MY LAST BLOG ENTRY

Saying good-bye to some of our dear friends in UkraineMarina, Deema, Ilia

Anya, sweet Anya

Fellow missionaries

Marina, Nastia, Olga, Vitaly, Sister Fry and President Fry

When one door closes........................................................................

another one opens...........................

 Our family greeting us at the airport in Sacramento

I'm sitting here looking at this blog thinking about updating it a bit and I just can't bring myself to change one thing about it. This blog contains more than words and pictures. I started writing the blog as a way to communicate to our friends and family what we were doing in Ukraine, but I soon found myself sitting at the computer sometimes daily pouring out my heart.Today as I sit and visit with friends here in America and they ask about Ukraine. I find myself tearing up as I speak of the people I have come to love. The girl who I initially referred to in my blog as our interpreter who we now call our Ukrainian daughter, Olga, the 16 year-old Anya who stole my heart and her cousins, Nastia, Marina, and Ilia, the women at church who I called my sisters, our amazing branch president and his counselors.My friends ask me how it was to see so much pain and suffering. They ask how we dealt with it. My answer is this blog. I just came home and wrote about it. Sometimes the feelings were too much to keep inside and I just had to get it out and this is where I went. I didn't think so much about who would be reading it I just wrote. I wrote about the adjustment to living in a foreign country. I wrote about how hard it was to leave our family and know that we would be gone for so long. I wrote about the things we saw that broke my heart, the children who lived on the streets, the babies in orphanages, the beggars who were often old ladies, the elderly people who were abandoned and left in shelters. I wrote about the appalling way that handicapped people were treated. I wrote of the shocking conditions of the hospitals and orphanages.That is how I coped with seeing so much pain. I wrote about it.

But our mission was so much more than all of that. I wrote about that too. I wrote about the amazing spiritual experiences we were having. I wrote about the wonderful young men and women we were serving with. I wrote about our Mission President's and their wives and how much we admired and loved them. I wrote about how my testimony of Jesus Christ was growing. I wrote about the things I was learning about myself and how Ukraine was transforming me. I wrote about how much I love my husband and the blessing he is to me.

Today will be my last entry in THIS blog, it is time to turn a new page, or maybe to begin a new journey. I will be starting a new blog. It may not be as fascinating or interesting as life in Ukraine but it will continue to be the place I go to pour out my heart.It will be filled with the magical moments of being a wife, mother and Nana home again in America..........................................

I want to close by thanking you, our friends and family who became followers of our blog. As I said I didn't always write with you in mind but I know that your words of encouragement helped us through the difficult times. I will be forever grateful for the love that we felt from you thoughout our journey in Ukraine. To you parents of missionaries who lifted me with your love, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your words were often the balm I needed to face another difficult situation. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for your love and support.