Starting

A bigger room this year.  Over 76 students waiting in eager anticipation.  Dignitaries from the President of the Institute to Igor Kozlovski (more on him later) prepared to open the five day seminar.  A team that has been getting ready for the past six months for this exact moment. A small prayer and we all walk into the room.  Time to get started.  No more planning; now it is time for action!

The facilities have been reserved.  Local support is in place.  The team is prepared and ready.  Time to put all the planning into action!  The second annual seminar on the importance of personal character in business,  sponsored by the College of Business Administration (COBA) at  Harding University, the Donetsk State Institute of Artificial Intellect (Institute) and Eastern European Missions (EEM) is about to start.

They are motivated to be here to learn something more about the United States' economic model that has been so successful in the world.  They are searching for something other than the old ideologue under which their country has struggled for so long.  They want a word of encouragement about their future.  Most do not have a personal relationship with God, but they know that communism has failed them miserably.  They are seeking hope.

The Team

At the beginning of the fall semester, eight students made a commitment to raise the $2000 each for the trip to Donetsk.  In addition, three Christian professionals were brought on board to participate in the seminar.  We assembled a very eclectic group from Eastern Europe, Central America, Asia and the U.S.  The following students and professionals made the trip:

Students

Karen Anzueta Gutierrex                    Republic of Guatemala

Jason Yeo Balota                               Republic of Singapore

Diana M. Green                                  U.S.A. (Virginia)

Sofika Londo                                               Republic of Albania

Luis Francisco Rivera                         Republic of Costa Rica

Darwin Isaac Romero                         Republic of El Salvador

Greg P. Seiders                                   U.S.A. (Rhode Island)

Alida Shehaj                                       Republic of Albania

Professionals

Shirley Austin                                   U.S.A. (Florida)

Budd H. Hebert                                 U.S.A. (Arkansas)

Carol Kell                                         U.S.A. (Arkansas)

Tom Phillips                                     U.S.A. (Alabama)

By the end of the journey, this amorphous group became very close.  The young men conducted devotionals every morning after breakfast before traveling to the Institute.  Three of the young men had never conducted a devotional prior to this trip!  Tom led us in a worship the second Sunday we were on the trip each member of the team was asked to discuss the high point of the campaign for themselves.  Some very poignant stories were shared that morning, inspirational to each of us!

Almost all of the team caught a cold on the trip and one spent a morning in the hospital in Donetsk.  Another of our members spent the entire Moscow trip in bed with a virus!  We will have to prepare for such contingencies better next year!

Everyone agreed that this was an extraordinary opportunity to testify for God.  We all discovered emotions and feelings we did not realize that we would have.  Several want to come again next year!

The Trip

After almost 30 hours of travel our team arrived in Donetsk.  Our international diversity in the team members caused no small amount of delay in coming through passport and immigration control at both the Moscow and Donetsk airports.  We had a two hour delay in Moscow and we were the last people out of the airport at Donetsk late Thursday night of March 13^th!

 But, after being greeted by Natasha, of Blogovest,  Nickolai, the preacher of a local church of Christ, and eating a McDonalds, we were able to check into our hotel for a night's rest.  Home for the next seven days would be a sanatorium located on the south side of Donetsk.  The students were immediately at home, for the accommodations were reminiscent of dormitories back at Harding maybe a bit more Spartan.  

Arrangements had already been made by Igor for us to meet at 8:30 on Friday morning for an orientation with faculty and students at the Institute.  That was then.  Now it was time for some horizontal sleep!  (airplane and airport sleeping is not restful!)

Preliminaries

So!  On Friday morning we were greeted by the Institute van for our first daily ride to work!  The morning was spent looking at the meeting room (a new and bigger room for us this year!),

checking on the equipment that would be needed (overhead projector for which we burned out two bulbs over the course of the seminar!), locating printed materials (some of which arrived on a just in time? basis!!), and finding our  gathering room (Igor Kozlovsky?s office became our rest area, our lunch room, and our logistics office!).

 At 1:30 we were to meet with a group of the students who would be participating in the seminar. 

So! We broke for lunch, taking several of the staff that we would be working with while in Donetsk.  This included Dasha Averianova and Angela Ananyeva, our trusty translators.  Lunch was ordered in a new eatery located immediately up the street from the Institute.  Little did we realize, when ordering, that time was not a constraint to the cooks or waitresses when getting the food to the customers!  So!  Budd met with the faculty and the students while the crew tried desperately to finish lunch! 

Later in the day some of us participated in the ?Scientific-Practical Conference, Spiritual and Social Relevance of the Activity of the Churches and Religious Organizations in the World and Ukraine. This conference was held at the Institute.  Prior to the conference. In this picture, our Harding team had the opportunity to have pictures taken with one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Igor's office.

That evening the Harding crew, together with their translators had dinner at the Lions Inn, an Irish restaurant.  A good time was had by all and the food, though not Ukrainian, was delicious.  And, we drank a lot of bottled water you have to stay away from tap water here as in many places in Europe.

 On Saturday we took a tour of the city of Donetsk.  This was conducted by faculty from the Economics department of the Institute.  We had the occasion to see WWII memorials (the entire city was leveled by the Germans during their Russian campaign meaning that the entire city dates only to WWII!), to visit a historical museum that depicted life in the area, and walk through an outdoor market in which art was displayed for sale (temperature was in the mid twenties during our viewing and purchasing of art in the park!).  Some of us got to witness a chess match played outside in 20 degree weather with no great urgency to complete (no one was going to freeze plenty of antifreeze in the audience!!). 

The view overlooking the river was great and everyone wanted to participate!

After the tour we all went to a well known restaurant that had a very distinctive Ukrainian flavor to it!  Most of the food was wild meat prepared in one form or another.  The restaurant  It's called the Chinook.  A good time to get to know the faculty with whom we would be working during the upcoming week.  These are very generous and giving people's their students (our students in the seminar) reflect this generosity in their own lives.

Worship

On Sunday we worshipped with the Cup of Life congregation located in the center of Donetsk.

This church of about 30 to 40 members many of them students at the Institute is anchored by Igor Kozlovsky.  This man, a former Deputy Minister of the Philosophy and Religion Department of the Federal Government, is a mainstay to the work of the church in Donetsk.  The church meets in a former flat (apartment) that was purchased, renovated and given to the church for their meeting place by one of the members.  They prepared a uniquely Ukrainian meal for us.  We all spent the afternoon eating and talking and sharing Christ!  A delightful day!

Here is a picture of some of the singers in the congregation (the preacher, Nickolai, is a musician and uses his talent as a means for reaching out to Institute students' he has a choral group that performs and who have recorded some music!). Maxim, on the right and Denis, on the left with Nickolai and Jason in the middle.  Alida is on the far left (both Jason and Alida were part of the Harding team.

Touring

Here are some of the students at McDonalds!  -------In Donetsk!!------ 

That evening we all met back at the sanatorium to prepare for the coming events of the week.  It was a good weekend to get to know some of the people with whom we would be working and, especially, to worship with the church!

The Seminar

On Monday morning at 8:30am we started the seminar.  The opening included talks by Anatoly Shevchenko, President of the Institute, Igor Kozlovsky, Docent of the Institute, Alaxender S. Zvenigorodsky, Dean of the Economics Faculty at the Institute, Victoria Murashko, Associate Dean of the Economics Faculty at the Institute, and Tanya, Veronica and Natasha, faculty of the International Economics Program at the Institute.  Gifts were presented on behalf of COBA and EEM to each of the dignitaries.  Once roll call was taken we discovered that we had 76 students participating in the seminar, up from 51 last year!

We immediately divided the entire class into groups of about ten students and assigned one of our Harding team to each group.  The relationships between the students became very close over the duration of the seminar.  In this picture Karen, from the Harding group, with her trademark sweatshirt, is involved with her team on opening day.  Before the end of the seminar, the girls had bought Karen a hat and taught her how to wear it they developed a very close relationship with one another, Karen attending their rehearsal session and they accepting an invitation to a Tuesday night Bible study at the Cup of Life church!

The sessions on Monday consisted of lectures and exercises that brought thought and personal character together.  Emphasis was placed upon their seeing the importance of shaping thoughts, for it is these thoughts that shape our character.  The students were asked to talk about their friends and to write down seven reasons this person is very close to them.  We wanted them to start to see the character in their friend and relate that to their friendship with them.  After the morning session they were asked to write down actions and activities they do every day and to ?see? how these actions affect their intellect.  The students found this difficult to do, but also revealing.

This was the start of our lunch sessions in Igor's office.  Finger food was brought to his office and we shared it with students and faculty.  In this picture several of our Harding students are having lunch with some of the Institute students at Igor's conference table.

That night this group had dinner at ?Sun City? a pizza restaurant.  The students had already been invited by the Institute students to have dinner with them.

On Tuesday we opened the seminar by presenting each of the students with a Bible written in Russian.  We then proceeded to make use of the Bible by showing the students the actual scriptural references that were used in the seminar.  They were directed to the page in the Bible from which a scriptural reference was used in the class, so that they could see that the quotations used in the seminar material came directly from the Bible.  This procedure was repeated several times throughout the seminar.  The seminar sessions focused upon them beginning to understand themselves better to see themselves as creatures made in the likeness of God himself.  Later in the day we discussed published studies that provided better insight into who we are and how we absorb information from the world surrounding us. 

The students were again asked to undertake a series of written exercises.  Specifically we wanted them to see the connection between their thinking and their actions.  At the close of the session they were asked to write their own obituary.  We wanted them to think about goals, visions and tasks they see themselves accomplishing in their lives.

That afternoon the ?older? folks on the Harding team (Budd, Shirley, Carol and Tom) were invited by Igor Kozlovsky to a meeting with Gennadiy Atanov, Rector (President) of the Donetsk Open University (A private liberal arts university upon whose board Igor sits).  In attendance were department heads from ?Economics? (Business), CIS and Languages, together with the Deputy Rector.  They wanted to know about the program that was being presented at the Institute and to let us know that they would like to talk about our bringing the seminar to their university.  Through our translator, Angela, we presented our new web site (Gennadiy pulled it up on his computer and wanted to look at it after we left!).  We agreed to meet with them on Friday afternoon at one of their new campus facilities.

On Wednesday morning we opened the seminar with an exercise intended to get the students to see their strengths and weaknesses and to list their opportunities and threats.  The day was spent discussing Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, Goleman and Boyatzis's studies titled, Working with Emotional Intelligence and The Competent Manager, Kolb's Experimental Learning, Barker's Future Edge, and Handy's The Age of Reason.

We also discussed several mentors worthy of examining for different character traits.  We also got the students to list and write about people they think of as mentors to themselves.

Later that afternoon we visited the art museum in Donetsk.  Igor's wife works here and conducted a tour through the complex.  Most of the original works were destroyed when Donetsk was captured by the Germans in WWII.

That evening the students headed off to have their evening time with the Institute students while the old gang found a Ukrainian bistro for some inexpensive and genuine Ukrainian food!

On Thursday we completed the seminar, spending considerable time talking about our purpose in this life and how to build lives of service.  The topic got very focused on scriptures that the students could use in their lives as guidance.  In several cases we located references in the seminar material in the Bible for the students so that they understood that the material they were studying came directly from the Bible.

Friday was a busy day for us.  This was graduation day!  For all of those students who successfully completed the materials in the seminar and who faithfully attended all of the sessions, a Certificate of Completion was awarded.  This was a Harding University certificate signed by the Dean of the College of Business Administration (Bryan Burks), the President of the International Business Society (Jason Balota), and myself.  In addition to the awards ceremony, gifts were exchanged and pictures taken!  In this picture students are beginning to gather for the awarding of their certificates.  This is very important to the students, for it signifies successfully completing academic work with a U. S. university.  In the following picture the students are being awarded their certificates. 

Here are the students after rearranging the room participating in the graduation ceremonies.  I don't think we lost a single student in the class due to being absent during the entire week.  I had one student come to me the day before graduation to tell me that he had to be in Monrovia the day of the graduation and he wanted to be assured that he would still be able to obtain his certificate!  A friend received it for him!

Here is the final graduation class all 76 of them (I think!).  As you will note, the majority of the students are young women.  These are the youth who will not be working in the coal mines or the steel mills in the area (the mainstay of the economy).  Rather, these are the young people who will be shaping the future of the country.  These are the ones who will be developing the vision for their country tomorrow.  There is an interesting separation between men and women in the country the men work the mines, the women think about the future.  It makes for a lot of difficulty in marriages in the country.

In the afternoon, the Harding students, together with several students from the Institute, traveled across town to visit an orphanage.  The students had raised $2000 in the U.S prior to coming to Donetsk in order to help some of the children in the orphanage.  They spent most of the afternoon with these children; some very touching stories were shared.

So!  Now it was time to head for home (and back to school work!).  Early, early Saturday morning we gathered at the Donetsk airport for a 6:40am departure.  This required us to be at the airport at 5:00am!  So, not much sleep was had Friday night.  What a pleasant surprise when we were met at the airport by four of our seminar students!  There were some teary eyes and moist cheeks before final goodbyes were made!

Once in Moscow we were met by Marina Kotova for a bus tour of the city (some of our hardy souls did not stay awake the entire tour!).  The first stop for the day was a McDonalds, so that we could all get a quick something to eat!  This had to have been the single busiest McDonalds that I have ever seen!!  It was pure mayhem people and children everywhere!  And we think the Moscovites have no money to spend?  We could not even find a place to sit down to eat until someone vacated their space!  Quite an experience!

We also visited the University of Moscow, perched on a bluff overlooking downtown Moscow.  After that we visited the cemetery where many famous Russians have been buried quite impressive and what a documentary of names!  By that evening we ended the day at our hotel near the Sheremetyevo 2 Airport.  It was a long day and we were all exhausted.

Sunday morning we had a worship service in our hotel room.  Tom Phillips directed us in our thoughts and Greg and Jason led us in song.  After our communion Tom asked each of us to share some moment in the past week that added to our faith:  the stories were extraordinary!

In the afternoon we took a van from the hotel to the metro.  It is no easy task getting around in a subway system, one of the largest in the world, especially when you can't read the directions!  But with Dasha we traveled quickly and efficiently around Moscow ending up at Izmaylovsky Park where we spent the afternoon.  This is one of the largest if not the largest' shopping bazaars in Moscow.  Oh!  The deals that we made for the next five hours!  A great opportunity to taste some of the local culture.  Shop owners display all types of hand crafts made in villages spread all over the Moscow region.  Most speak enough English (or German or Spanish or Chinese or Japanese) that you can talk and bargain for hours!  The day was a beautiful sunny day (one of the few we encountered on the entire trip!) and our group was exhausted as we wound our way back to the hotel late that afternoon.

On Monday morning we all hopped in the hotel van and headed off to the Kremlin, located in the heart of Moscow, arriving at the statue of Zukov pictured here.  For those who have not had the opportunity to ride in the Moscow traffic a real experience has been missed!!  And you get a total emersion into the grit and dirt of winter!  Looking out the window of the van we found not a single clean car, truck, bus or van!  And the local culture really came out in our driver who had the heat all the way up to volcanic in the van and he was wrapped in a collar high overcoat (not sweating!!).  And he was not going to change the temperature or role down his window for ventilation his and the other front window were the only two that would open!  So, we had our personal sauna as we drove er, crawled down to the center of Moscow.

The tour through the Kremlin was extraordinary!  The history in this place is majestic and the artifacts and relics stored in the Armory stretch the imagination.  This was the seat of authority for the Romanovs for 300 years.  The collection of personal belongings of the Tsars was incredible to behold.  And, it is the seat of today's President of Russia (we didn't get any personal visit from Putin while in his neighborhood, however!). 

After having lunch in the underground shopping center located immediately to the north of the Kremlin, some of us toured (the younger generation) and some of us caught the hotel van and headed home tired!

Tuesday we headed home?24 hours after leaving Moscow we actually arrived in Searcy.  The van ride from Little Rock to Searcy was one of the quietest I have ever experienced with 11 people!!

It was a great trip.  The lives of the Harding team have been transformed.  And many lives in Donetsk have been touched for the Lord.  May He continue to bless the work that has been started.