Widow’s Gathering Update
As you may know, people are continuing to catch COVID-19 in Kyiv. Therefore, we are doing our best to create maximum safety in our meeting environment for our widows, especially during their weekly gatherings on Thursdays.
In July we have been implementing a new practice of dismissing people after the Bible lesson. However, getting everyone to create a nice line for food voucher distribution hasn’t been working. So we had to get a little innovative.
As soon as Sasha gets to the Blue Church, he makes sure the conditioner is on in the meeting place for maximum air filtration. At the beginning of every lesson, Dr. Vadim makes the necessary announcements regarding heat precautions. And Lena assures us that this is indeed one of the hottest summers she can remember. At the end of the lesson, we dismiss our pensioners row by row. Pastor Ruslan came up with a great idea to show them some wonderful documentaries about nature (the most recent ones were about American butterflies) to help pass the time as they wait for their row to be dismissed.
Recently we came up with a new idea that we tried: a Bible quiz! Lena read a question, for example, "Who was the first surgeon mentioned in the Bible?" Then a person is to raise his/her hand if they think they know the correct answer. If the answer is correct, the whole row this person is sitting in is dismissed right away.
It was fun! Sergey K. put all the questions on the screen to help people focus and Lena would give them a further explanation of the answer if it was needed while we were waiting for Sasha to give us the green light to dismiss another row. Igor Z. was watching carefully which pensioner raised their hand first to answer. When the explanation of the answers was not needed, guess what our pensioners were doing? A couple of ladies would come forward to recite their poetry. Some of them are wonderful poets and two ladies sang songs they composed.
