You will remember reading Brother Alan Eyre's fascinating account in the November 1992 Christadelphian of how, accompanied by Brother Victor Sluczewski, he visited two places in The Ukraine which are of special significance to us (read articles from The Bible Missionary and The Christadelphian). One was the ruins of the Bible Academy built at Kiselin in the 17th century by the Brethren in Christ escaping from persecution in Poland and finding refuge there. The other, closer to our own time, was the area around Shchors where Brethren Dubrovsky and Danilchenkov preached the Word in the 1930s and for a brief time established Christadelphian communities in several villages, until they were broken up by the Soviet authorities. On that occasion the local people asked Alan to come back again; their appeal was endorsed by the CBM and arrangements were put in hand.

A team with a distinctly international flavour assembled at Gatwick on 19 July:

Alan Eyre from Jamaica, Abigail Brooks from Glasgow, Kerry Cort from the USA, Steve Cox from Korea and Mark Vincent from Scarborough. All except me had some linguistic, scholarly or family connection with The Ukraine, and at our destination, Kiev's.Borispol Airport, the final member of the team, Victor Sluczewski from Russia joined us. We were supplied with 10,000 copies of a leaflet in Ukrainian, a translation of the one used in Prague last year, 1,000 copies of a specially written booklet in Ukrainian by Brother Alan entitled The Original Gospel Comes to The Ukraine, and some other items of literature in Russian.

That we got even thus far was in part the result of the help provided by a number of brethren and sisters in overcoming such practical problems as obtaining the necessary visas. Mention must also be made of the help given by two contacts in Prague, Olga and Milos Bednar. Olga, who is Ukrainian, translated the leaflet for us, while Milos had it printed in Prague and then carried all 10,000 with him when he followed Olga to Kiev in June! We were also most grateful to Vladimir and Ludmilla, two friends of Victor in Kiev, who accommodated all seven of us for a night in their modest flat!

The outline plan, which we kept to more or less, was to have a base at Kiev and from there to make forays to Kiselin in the west and Shchors in the north-east, devoting the remaining time to billing, visiting correspondence-course contacts, and investigating possibilities for future work. Accordingly, after what seemed endless preparations and negotiations, we set out on Thursday 22 July for Kiselin, a 600-km. journey in an elderly Lada and an even older Moskvitch, with a driver/mechanic in attendance. Whether cars for the home market are fitted with extra special heavy-duty springs and shock absorbers I do not know, but those two rode every pothole without murmuring, and once we had stopped them boiling by adjusting the ignition to the grade of petrol they were drinking, these twenty-year-old cars performed very well.

At our first destination, Lokachi, the mayor himself took over arrangements for the talk on the Saturday evening. He cancelled the cinema show in our favour, had two posters hand-printed and would have presided himself, had not other duties prevented him. Similarly in the smaller village of Kiselin, the mayor personally summoned the village to attend, and the audience was only limited by the fact that we were in the middle of harvest, and after torrential rains the previous day, all active bodies were wanted in the fields. However, we spoke to twenty-four and twenty-eight people respectively, and some lively discussion followed.

The journey back to Kiev was not without incident. We took separate routes because we wanted to call on a student at Ostrozhets, a hamlet some twenty miles from Kiselin, on the way back. Both cars had been filled up, but the Lada, which had been locked in the police compound all night, was mysteriously empty. It was 'Border Guard Day' and such filling stations as existed were closed for the holiday. The problem was solved by our student Eugene Polishchuk, who, after praying for success, approached another villager who, he said, might have some petrol. Our predicament was explained and forty litres of petrol went into the tank. He would not hear of any payment, but accepted the Bible which we gratefully offered him. The Moskvitch had allegedly developed clutch trouble and the driver insisted that repairs were necessary. After six hours' work, in which no new clutch plate was noticeably fitted, the driver asked for $250 which, it was surmised, included a considerable backhander for him. A receipt was insisted upon, and to their credit the car-hire firm repaid this in full when we returned to Kiev.

Kerry Cort picked up a virus infection and spent three days in Lokachi hospital, where he received skilled and devoted attention from the doctors and nursing staff in that order. At our insistence they accepted $100 for services rendered, and he was well enough to visit Kiselin on the Sunday morning before we left and also catch his plane back on the Monday as scheduled.

At this point the team divided, Alan, Victor and Mark going to Shchors and the nearby village of Chepilev, and the others staying in Kiev. The travellers contacted the chief citizen as before, who arranged for a talk to be given to an audience of fifty and then entertained the visitors to a banquet which continued, so I am told, until the small hours of the next morning. The willingness of the people to attend after some modest canvassing in heavy rain augurs well for future work here. The people admitted that they had no experience of the Bible but were ready to give it a hearing. The wooden church at Chepilev, which for a few glorious years had been a Christadelphian Meeting Room, was visited and found to be empty and in a sad state of repair, but apparently sound and capable of restoration.

The base party at Kiev moved out of the Borispol Airport Hotel and into an apartment in the city for the remaining week. The charge for one week would have paid the rent for a year for an average tower-block flat, but it was a considerable reduction on hotel rates. Ukrainian and Russian Bibles were bought one by one from street book stalls and the Cathedral (strictly speaking they are for Ukrainians only) and despatched, together with the Russian translation of Bible Basics, to our interested friends. We completed the distribution of the handbills in the streets. Some impatience was detected, which we put down to the fact that Kiev is currently suffering from a surfeit of evangelism, and there were a few aggressive protests, but on the whole the leaflets were accepted courteously. It was common to see people going away reading them once they realized they were written in Ukrainian, and quite a few stopped to ask who we were and what they were about.

The last hours were spent looking at some of the more remarkable parts of the city: the shops, the monastery and the houses in the cobbled streets of the old city. We all felt grateful that we had been given this experience which confirmed to us the importance of this work and our duty to spread the Word as widely as we can before the Lord returns.

One particular moment I will always remember. At our first meeting at Kiselin for considered reasons we had not asked those present to stand for the opening prayer, but as we approached the end, a little old lady stood up and made the suggestion that as we were talking about God and His Word, would it not be right for us all to stand and seek His blessing? There was a murmur of agreement and, suitably chastened but inwardly uplifted, we joyfully complied with her request.

DAVID WHITEHOUSE

"I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south. Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, every one who is called by my name, whom I created/or my glory, whom I formed and made. "—Isaiah 43:6-7 RSV