HELLO FROM RUSSIA #3 ==================== E-Mail from John Zaitseff. Friday, 17th August, 2001 Greetings in the Name of Jesus! I pray that you are going well, by God's almighty grace. This is my third e-mail from Russia, written on Thursday 16th August, and I trust that it will keep you up-to-date with what is happening during my time in Russia. As you will recall, I finished my last e-mail with our leaving "Zvyovdochka" on Thursday 19th July. So much has happened since then, in the last four weeks! I am, in fact, writing this e-mail from Khabarovsk, some 8,500 km from Moscow. St. Petersburg is a beautiful place to visit, and my brother and I spent a few days after the camp just looking around the city. On the Thursday of leaving camp, for example, we went to Peterhof, the summer palace of Czar Peter the Great. Nothing, by the way, works to plan (at least, our plan) in Russia, and we only arrived there at 1pm, some five hours after setting out. However, the sight of hundreds of fountains and waterfalls, all working by gravity, was, I think, worth the wait. I was also able to see, this time around in St. Petersburg, the Church of the Spilt Blood and the Alexander Nevskiy Lavra. My brother and I were blessed by being able to stay in St. Petersburg at a friend of a friend's place. Christian fellowship is so valuable, and it was indeed pleasant to be able to get to know Rinat Saadetdinov and spend some time with him, as well as with some of his friends. We were also able to attend Rinat's church on the Sunday, as well as the Christian ship "LOGOS II", visiting St. Petersburg for the second time this year. Being able to get to know some of the crew of the "LOGOS II" was a particular highlight for me. I was able to take the whole of Saturday 21st July off to visit the camp I attended last year, "Baltica". This involved a train trip of an hour and a half, as well as a half hour of meandering around Vaskelovo, trying to find the camp. I managed to arrive just as the Australian team was finishing breakfast. It was so good to meet with my old team mates, Kyleigh Russel and Rodger van Duyn, as well as with the rest of the team in "Baltica" this year. It was just as good to meet with some of the children that I got to know last year. It felt so pleasant to be remembered---some of the children came running up with shouts of "Vanya!", and many were disappointed that I was not staying in their camp this time around. Although it was a hard decision for me to make, I believe I made the right one, based on what the Lord wanted. In general, I most definitely recommend going to the same camp each year, as the continuity of friendships does play a significant role. An overnight train trip saw my brother and I in Moscow. We spent a few days in the capital of Russia, independently meeting with some of the church leaders and seeing some of the tourist attractions. My brother managed to see inside the Kremlin; the day I went, however, it was closed. Such is Russia! I did, however, manage to see inside the famous St. Basil's Cathedral and the newly rebuilt Temple of Christ the Saviour. One needs a lot of patience when travelling in the former Soviet Union. I think I amply demonstrated this by waiting some seven hours at the Novosibirsk Railway Station for my friends to pick me up, and this after a 48-hour train journey, mostly across the flat-lands of Siberia! One thing I am slowly learning, however, is that my plans and God's plans are not necessarily the same. And this means that I need to adapt my plans to match those of the Lord's! Novosibirsk is not, in itself, a destination to rank highly on any tourist's itinerary. For me, however, the city has a most definite appeal: I lived here for three months in 1998, after all, and made many friends in various churches. And it was excellent to meet many of them this time around. In particular, it was good to spend time with Mann Nguyen, a Vietnamese friend I made the last time I was in the city, as well as with the group of Christians that consistently meets together every week (apart from, that is, the usual Sunday service). I was even able to spend a couple of days at a "dacha", usually a small house outside the city, and take part in a traditional Russian "banya"! I was also able to visit the Covenant Church (part of the Union of Evangelical Christians Pentecostals of Russia), the traditional Pentecostal Church, the Church of Siberia (a church started by a Korean missionary) and the Korean Presbyterian Church. All in all, I spent just over a week in Novosibirsk, from Sunday 29th July to Monday 6th August. Travelling on the train over vast distances does have its advantages. As the saying goes, "the natives are very friendly". I am sure that the fact that I was from Australia and that I could speak Russian fairly fluently had something to do with it! In any case, I made a number of friends on the next stage of my journey, from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. The four (small) albums of photos from Australia (all taken by your's truly) definitely came in handy here; the photos I included of our church and of my water baptism were also good conversation starting points. Although I hoped to spend about a week in Irkutsk (with visits to Lake Baikal thrown in for good measure), my plans changed (again!) when I met Ivan Marchuk, the principal of the Irkutsk Theological College, part of the Bible Institute in Russia, and with Victor Artyushin, the pastor of one of the churches in Irkustk. It so transpired that most of the church and college was either on holidays, at a Youth camp in the next city, or about to go to a wedding to be held in a village near Lake Baikal. And so these men kindly invited me to travel with them to a wedding in a place I had never heard of and between two people I had never met! Travelling to the wedding in the village of Kamensk involved a rough ride of about 300 km over the main road (now you know why most people do not travel long distances by bus or car in Russia!). However, the fact that the route lay over some quite scenic mountains and past the awe-inspiring Lake Baikal more than made up for any discomfort experienced. After the wedding, a fairly simple affair between two young members of the local church in Kamensk, we made our way to legendary Ulan-Ude. The fact that this city has been and is a meeting place between eastern and western cultures is especially visible in the Buddhist temples scattered around the place. Here is where I met Pastor Michael Koval and his family. And not only his family, but his church (a small congregation of around 70 people at this time) as well. One highlight of my time with Michael was travelling with him and with his team to Novokizhinginsk, a large village some 250 km (and some three and a half hours over very poor dirt roads) to the east. This they have been doing every week for the past month, starting a church where one (of any kind) had never been before. I had the privilege of preaching on Romans 12:1-2 to this church of about 40 people, mainly children, teenagers and older women. And now I can at least partly understand why Apostle Paul wanted to reach those who had never heard the Word of God before... To start something totally new, to see people who had never had any contact with God previously start to live a new life! I would certainly like to be involved in something like that! Incidently, we arrived back home at 3am... to think that the team from Ulan-Ude does this every week, as there is no-one yet able to nurture that church living in Novokizhinginsk itself. The longest stretch I have had to travel thus far by train was from Ulan-Ude to Khabarovsk on train 54, departing on Monday 13th August. And when I consider the fact that this train was from Kharkov in the Ukraine and some passengers had already been travelling for six days and nights and had a further four days and nights' travel to Vladivostok, my own odessy of 50-odd hours pales in comparison. Perhaps this also explains why I found it harder to make new acquaintances on this train... Unfortunately, I also fell ill from something I ate, with vomiting and diarrhea to match. And so I arrived in Khabarovsk at 3am on the morning of Thursday 16th August, feeling rather sorry for myself. Praise God, however, there was someone there to meet me at the station---I did not have to wait there overnight! Andrei Truhanov took me into his house and family, made me feel welcome and allowed me to have the rest I so desperately needed. I am still not quite over my illness as I type this, so please keep me in your prayers! This will probably be my last e-mail from Russia---it took some six hours to think through and type, by the way. Lord willing, I will be leaving Khabarovsk tomorrow, Saturday 18th August, and arriving in Vladivostok on the Sunday. My plane flies out of Vladivostok on Tuesday 21st August, and I arrive back in Sydney on Korean Airlines flight KE811 on Thursday 23rd August, at 6:55am. Feel free to come and meet me, if you so wish! Until we meet again, the Lord bless you and keep you, and make His face to shine upon you. Yours in Christ, John Zaitseff -- John Zaitseff ,--_|\ The ZAP Group Phone: +61 2 9543 6448 / \ Sydney, Australia E-mail: J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au \_,--._* http://www.zap.org.au/ Finger: john@zap.org.au v GnuPG fingerprint: 8FD2 8962 7768 2546 FE07 DE7C 61A8 4486 C9A6 69B0