We've moved!

Good news – we found a clean and well maintained apartment on Monday! (pictures are of the living room and kitchen) It is on the second floor – the other apartment where the present couple live is on the 3^rd floor so we will not have to hire a car to move the computer , the binders and kitchen items which belong to the church. It is tough to find help when  we don’t speak the language and the church is not established – no Elder’s Quorum or High Priest Quorum.

My little abandoned boy

Thursday afternoon we went to the closing event for a humanitarian project : the church donated respiratory machines for infants to the Children Hospital #1 in Astana. We were given a tour and shown how the equipment is being used. They invited us to see newborn, abandoned  children. There were 6 cribs, not much bigger than the 4-5 day old babies, in the room and all were occupied. We walked around and looked at each child. Each was beautiful, some were sleeping having just been fed, but one little boy caught my attention. He reminded me so much of our little Mahana almost 30 years ago. Oriental features with eyes so dark you couldn’t differentiate the iris from the pupil, and a lot of unruly black hair. I talked to him, stroked his cheeks, and held his little hands and he just stared at me until finally he let out a big yawn letting me know it was his turn to sleep. It broke our hearts to think that these babies have no loving parents or grandparents to care for them. They will go to an orphanage even though they are not really orphans. They were so sweet to be with! We asked if we could come back and volunteer to hold and feed the abandoned babies and they agreed it would be OK.

It is miserable to go outside and walk on ice especially when the wind is blowing fiercely but we have to get groceries and do the Lord’s work. We are now wearing some yaktrack  device attached to the bottom of our shoes to avoid falling on the ice.

Viviane walking to the 'mall' where we had lunch and did grocery shopping - about 1.5 miles each way.

Viviane in front of an ice sculpture we found on the way to the mall.

We hope the missionaries will be able to come to this city next week to start teaching the gospel and building a branch – right now it is twig – and for us to finally wear our official name badge – once we get the religious accreditation for Astana. Missionaries are already allowed to preach the gospel in Almaty.

We are getting better – slowly – Our supply of antibiotics for bronchitis is almost gone. My hip is still bothering me from the fall – but the computer screen is bugging more!

Our meals consists of ramen soup, tomatoes with cucumber for salads, oranges, apples, yogurt, cheese, eggs, hamburger meat, pasta, black beans and fruit juices. We have been going to lunch  a couple of times a week. We have had Kazakh pizza – if you order sausage you get shredded bologna, a couple of local chicken dishes, and cole slaw form KFC (lol). Food is expensive! A whole rotisserie chicken – almost like Costco – is $18. We have to buy bottle water or boil water. I fixed rice and pasta in tap water – it stunk !!!

We know the gospel will brighten the life of every Kazakh who will listen to the message of the restoration. We are so thankful to be involved in this work.

PS - I can't seem to get pictures to load to the blog. In fact I can't get to my own blog site to see how it looks. The web page always gets a 'time out'. This happens to many of the web sites I try to visit. Maybe I'll start putting pictures in a Picasa web album and just add the URL. 
PPS - I figured it out by changing the ISP DNS to OpenDNS. I hope it stays fixed!!!