Happy New Year!

We have so much to be thankful for. We said goodbye to the old year last night with our neighbors and hello to the New Year with the kids shooting off fire works in our front yard. Christian was so excited about shooting off fire works.

Today we went with our new team member to clean her new apartment. We got some of it done -- Chris hauled out lots of trash and old stuff and I cleaned out the closet and the bedroom. In the midst of all of this, Chris notices that his "man purse" was missing. All men in Russia carry a hand bag. Now, he has left it many places and lost it several times, but this time it was stolen!!! We had a pretty good idea it was the neighbors and they were acting a little strange. It had all of his documents and about $150 business funds!! We did not really care about the money, but the passport was the main concern. We looked everywhere and called the cellphone -- but it had been turned off. After about 30 minutes of talking with the neighbors, who were still celebrating the New Year with drinks in hand, one of the guys comes walking up with Chris's man purse. The code had been changed to get into it, so we broke the lock and found the passport!!!! Praise the Lord!! The money of course was gone, and we ended up giving the guy who brought it back about $40 -- all the money we had left.

Anyway, life is never boring here in Russia!!