Yakutsk is a cold remote city of 200,000 located in eastern Siberia. It should be very cold here, but it’s less cold than other winters… -30 degrees, sometimes -40 degrees! At these temperatures it doesn’t matter if you use Fahrenheit or Celsius, cold is cold we just need to make sure we dress well.
When the sun’s out shining its beautiful here. We’re staying in a small nice house, but… without shower. Luckily we can take shower at the house of our contact person. There is also a Russian Banya (Russian Bathhouse), which is really nice!
We started our time in Yakutsk with a day investigating the city center. It’s good to be on the street and see what the place is like and what kinds of things are happening here. Being on the streets we also get to see what “needs” the city has.
Later we found out we were not in the city center (we first thought we were, but it was not!). Nonetheless it was good to look around and get a glimpse of the city and the locals here.
The following night we had a prayer evening, setting apart time to pray for the city. We had a great time with God.
It’s great that we can be here for 5 weeks and we are trying to build relationships with people here and work together with different churches.
The churches in Yakutsk are so open to receive us, and hungry to hear more of God. God is touching people’s hearts! We’ve had many opportunities to share in youth meetings, with youth from various churches. Manon shared about the Greatness of God and the youth were given an opportunity to express their love towards God in a creative way, Simone read a personal poem and we could pray with them. Chad has given his testimony and we could pray with the youth. An awesome and Powerful time! Our team enjoys this so much!
Today we went to a church service in the morning. Simone could share her testimony, we read the Fathers love letter (http://www.fathersloveletter.com), Chris played guitar, and people were touched. Some girls we met in church came over to our house for fellowship. We could encourage them and pray with them.
This afternoon we went sledging from a hill, together with two of our neighbors, Josh and Sam also helped a lady out with moving.
Some of our ministry ideas for the remainder of the outreach are: to be involved in prison ministry, go weekly to the university and help out the homeless people.
Please pray with us for more open doors. For example, we would love to go to help out with the orphanages, but we’re not allowed to. Pray that we have Gods eyes and ears for the people around us!
Warm greetings from Siberia!
Click here to find out more about our fall DTS. Starting October 2013.
