Poland

Poland, an independent country which was part of the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union, is located just west of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The country is home to around 40 million people and has no welfare system. That means if refugees want to come to Poland, they need to work. It is roughly the size of New Mexico. Ukraine is bordered to the north by the Baltic Sea, to the west by Germany, to the south by Czechia and Slovakia.

We started living in Warsaw, the captial city, in November 2023, with plans to live there for at least six months. It turns out that we lived there for just six months, because God - and our organization - allowed us to return to Ukraine.

In the map below, Warsaw is in Poland to the northwest, while Kiev (Kyiv) is to the southeast in Ukraine, and Krivoy Rog (Kryvyi Rih) is near the lower right corner.

Warsaw (52°13′N 21°02′E) is a little further north than Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada (52°08′23″N 106°41′10″W) - and farther north than all of Ukraine. The winters are fairly mild, but wet (very often rainy, snowy, foggy, or just cloudy), and summers not as hot.