Monday, February 28, 2022

The war in Ukraine hits us in a very personal way.  As many of you know, we have hosted 30+ agricultural students from France over the years.  Now, many of those students are farmers or working in the ag industry.  Most have families of their own now, so Pat and I are ‘grand mere and grand pere” many times over.

One of those young men left France in 2007 and moved to Ukraine where he started a farm there on his own.  He has built a very successful farm business.  He is married and now has a 5-month old son.   Until the war hit, we received news frequently from him and we happily welcomed his pictures and stories of his life there.  It is this young farmer that makes the war in Ukraine very personal to us.  We have had very limited communication with him in the past week.  He lives in Ukraine in the edge of a town near his farm.  Also near his farm is a Ukrainian military air base, and he has heard and felt the shaking of his house from two sessions of bombing.

Of course, I’d like to share with you his name and pictures, but it would be unwise to publicly post such things.   In one very brief message, he merely said it was ‘bad’ there.  There is now so much uncertainty… he said, “Nobody knows what will be.”

I do ask for you to pray for this young farmer and his family.