Tag Archives: cross cultural relationships

How I met my Ukrainian husband

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Our first date in Kiev

 

 

 

 

 

 

How I met my Ukrainian husband

(An excerpt from my memoir about meeting my husband Sergei in Ukraine in 1996.)

Moving to Ukraine

I was twenty years old when I moved to Ukraine. I was still considered a new Christian, which meant that I fervently believed what I believed before the mud of life started to creep up on my squeaky clean faith. I talked to God all the time, like he was all five people in a T-mobile family plan. I was positive he wanted me to be in Ukraine for a year, but I had no clue what I was doing as a missionary. I had never taught before. I still didn’t really know the Bible well.

I didn’t even know Ukraine existed before I was assigned to move there.

I thought it was part of Russia and the only things I knew about Russia was what I gleaned from Rocky IV, like, the women were extremely tall and beautiful, no one smiled, and it was always cold.

The day our plane landed in Kiev, I found my luggage and got through customs. Sergei claims he was one of the first people I met when I got off the plane.

“I was at the airport. I helped you with your bags.” Jet lagged and frightened, I had no idea whom I met that night. All I remember was a cold, dismal airport and men everywhere. Some dressed in dark, pressed airport uniforms, their grim stares swiping over our motley crew of Americans. And others, zipped up in thick, black leather coats and furry shopkas, winter hats made of animal fur, pulled down over their ears.

It was the first week in January, and it was -15 degrees below zero in Kiev.

My teammates and I filed out to an old bus without heat. My eyes burned in desperation for sleep as we drove through the city in the dark. I couldn’t see anything outside the foggy bus window.

The bus stopped. “Gillian, Andrea, this is you,” our team leader Jerry told us. My best friend Andrea from college and I were helped with our luggage and herded into a broken down, old apartment building. We squeezed into a small wobbly elevator that reeked of urine and watched our Ukrainian chaperon hit a floor number. We took the elevator all the way up to the ninth floor. I breathed quietly, willing the decrepit old elevator to make it. When the doors opened we were opposite a huge steel door. Our Ukrainian helper pulled out a set of keys, opened the steel trap door and went to work on the second one; with funky red quilted leather. The apartment door key was old fashioned, starting with an oval shape and ending with two huge notches at the end. It looked like a key that would have been used in the book, Series of Unfortunate Events.

It looked like a key God would use to open the book of life.

We were deposited into the foyer of our new apartment that night. “There’s bread and cheese and juice in the fridge. Stay here and wait for us to call you. We’ll tell you what to do next,” the Ukrainian helper said. The big quilted door closed us in. I heard the key rattle as the steel door snapped shut. I looked at my friend Andrea. She looked at me. We both burst into tears. What had we done? We clung to each other for a few moments in the cold, dark Ukrainian apartment. Instead of being exciting, it felt more like someone had kidnapped us and stuck us there for ransom. God, I did hear you correctly, right? What were you thinking bringing me here?

Moving my heart towards him

My first six months in Kiev, Sergei and I were merely acquaintances. Our team employed interpreters to help us buy food, sight-see, and pay bills and ours was the third group Sergei had worked with, but we worked in different schools.

In the summer the schools and universities were on vacation. Our major project that year was teaching a curriculum on morality and ethics based on the Bible to teachers. So we had to come up with other things to do with our time in June, July, and August. A few of us decided to invite college students to play volleyball on Saturdays at Hydro Park, the beach along the polluted Dnieper River that ran through the middle of Kiev, cutting the city into the left and right bank.

Each Saturday, halfway through our game, we’d take a break. Someone would read a Bible verse and talk about his or her relationship with God, and we’d all sit in the hot sand, sun burned and looking intentional, like we were on the beach that day for God, not a killer spike.

Sergei was the interpreter for our God talks at the beach.

He was very good at translating Russian to English and vice versa, but he was a horrible volleyball player, always claiming that the veter, the wind, caused the volleyball to bounce out of bounds when he hit it. He’d go for a swim in the river and I’d look away, embarrassed, when he’d take off his shirt and shorts. He was painfully skinny, a fact not helped by his choice of tiger print Speedos. Stringy, dirty blond hair hung to his shoulders. We Americans would sit on the beach, hot and sweaty, and watch our Ukrainian friends swim perfect back strokes in the yellow river.

After volleyball, Andrea and I would invite everyone back to my apartment. We’d bake cheesy bread in the oven and make popcorn, a novelty in Kiev at that time, something we had brought with us from the States. We’d eat and pray and talk about Jesus with Ukrainian twenty-somethings who grew up in an atheistic country.

I noticed Sergei a lot at the beach. He was serious and took pride in his country. “I never want to live in America. God has called me here to help my own neighborhood,” he would say confidently. This was amazing to us Americans because most of the people we met that year were enamored with the United States. Sergei wasn’t hanging out with Americans to attain the Utopian lifestyle seen on Dallas reruns dubbed in Russian on television. During meetings and in conversations and prayer, he always put our group’s focus back on what God was doing in Ukraine.

I found myself looking around for him at meetings. It shocked me to catch myself thinking that his focus and pride was sexy. Sexy really wasn’t a word a young missionary should have had in her head. I sat next to Sergei in prayer and batted my stubby eyelashes at him as he translated. He must have noticed my attention, because he started to show up at our apartment to walk me to team meetings.

My attraction to him was fully realized one Saturday morning while he interpreted a study on the New Testament book of John.

After every few sentences, my teammate Jim would stop talking and wait for Sergei to translate his words into Russian. Sergei spoke quickly, and with conviction. That day as he translated, I convinced myself that his clear blue eyes were focused on me.

And they were. I called my mom a few weeks after he and I admitted feelings for one another sitting on a bench outside my apartment building, and after we talked to our team leaders to see if it would be okay if we dated.

“Mom, I have something to tell you.”

“Well, whatever it is, don’t tell me you fell in love with someone named Sergei.”

“Funny you would say that. . .”

Sergei had nothing.

He was three years younger than me. He took showers once a week. His teeth were crooked. He had never owned a dresser for his clothes. I took him out to dinner one night and his hands shook as he ordered his meal because it was the first time he had ever eaten out in a restaurant.

I was raised going to restaurants at least once a week. My dad gave me twenty bucks to blow with my friends every weekend. I had a dresser and a closet full of clothes back home. My mom insisted I took a bath every day.

A few weeks before my year-long assignment was complete, I was sitting on a crowded bus in an aisle seat. Sergei stood next to me, his body shielding me from Ukrainian elbows and knees. His arms were pressed on the back of my seat and the back of the seat in front of me, creating a little dome of protection. By then we had been dating officially for almost four months. I looked up at him and he looked down at me. He smiled his crooked smile and I thought he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. At that moment, I was certain again in my spirit, so strong that it almost was an audible voice, that someday I would be his wife.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my husband. Nearly sixteen years after we met, I am still so thankful for my lousy volleyball player.

What I miss about living in Ukraine

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The Question

Here’s a question from Jill:

I would like to know what thing(s) you most miss about living in Ukraine. We were missionaries in Canada for a short 13 months, yet I find myself longing for the beauty of the Canadian Rockies, the drive from Calgary to Banff, the provincial parks, the cleanliness, the politeness, but most of all …the feeling that we were so completely in God’s hands. Um, not that this is about me.  

The Answer

This is a hard question to answer, Jill. Life is busy these days, but when I sit down and think about what God allowed us to build in Ukraine for four years, I suddenly find myself standing under a waterfall of nostalgia, thankfulness, and sorrow.

I miss (in no particular order):

My family: Sergei’s mom, and his brother, and his dad.

Sergei and I met when I was on a year long mission trip to Kiev my junior year of college. He, and his mom both worked as interpreters and ministry partners with our team. As soon as Sergei and I “got the hots for each other” to put it spiritually :) , his family has accepted me and gently loved me unconditionally.

I miss Ukrainian food, our friends, the church that started in our living room.

I miss grueling Russian lessons with my teacher who became my friend.

I miss the day when Russian clicked, and I joined in and followed conversations.

I miss watching Elaina and Zoya accept the Ukrainian culture as easily as putting on a new outfit to start the day. I miss hearing them chirp away in Russian and my feet on the playground, the sand mixed with dirt and glass outside our apartment building.

I miss rickety elevators that smelled of urine, and the day by day, minute by minute knowledge that I was so totally outside of my comfort zone I could do nothing but cling to Jesus.

And so I did.

I miss the old men sitting outside on the benches in the early morning, some waiting to play a game of chess, some waiting for the liquor stores to open to exchange their empties with full bottles of liquid courage and happiness.

I miss how my friends crammed into two room apartments with their children, and in-laws, and didn’t even bat an eye.

I miss how we would sit around and sing songs and tell jokes for hours, how the meals lasted so long but we didn’t care, b/c there were toasts and smiles, and shots of vodka for those who could stomach it.

I miss seeing God show up in peoples’ eyes for the first time – something I was keyed into in Kiev, something I don’t even expect to see here in the States for some reason.

I miss the Babushki (grandmothers) yelling at me to put a hat on my kids, or zip up their coats, or to stop sitting on the cement ground or else I would become infertile.

I miss my American teammates who became my family. They gave me opportunities to breathe, speak, and laugh in comfort.

I miss the depth of friendships formed with women whom at one point I could not understand both linguistically and culturally.

I miss seeing my husband laugh so hard he would cry at jokes I still don’t quite get, and watching him revert back to his childhood and hoarse around in the kitchen he grew up in with his brother.

I miss having less, but receiving so much more in life that really counts. I miss materialism being cleared away.

I miss losing weight simply by eating natural foods cooked from scratch, and walking everywhere I went.

I miss the architecture.Ii miss the golden-domed Orthodox churches.

You know, we moved back to America six weeks after Polly’s birth. I spent the next year grieving her diagnosis, and then started the difficult work of rebuilding my life.

The only way I could deal with the abrupt change in the road, i.e. not living in Ukraine anymore, was to stuff the pain and loss of the life I had really grown to love, way down deep in my heart.

And yes, when I sit and think about it. It hurts.

I miss Ukraine.

(For those of you who wonder where the heck all this came from, Sergei and I served as missionaries in Kiev for almost four years. We planned to live there indefinitely. We moved back to the States for Polly’s care and early intervention, but then she got Moyamoya syndrome, a stroke and seizure disorder, and now it looks like we won’t be returning to Ukraine.)

Memoir excerpt about worry, Down syndrome and Big Macs

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(The following is a brief excerpt from my book KRASATA, a Memoir of Motherhood, Down Syndrome and Surprising Beauty, a story about the birth of our third daughter in the former Soviet Union while we lived there as missionaries and her diagnosis of Down syndrome.)

The first time I had felt the baby move, I was in the bath, looking down at my cushioned middle. The movement was just a slight flutter. She probably wasn’t any bigger than my finger. I loved taking baths, and when I got pregnant I continued my nightly ritual. I just made sure the water wasn’t too hot. The tub was deep, wide. The warm water swirled, while bubbles of Dove soap popped and fizzled around me. Sounds and smells that were unfamiliar to me were muted by the running water. I would lay in the bath and commune with my unborn child. It was us against the world, protected by the pink, high, Pepto Bismol walls of the bathtub. I was happy there, regardless of loneliness or homesickness or frustration over the Russian language.

Around the time I first felt the baby move, Sergei brought home a few books for me to read. Once in a while he’d stumble across a vendor who sold books in English in an outdoor market in Kiev. Whenever he’d come home with something new, it was like Christmas morning.

One book in the pile caught my eye. Jewel by Bret Lott. The story took place in the backwoods of Mississippi in the 1940s. Based on true events, it was about a woman whose sixth child, Brenda Kay, was born with Down syndrome. I read the book in one sitting, ignoring my husband and kids, my usual practice when I had a new book to read.

I thought about my baby, then a size of a Lima bean, growing inside me. The day I finished the book, I was sitting on the bed in our room. The sun was setting. It was the kind of evening in September when life is hazy. The kids were already in bed, even though it wasn’t dark yet. The air was tinted green.

“I couldn’t do it,” I told Sergei. “I could never be the mother of a child with special needs.” Instantly I wanted to take the words back. There was a life in me, paddling around, growing fingers and toes. God was knitting her together in my womb. What if there was something wrong with this baby?

My mom knits. If I close my eyes, I can still see her sitting in a chair in my childhood home. Already in pajamas at 7 p.m., her hair wet from a bath, a Coke sweating on the side table next to her on top of a flimsy paper napkin. I see her hands moving, click, click, click, click. Sometimes she’d unravel a sweater or a scarf that was nearly done. I didn’t see the point after coming so far to start over because of a few mistakes. “Who wants to wear a sweater with mistakes?” she’d say. Later on in her life, she started to ignore mistakes more often. I guess by then she wasn’t afraid of a little imperfection.

My fears about the pregnancy grew with my stomach. The baby started to move less often. By then we knew she was girl. When she became sluggish, all I wanted was to get on a plane and fly back to the States. I was sure the doctor was missing something. My hands were tied, though. It wasn’t easy to just pick up and go home, and no one else seemed to think anything was wrong. When I’d start to worry, I’d go over the facts with Sergei: the baby is growing steadily, although she is small, I felt her kick every day, my doctor thought everything was okay.

But I’d still ache for a doctor and a hospital back in Michigan. Doctors in the States wouldn’t let anything slide under the radar. I would be able to trust them if they told me the baby was fine. Instead, I was stuck here in Ukraine.

Sergei prayed and I worried and time passed. Somehow, each day I convinced myself I was overreacting. I drank lots of orange juice and spent afternoons lying on my left side on the bed, counting kicks. I’d lay there and cry and at some point almost always felt a soft kick to reassure me of her existence.

And I ate a lot of Big Macs.

Mondays were our family days. We’d pile into our white Ford Focus purchased finally after three years of dragging the kids around town on buses and trains. We’d drive to METRO, an indoor mall in Kiev that housed a huge, modern grocery store and a skating rink, outlined by a dozen fast food places, clothing stores and flower shops.

My pregnancy weight packed on but I didn’t care. Every Big Mac tasted like home. We’d sit right up to the skating rink glass and laugh as beginner skaters flailed around on the solid, slippery surface. Elaina and Zoya were appeased to sit still for a while thanks to vanilla soft serve ice cream cones that dripped on to their shirts.

A couple times Sergei took the girls skating. I’d sit alone with my Big Mac and my third little daughter quiet and still inside me and giggle as they crept along, the three of them joined together by locked hands, digging their blades sideways in the ice to move forward. A chord of three strains isn’t easily broken it says in the Bible. Not so for my family. They’d fall on the ice and I’d laugh until I tasted my tears.

(Leave a comment and tell me if/why you think my book should be published. Seriously, I need the love today. Oh, and I will pick a random winner on Friday, March 2nd, my birthday, and send you Jewel by Bret Lott. Beautiful, beautiful novel and my premonition of Polly.)

(Also, for those of who so kindly have said you wanted to read more of my story, check out my post Moving my heart towards him, another excerpt from my memoir about meeting my husband Sergei in Ukraine in 1996 when I took a year off from college.)