Remembering Our Trips to Ukraine

One of the more interesting and rewarding things that our family has done is to make friends with the Drozd family in Lazarivka, Ukraine. Back in 1992, Valeska answered an ad looking for penpals for Christians in the former Soviet Union. She began corresponding with Natasha Drozd, an English teacher in a small village. Their familiy consists of Natasha, her husband Viktor, and their children Dima and Ulia.

We have traveled to visit them three times, in 1998, 2000 and 2005. There is nothing quite like spending time with a family to get to know a country. The hospitality that we received was unbelievable. When we first visited in 1998, we were often the first Americans had met in person. They opened their homes to us and we divided our time between sightseeing and dinners that ran late into the night.

The language barrier was not that much of a problem. Of course, Natasha speaks excellent English since her profession is teaching that language. Over the years, Dima and Ulia have become strong English speakers as well. We were able to talk to Viktor a bit in German. Val and I both took German in high school and Viktor learned some while he was stationed in East Germany during his mandatory service in the Red Army. The fact that none of us were that strong in German meant that we had to fumble around for the right word some of the time, but we were able to get the idea across most of the time.



Here are a few photos from 2000. I didn't have a very good digital camera on that trip, so I wasn't able to get very many pictures. I took a lot of video which I will try to convert to digital some day.



Our most recent trip in 2005 was the most emjoyable because the children were old enough to travel well and to fend for themselves much of the time. Kristen and Stephanie spent many hours playing outside with the neighborhood children and going to their homes. They learned how to milk a cow, while their friends learned how to play Gameboy.

I took a lot of pictures on our last trip. With the help of Kristen's friend Catherine, I have combined them into a movie that I uploaded onto Youtube. These photos cover home life in and around Lazarivka and trips to Zhytomir and Kyiv. I have used the Ukrainian spelling of these cities rather than the more familiar Russian version of Kiev.



Our children have grown up together around these trips. In 2000, Dima was 10, Kristen was 8 and Stephanie and Ulia were 5. In 2005, Dima was 15, Kristen was 12 and Stephanie and Ulia were 10. Today, Dima is 18 and will be starting his second year at the university in Kyiv. Ulia is now 13. Here is a current picture of them.