One Broken Tooth - My Adventures in Foreign Missions
By Pastor Randy Pospisil

Back in the summer of 2001 I had the wonderful opportunity to go on a mission trip for 9 weeks to Ukraine. I wanted to learn a little about the culture and spend some time contemplating if I wanted to be a full-time missionary. So, I signed up with SEND International to do a program called SEND Summers. My job was to go and spend time with missionaries and help them do special projects over the summer like Vacation Bible School, construction projects, and street evangelism.

By nature I’m an adventurous person. I like to try new things and go out on a limb. So it was natural for me to kind of get a wild hare and go on this trip. I was excited to see this new country, to try new food, to learn a new language, and to really get immersed.

I remember just a week or so before it was time to get on the plane that I had a little twinge of pain in my tooth.

So, I get on the plane, wave goodbye to my family and my girlfriend (who is happily married to someone else now) and take off for the great vast unknown that is Ukraine. I read a book about culture shock, I’d tried to learn a few little phrases to help get me where I was going, and I had been reading in my Bible in preparation for anything that God would throw my way.

As we hit the higher altitude I remember my ears popping, and boy my tooth was aching just a little.

We landed safe and sound in the Kiev airport and I met my very first Ukrainian, Andrei, the driver. I wrote in my journal that he was studying to be a physician assistant. Here was a student just like me. This was going to be a great trip.

I met one missionary couple, Howard and Joyce Botterill from Minnesota, who would be my host for the first week I was in the country. They had a really nice apartment and they took me right in. That next day I spent time in orientation class learning about Ukrainian culture and some Russian words from actual Ukrainians.

The next morning at breakfast it happened. I think we were having cereal and the crunch I heard was not the rice krispies. I had broken my tooth. And boy did it hurt.

My hosts made some calls and we found a dentist that had been trained in the American style of dentistry, but he only spoke Russian and Ukrainian. That would be great except all of the missionaries in Kiev with me were Russian students, not native speakers, and they certainly didn’t know the Russian word for “molar” or “bicuspid.” I would be at the mercy of this dentist.

I sat in the very sparse, pure white dentist office, my mouth hooked up to a spit tube and gauze clogging the hole. My host Joyce and another missionary Jayne spoke as best they could to the dentist to try and figure out what to do.

The dentist took x-rays and removed the broken part of my tooth. It cost me 80 griven (which was about $16). The cap would come when we got back from VBS in another town and would cost 400 griven ($80). You know, I still have that cap, and he did a great job.

I had gone prepared for anything, or so I thought. What I got was a lesson in missions: be ready for anything!

My 9 weeks might have started with a broken tooth, but it ended with a new sense of God’s plan for the world and a new sense of his plan for me. Since my experiences in Ukraine I’m more sensitive to unbelievers, I’m more bold in speaking and living the gospel, I’m more introspective about my own spiritual development.

Just the other day I was in the Medford nursing home and I met a woman who speaks nothing but Russian. And the words I learned with that trip came streaming back. Right away I said zdrasvutyeh (hello) and ya ne panemayou pa ruski (I don’t understand Russian) which made her smile and in English say “thank you.” Who would think 7 years later in the middle of Wisconsin God would use those experiences once again.

If you’ve never taken the opportunity to go on a short term trip, I hope you’ll grab that experience. I hope you have an experience like mine. I hope you get a bigger picture of God. I hope you get a better view of his purpose. I hope you get a greater sense of the world. Be ready to be changed by him and to be transformed in your thinking. There are opportunities all of the time to go with groups like SEND. I’d be happy to help you find those opportunities.

Oh, and remember. Don’t ignore that little tooth ache before you go.