Greetings!

Dearest Friends!

What a great pleasure to be able to write to you again!

We trust and hope that you are all doing well and that you all had a blessed festive season! Anneke, Arkadiy and the baby arrived safely back to Ukraine on the 6th of February. (We found out that we are pregnant on the day of our departure from South Africa). It is good to be back and serving here in Odessa. God has given us a good time in South Africa of reconnecting with our family and serving them.

Praises from our time in South Africa:

Here are some praises from our time in South Africa:

*ALL of Anneke’s family were able to be together for Christmas and New Year! It was a great blessing and joy! We also were able to go on a family holiday ALL together! It was SUPER!!!
*We found out we are pregnant!!
* Pieter (Anneke’s brother) and Nikki got married on the 10th and it was super special to share their big day with them
*All the border crossings, and flights went well with no problems; our luggage arrived safely on both sides too.
*We attended a mission prayer group every Friday morning early; it was such a great delight to us and an awesome blessing
*Seeing old friends and making new ones!
*Ministering along side Anneke’s mom in Alexandra, a township close to the center of Johannesburg. It was a joy to serve with Anneke’s mom and help her in her ministry there, and a great delight to see all the little kids faces. (Around 200-300 kids came every Wednesday)
*We were able to get most of the documents we needed to get for Anneke in South Africa.

Being back in Odessa

Being back in Odessa has been good but challenging at the same time. When we got off the airplane, we felt as if we were taken 15 years back in time into the mid 90ies – the crisis has hit Ukraine. A lot of places have shut down because they went broke and more and more people are getting more and more desperate. When we arrived to our apartment we noticed that someone had cut our Internet cable and had removed it all the way from the 5th to the 1st floor. When Arkadiy looked more in the general area, he/they had cut every internet cable that was in our apartment building, from the 9th floor all the way to the first floor. They had stolen the cables to resell them. It was an unpleasant surprise.

As we arrived back home there were so many things waiting for us to address that we felt a little bit overwhelmed, we still do but we have been making good progress. We were able to start our one on one meetings and that has been great.

Church and Bible Study

<- Church Church is going great. We had a good service yesterday. Arkadiy preached on Eph 6:1-9 about duties and responsibilities of children, parents, servants, and masters. It went good. We had some guests from another Church come and altogether we were 33. It is about time to start looking for some place to meet for Church because it becomes harder and harder to fit everyone in the Huffman’s living room. But it is a good problem to have :) . On Tuesday we started a new series on dating at the Bible Study. We trust that the Lord will use this topic to draw more people to the Bible Study and then eventually to Himself.
<- Bible Study

Current Prayer Requests

Current Prayer Requests:

* Please pray for time management and prioritizing as we try to catch up with all of the ministry things here in Odessa

* Please pray for the new series of the Bible Studies on dating on Tuesdays, for wisdom as how to make Christ and His plan obvious to the unbelievers, and for those who are believers that we would be able to provide the “food” which would help them to mature more in Him.

* Please pray for Anneke and the baby, for them to be healthy; and for Arkadiy to have wisdom as to how to take care of the two of them.

Thank you so much for your partnership with us in the Lord’s work here in Ukraine through your prayers and finances! We really appreciate it!