This morning we left the Good Samaritan Ministry's Community Centre in Pulin for the last time. To commemorate the visit of our all Canadian tour group, I built an inukshuk in their flower garden (see pic). There just happened to be some rocks there, not very artistically arranged. It was a 2.5 hour ride to Kiev on mostly a four lane highway, but very bumpy. Definitely overdue for resurfacing. In Kiev our first stop was a place with many street vendors selling...

First thing this morning we saw some of the sights of Pulin (the German name). This is the small city where we're staying, at the Community Centre run by Don Miller's ministry. Like most cities/towns in Ukraine, there's still a statue of Lenin, and a monument of some sort commemorating the soldiers who died in WW2. In Pulin there was also a Russian tank that we got Liz to climb on top of for pictures. We then visited two operating farms. One was in a sorry state,...

This was a very long day on the road, that is if you can call some of the cow paths we travelled on a road. Left at 8:30 am and didn't get back until 11:00 pm. For the first 2.5 hours we travelled west on a relatively good highway that's in the process of being four laned. Polish Volhynia is the area that became Polish territory in about 1922. The general state of the housing etc. appears to be slightly better than in Russian Volhynia, where we're staying, but st...

This morning we went to church at the Ukrainian Baptist Church in Neudorf. Neudorf was the name of the village when the Germans settled here. It now has a different name in Ukrainian (as does Heimtal). The church in Neudorf was established by German Baptists in the 1860s and was the mother church of numerous other Baptist churches in Volhynia. The present building (see pic) was built in 1907. Since we know Grandma Bartz was Baptist, we think there's a good chanc...

Today was mainly Jim's day. We visited Cholosno where his family lived until they came to Canada in 1928. But on the way we also stopped in Tschernigov where Cathy's grandfather was born, and spent a bit of time in the market there. In Cholosno things got really interesting. Through a few inquiries of several locals, we once again were led to an older German man, although he no longer spoke German. His name was Ivan. He said he was nine years old when his family ...