River of Thoughts

Christine Royse Niles — Changing the world one word at a time

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The Road Warriors

by Christine | 1 Comment

Monday, 14 May Sunday and Monday pretty much ran together….It’s Monday evening in Kiev as I draft this, and Mark and I are both running on about an hour and a half of sleep since yesterday morning. Around 11:00 on Sunday morning, the Maxwell clan stopped by to see us off, and Mark’s parents came about 11:15 to take us to the airport. After many pictures, the guys piled all the luggage into the car, and we were off! We arrived at the Fort Wayne airport a little more than an hour before our flight, checked our bags, and breezed […]

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Happy Mothers’ Day

by Christine | 1 Comment

We are all packed and ready to go! We just have a couple of last-minute items to wrap up, and we’ll be on our way to the airport…..The last few days have been incredibly hectic, but they’ve also given us many opportunities to gain perspective. Friday morning, we spoke to Masha on the phone. Special thanks to Lena Statsenko, my friend and Russian teacher, for getting up at an ungodly hour to come over and translate for us on the call. It was wonderful to hear Masha’s voice and to be able to communicate with her!! We did encounter a […]

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Baby Shower

by Christine | Leave a Comment

In the midst of my scurrying and hurrying to get ready to leave this weekend (yes, this weekend!!), my wonderful sisters-in-law organized a “baby” shower for me!!!! It was so great to see so many friends and family members from different areas of my life come together to support Mark and me as we step into this new adventure! In preparation for this, we went to Target about a month ago to register….it’s actually kinda hard to register for a 12-year-old baby!!!! As many of you know, for a traditional baby shower, you can register for diapers and bottles and […]

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Plane Tickets

by Christine | Leave a Comment

WE HAVE TICKETS TO UKRAINE!!!!!!!!!!!!! We have booked our flights, and we even found rates for summer travel directly from Fort Wayne that were less than I paid for my last business trip to New Jersey! So…..we leave Fort Wayne on Sunday, 13 May (Mothers’ Day) at 1:23 in the afternoon. We have a 2 hour layover in Detroit, and then board a flight to Amsterdam. An overnight flight schedules us into Amsterdam just before 6:00 AM, and then after a very quick connection, we leave for Kiev at 7:10 AM. If all goes well, we should arrive in Kiev […]

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We Talked To Masha!!!!

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We had one of the biggest joys this morning….we talked with Masha on the phone! Flash back to a few weeks ago when the orphanage director was here…she left us all with a phone number for the orphanage, and told us that we could call the kids one time per month until we could come to get them. Life at the orphanage is very structured, and it’s obviously a bit of a disruption to go take the kids away from whatever they are doing, so they do try to limit the phone calls. It’s quite a privilege to be allowed […]

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