and excitement. It was just great getting to know these church leaders and to share in their passion to reach Ukraine for Christ.

WARNING: MUCH COMPUTER LINGO USED BELOW

The second part of our time in Ukraine was installing an eLearning Center in Vinnitsa. While this would seem straight forward and easy – it wasn’t. First of all, we weren’t installing our normal eLC. This was a brand new configuration that was to be all Windows based. We had been using Linux for the eLCs but our centers were saying that it was hard to find people to support them and that people were not drawn to come to Linux classes as they see Windows in all the businesses. The reason many want to learn computers is so that they can get jobs that now require them to know computers. So hearing their concerns we are now installing Windows eLCs. So for about a month before we arrived in Kiev, John (an eDOT’er who is raising his support to move to Kiev) and I worked on developing the proper configuration. This was all done in Kandern, Germany using Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro (both in English). We had a configuration that we thought would work pretty well but we never had time to test it. So when we arrive in Kiev, we got to work configuring the computers that our partners in Ukraine had gotten for us.

Problem one: Everything was in Russian. Now we had known going into this that we would be working with Russian on these computers but in my experience with Microsoft, I have always been able to navigate Windows. One thing you can say about Microsoft is that they are consistent. (No more comments from ya’ll about that comment, OK?) Anyway, just a heads up – in Russian, not everything is in the same place.

God’s solution One: God provided Roman. Roman is a computer guy who works at one of the Bible Colleges we partner with in Ukraine. He was at the conference and was an incredible help. He too had developed an all Windows configuration and we were able to use his solution (which he had brought with him using laptops) to go with our solution and he knows both Russian and English so we were able to get through the whole configuration problem.

Problem two: Apparently, Windows Server 2003 doesn’t play well with all motherboards and processors. After three days of getting the configuration of the eLC server put together, we started noticing that it was taking two minutes for the clients to login. While it worked, it meant that there was a problem somewhere and here we were going to install it 250 km from our closest technical people. On top of that, Roman had to go back home. The only thing we could figure out was that the driver for the on-board network card was wrong.

God’s solution two: We took the server back to the place we bought it. When they saw it, they told us that they never should have sold us that box as they knew it wouldn’t work with Windows 2003 Server. It took them a day, but they replace the motherboard and processor with one that they knew worked as a server and loaded Windows 2003 Server for us to verify it worked correctly.

Problem three: We have a server that works but it is in Russian and we still have to reset all of our settings. We know that it would take us at least 24 hours to try and configure it ourselves since we would be doing things almost randomly as we couldn’t read them.

God’s solution three: The translator from our conference (which had ended by this time) was also a computer consultant. He spent four hours with us configuring the server and getting it ready for install. Now we were ready to travel to Vinnitsa to install the eLC. We were only one full day behind the original schedule.

Problem four: When we got to Vinnitsa, we were excited and began setting up the eLC right away. There were a few modifications still to do but we had a translator, Anna, with us who doesn’t know computer lingo that much but she knew how to do literal translations which was all we needed to know what everything was. After another day of setting up the computers and configuring them, loading them with software to be used for outreach and finally doing some serious testing – the eLC was all set and ready to go. All we had to do was train the guys that were going to be running the center. We also wanted to make images of each of the hard drives so that if something went wrong with them, they could just reimage the computers and make them as good as they were right then. So since the guys we were training were running a little late, I decided to go ahead and make an image of the server. I pulled out my trusty Ghost 2003, loaded and proceeded to make an image. When Ghost makes an image, it reboots the computer into a special DOS mode and that’s exactly what it did. However, it did not make an image. As a matter of fact, it didn’t do anything. It would only reboot back into DOS mode. I couldn’t get it to go back to the Windows Server. Of course, that’s when the guys show up to get their training.

God’s solution four: Now, we don’t have Internet access and I am trying everything I can remember from my days with DOS. I am rewriting the autoconfig.bat file, I’m reworking the config.sys file. Yikes, nothing. I turn to one of the other guys and just say “I’m about to lose it!” (Did I mention that I’d been traveling for almost three weeks by now, we were sleeping in a place that had no heat or hot water and the temperature outside was 35 degrees Farhenheit). That’s when we stopped everything and got together as a group and prayed. Afterwards, one of the guys took me to a computer that had Internet access so that I could try and find a solution. Online I found out that Ghost had created a small drive partition that needed to be removed and the original drive partition had to be reinstated as the bootable partition. I also found out that Ghost 2003 does not work with Windows Server 2003. Good information to have after the fact. Anyway, I go back to the eLC to where everyone is and start to try and figure out a way to redo the disk partitions with only being able to boot into DOS (that has no fdisk) I could make bootable floppys – only problem is none of the computers have floppy drives including the server. So I start to use the Windows Server 2003 installation disks hoping as they are bootable that I could get something to work. With these disks, I am able to remove the Ghost partition but now the machine just boots up saying there’s no operating system. I still have to mark the Windows partition as bootable on the hard drive. That’s when I hear behind me some Russian words with “Partition Magic” in the middle of it. This is lifesaving software for me at the moment and I turn around and ask through the translator if they have “Partition Magic”. He says he doesn’t but he could get it. (In Ukraine, any kind of software can be purchased on the streets – labels are hand made if there is a label at all). Another one of the guys turns and says that he has it right there. Now I don’t condone illegal software but I was stressed. I popped the CD in the drive and booted up off of it. I saw a lot of things in Russian but then saw “Partition Magic” and tried to run it. It wouldn’t run. Their version didn’t work with Server 2003 (sounds like theme here). But it did kick me out to a DOS prompt so I decided to see what else was on the CD. The first thing my eyes focused on was “FDISK”. I immediately ran that, made the partition bootable and rebooted the PC. No one had noticed what I had done but they all jumped when I gave a huge scream of excitement at seeing the Windows Server 2003 flash screen that had came up during the boot up sequence.

Needless to say, I didn’t touch the computer again. We did do some more tests and trained the men before having a modified celebration dinner of ordered out pizza and Ukrainian chocolates.

Sorry this is such a long post and that I have not posted in a while. When we came back (which was the very next day from when this all happened), I was sick and its taken me a little bit to recoup. Please enjoy the pictures of our trip which can be found here in our Photo Album. Most of these pictures were from John as I didn’t have a camera with me most of the time.

Talk to you more soon. Now on to the next project……

Above you see a traditional Ukrainian toilet. No, you don’t sit on it! This is how most of the public restrooms are here and honestly, it took me a while to figure out HOW to use them and I’m still not able to really USE them. Unfortunately, I get a leg cramp.

Thank you to all of you who prayed for our eLC Directors Conference that eDOT sponsored this last weekend. There was a great exchange of ideas and it was awesome to get updates from many of the elearning centers and hear more about how God is using their computer ministries within their communities. I hope to share more of these stories later.

Half of our team left today and returned to Germany. There are three of us still in Ukraine as we are working on installing a new configuration of an eLC. In the past, our eLCs have been either all Linux based or part Windows and part Linux. This new configuration is an all Windows based configuration. After spending several days trying to get Windows 2003 Server loaded and configured, we figured out that the server we were using was designed for Linux and will not support Windows 2003 Server. So I am taking this moment to write to ya’ll while our partners here in Ukraine are running the server back for one that will run Windows 2003 Server.

So please pray for us as we are suppose to leave tomorrow for the location to where we are to install this new eLC which is about 300 km from Kiev. We are scheduled to fly back from Ukraine on Friday and so we really need to finish up the configuration tonight (sleep, not needed right? We can sleep in the van on the way there!)

Also pray for our families as this has been a long trip with little communication (we have been in areas without Internet access and what access we have had has been very slow). We are at that point in our trip that we are missing being with our families.

Thank you and God bless. Oh, and remember us the next time you are able to SIT on the toilet.