Finally came the text message from Sasha that I'd been waiting for: the truck had left Kyiv and was headed in our direction. The trip took most of the day to complete, and after several delays, it finally arrived around 9:30 in the evening. When it did, our crew of six men and two ladies were waiting.
There were five pallets of books on the truck — 1000 per pallet.
Sasha and the truck driver guide the first pallet onto the lift.
We don't have a warehouse, and so the shipment had to be divided up amongst a couple of apartments. This meant placing the pallets in the parking lot, and then passing the boxes man to man into the building and eventually up the stairs.
We had a great crew of volunteers who worked late into the night unloading the books, passing them along like a bucket brigade!
After unloading the first few pallets at one location and stashing them just inside the first floor stairwell, we immediately departed with the truck driver to deliver the remaining pallets at a second location. Denise and Sasha's wife, Alla, stayed behind to guard the first group of books until we could return and finish taking them up the stairs to their final storage area.
Upon arriving at the second location, the truck driver unloaded the remaining pallets near the curb (as close as his truck could get) and we began the long and arduous task of passing the boxes one-by-one up the stairs to their storage area on the sixth floor!
We don't have the room to store 5000 books in any one place, so the boxes were divided up and stored in smaller groups. The men carried this stack up six floors using only the stairs!
Over an hour later, the task was complete and we headed back to the first location where the ladies were waiting for us. We formed up our bucket brigade for the final time and passed all the remaining books up the stairs and into their places.
Mission accomplished. Big thank-you to these guys for giving of their time and energy to help us with this task! Clockwise from the left: Nathan, Yura, Sasha, Taras, Tolik, Joshua.
A case of 20 Good and Evil books
Denise has already packaged up the first batch of books for mailing. We have a growing list of people waiting to receive them!
Any Ukrainian may receive a copy of Good and Evil free of charge simply by submitting a request through our web site: https://dobroizlo.com.ua
A Word of Gratefulness
We'd like to offer our sincere thanks to everyone who has been involved in this project. Many people gave generously of their time and finances to help us bring this vision into reality.
We would also like thank No Greater Joy for producing this fantastic ministry tool, and for supporting our efforts to translate it into Ukrainian.
"For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister." (Hebrews 6:10)