Going to Lisakovsk
Remember that nice college student, Masha, who helped me buy some baby clothes my first full day with Veeka? Well, she invited me to come visit her parents for the weekend. They live about 2 hours away by bus about an hour south of Rudny. On a map, find Kostenai, then follow the Togol river SW til you get to Lisakovsk, a small town of 60,000.
I stayed in a small 2-bedroom apartment with Masha, 18, her sister, Dareen, 3, and her parents: Gulnara and Sergey. Masha's fiance, Sergei, picked us up at the station. The place is typical 1960s-era Soviet tenement city; drab, drab, drab, except for a few buildings with some splashes of color. There was another sister, Dasha, who'd be 17 now had she not died in 2002 of an inoperable brain tumor. I spent much of Saturday evening going over family photos with Gulnara, who showed me what Dasha - a local beauty queen - had looked like. The saddest one was of Dasha standing forlornly by a bridge in Moscow just after she'd gotten news from doctors there that her condition was hopeless. The family sent her there on a 3-day train ride in a last-ditch attempt to try to find treatment for her. I told Gulnara I had an aunt who had died at about the same age in the 1930s.
Anyway, Gulnara fixed a goose in honor of my coming and invited quite a few of the church members to come meet me. They keep the inside of buildings very hot in that part of the world, which means you basically wear T-shirts inside, then bulk up with triple layers of clothing once you encounter the sub-zero climate outside. And Lisakovsk was pretty snowy.
Sunday morning, we repaired to another building a few blocks away where about 40 adults and lots of kids were gathered for a very passable evangelical/charismatic Christian assembly.
After the service, the church members all gathered around a long table with a samovar (large urn-type container that dispenses hot tea) in the middle and many plates of sweets. Apparently this is a Russian custom. They are building a new church that will incorporate a lot of the local culture - ie a place for the babushkas to sit and a place for the old men to sit and drink tea in the courtyard every morning. And a spiral staircase - a real innovation here.
The photo of the worship band; Sergey is on the far left; Masha is the woman in the middle and her fiance, Sergei, is on the far right. Being there was like a lovely dream and it got me out of the dreary routine here.