Friday, September 10, 2004

Summer Fun

September 10, 2004

Time flies when you're having fun, and we have been having loads of it!! We grilled shashlik (shish kabobs) on the beach with dear friends, walked through Kiev at midnight to hear the bells of St. Michael's play the national anthem, and paddled our hearts out on the Dnepr River with family.
We spent one glorious week in Kiev, Ukraine, visiting a good friend and missionary, Natasha Shure. We were so blessed to visit her and Vicky, her housemate and ministry co-leader. We also had the double delight of spending a few days with my sister Ruth and her family just leaving the Ukraine after 10 days of ministry in the south. What a much needed time of refreshment and blessing.

Then back to St. Petersburg where my clinic had finally moved into its new home under a new name. We went from a one story outpatient clinic with 8 exam rooms to a full 6 story hospital, 20 exam rooms, and 30 inpatient beds, operating theaters, diagnostic centers, a full floor of dentistry. Talk about bouncing around an empty can. Our poor little staff of 100 full time workers felt really lost. Of course the clinic forgot to order enough supplies to fill all those exam rooms, so we were running from one floor to the next in sharing our pulse oximeter, ECG machine. We didn't even have enough basic supplies to stock our outpatient clinic. It took a week before we could really say we were ready. But the floors looked beautiful in their Italian marble and the 5 story vaulted atrium where our reception is located was absolutely breathtaking.

And then of course was the exciting discovery that we are expecting another little Bogott sometime mid April. This has truly been a summer of many blessings.

Aaron has been working hard in a new project taken on by Jensen Group, to lease close to 900,000 square feet of storage and factory space for a company situated outside the city. He spends 3 to 4 days traveling to this site and has not been getting home before 8pm. It has been difficult and extremely wearing on him. My prayer is that he leases the space quickly and gets back to his regular work schedule at Jensen. Of course with an active
21 month old and another on the way, poor Aaron gets an exhausted wife to greet him when he does get home.

Timothy continues to grow - at an alarming rate - and now falls in the 110 percentile for his height and 120 percentile for his weight. That means he is really big for his age J. Most people walk up to him chatting to him in Russian and are somewhat surprised that he chats back in baby-talk as he looks like a three year old. He walks around the house with a phone attached to his ear, sometimes two, and babbles away at "Baba, Papa, Mama, or whoever it takes his fancy to hold a conversation with. I listen to him in amazement at his long involved conversations and exclamations and wish I could understand his special language. He certainly must have something interesting to tell.

In ministry, we continue to meet the needs, especially medical, of those who God leads us to. Aaron and I have helped several families in crisis' pay their medical bills as well as see some of my clinic's physicians at a reduced price. I continue to give medical advice over the phone as different missionaries or Russian friends call with various ailments or health questions. This week I gave a presentation to a group of foreigners who had just arrived in the city for a stay of one or more years. We discussed health issues in Russia, vaccinations needed, quality of health care, food, drinking water etc. The U.S. Consulate asked me to take a job with them as their nurse, but I had to decline as they were also asking me to pay for my own work visa as well as the cost of procuring it - close to a
thousand dollars. All in all it has been a busy summer and fall with more
and more being added to our plate.

One of my greatest joys has been leading worship in our church one Sunday a month. More and more people have been joining our team and now we have a full team with two to three guitars, a drum set, and four singers. Aaron and I bought a case for the electric piano he bought me and we have been hauling it back and forth to the church when it is our time to lead worship.

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