Tarrant Family Updates

10/04/2023

We’re raising support for an initiative that will provide generators, power banks and heaters for Ukrainians who live in the eastern city of Chuhuiv near the Russian border. (https://gofund.me/e6269204). This city is constantly under attack and electricity is turned off frequently. Now that winter is quickly approaching, the need for generators to keep warm is critical. Please contribute $5, $10, $20 or more. Everything helps!

10/04/2023

Now that we have finished our missionary contract in Poznań, Poland, we encourage you to direct your support to the next missionary family, Kurt and Holly Johnson, who will hopefully arrive in November! Click the link to see how you can get involved!

Kurt and Holly Johnson are missionaries with the Church of the Nazarene in Poznan, Poland. They serve at a coffee house ministry named Sweet Surrender Kawiarnia, which aims to create a space for individuals to meet new people and establish a sense of community. What makes the coffee house ministry i...

06/09/2023

Hi everyone, we want to thank you so much for following us during our time as missionaries in El Paso and Poznań, Poland. Our contract here in Poznań is officially up. So soon we will be moving back to British Columbia, Canada. We are excited to return “home”! However, with that said, there is one last project that we’ve started and we need your support. Hayley’s friend, and staff member at (Sweet Surrender), will also soon be moving back to her home in Ukraine with her son and her mother. Dasha has been working with us at Sweet Surrender for the past year. She has such a servant’s heart and we are so proud of the ways she has helped her Ukrainian community who have been displaced by war. We have started a Go Fund Me fundraiser to help her accomplish her goal of providing activities for children and moms in her hometown of Chuguiv, Ukraine upon her return. We are over halfway to reaching our goal of $1,000. Would you be willing to contribute to help us get closer to our goal? $5, $10, $20… whatever you’re able. We would so appreciate it from the bottoms of our hearts. Link to the fundraiser is in our bio and also today’s Stories. https://gofund.me/2ee538d6

05/25/2023

Greetings friends! ❤️❤️
We have an important update for you. As many of you know, for the past year we have been leading the NCM Polska Ukrainian Crisis Response work at the Nazarene owned cafe called “Sweet Surrender” in Poznań, Poland. It’s been an intense journey. Many highs and many lows.

Many of you have supported our work here in Poland and we thank you!! We will soon be moving back to British Columbia, Canada and settling in the Vancouver area. We will share more details with you soon but first we really hope you can offer a little support to someone who is very important to us.

🇺🇦 Dasha is a 30 year old, Ukrainian mother who came to Poznań alone with her 5 year old son soon after the war in her country started. She found respite at Sweet Surrender. Her son participated in our Kids Club and Dasha regained a sense of community at our Tea Club. Not long after she started frequenting Sweet Surrender, Hayley was able to hire her with NCM funds to manage the coffee shop at Sweet Surrender. She became one of Hayley’s closest friends and confidants, and even supported Hayley through some very difficult situations.

Dasha will soon be returning to her hometown in Eastern Ukraine to reunite with her husband and the rest of her family. She feels a calling to create a children’s centre in her town much like the one she helped to form in Sweet Surrender. Dasha is incredibly talented and has a lot of experience in management and business. This centre will be completely free to the public. It will not be a business but she knows how to run such operations. She owned her own business for many years in Ukraine.

We feel it appropriate for our final project to be this fundraiser for Dasha’s children’s centre. There is nothing like this available in her town, which has been completely devestated by the invasion, and it is greatly needed ❤️🙏

This is a private fundraiser. You can trust that all proceeds will go to this cause.

If you have wondered how you can help the Ukrainian people, this is a very personal way you can make a difference!

The news about the war has simmered but we promise you it is just as intense as when it started. It is not over and the Ukrainian people still matter just as much now as they did when we were all initially shocked by the invasion.

Please, please, please help Dasha make this idea a reality. She will do it! 💪🏻 But she needs financial support to get it running. Please contribute $5, $10, $20, $30 or whatever your heart tells you! 💙💛 Or perhaps your church or community group would like to raise funds for this cause together! The fundraiser will finish June 14. So there is not much time.

We hope you will partner with Dasha. And we will be sure to keep her partners updated!

Blessings to you all!

Let’s help this amazing Ukrainian mom start a Children's Development Ce… Hayley Tarrant needs your support for Help Ukrainian Mom Start a Children's Centre

10/08/2022

Hungarian NYI Day

Part of Andrew’s role is partnering with youth leaders across the Central Europe Field

Today he had the privilege of connecting with Youth & Leaders of the Hungarian District and sharing with them about .surrender.poznan and

📷:

07/14/2022

Every year a local youth organization called “Lighthouse” conducts two, English language, summer camps for youth ages 11-18. The Church of the Nazarene has been a consistent partner by leading the English teaching portion of the camps. This year, Lighthouse, which is a Polish organization, opened up opportunities for Ukrainian young people to attend the camp free of charge. Several young adults and youth from our Sweet Surrender community joined the camp both as leaders and campers. Lyuba and Dasha joined as “house leaders” and Karolina, Marusia and Vika attended as campers. Hayley’s family (Andrew + children: Samuel, Rees and Emily) also came. Hayley as an English teacher. Jay and Teanna Sunberg came as an English teacher and organizer. The Lighthouse team does an incredible job with their camps and we are so glad that our Ukrainian young people have had this opportunity to meet new people, play games, expand their English and just take a break from their usual reality for while. Lighthouse was a critical partner when we began organizing Sweet Surrender as a Ukrainian community centre. They have been a dependable partner for us as we have for them.

06/16/2022

So, sometimes when you’re an immigrant, you get up, get ready for school… and then as you drive there, start to notice it’s very quiet and wonder if there is some kind of apocalypse afoot. Then you check your calendar and turns out it’s a national holiday. 🤷‍♂️

Which is a great reminder to thank the Church Street Church of The Nazarene in Carlsbad, and the NMI - British Isles North District for sponsoring Samuel & Rees’s first year of school in Poland!! Hopefully this is a testimony to the eagerness with which we have appreciated your investment in us! Thank you!

03/19/2022

Our first Kids Club happened today! We had 14 children join us. Our Kids Club was entirely led by Ukrainians who fled the war, many of whom are Nazarene. The heartbeat of our efforts is Ukrainian. They know better how to meet the needs of their community than we do as non-Ukrainians. I (Hayley) felt my heart swell as I watched these refugees and displaced people step into these roles of service even though they are experiencing the affects of war themselves. ❤️ [ consent for publication was given by everyone in these photos ]

More updates can be found on at Nazarene Compassionate Ministries - Ukrainian Help in Poznań, Poland

03/11/2022

Imagine fleeing your home, being separated from your loved ones, living in temporary housing, and then dedicating all of your time to serving … cleaning … planning outreach … organizing housing for others … 💕😭 Our hearts are full. What a blessing for us to have these amazing Ukrainians become our team, our ministry partners and our family here in Poland.

03/06/2022

For the last two intense weeks, Hayley has been working hard, preparing to receive, and then receiving, hosting, and caring for 8 Ukrainians (4 adults, 4 children) seeking refuge in Poznań. I (Andrew) am never far from tears, as I think about how Hayley, our NCM Polska team, our friends at Lighthouse, and so many partners around the world are caring for our guests, current and those still on the road. Thank you all for the part you are playing to respond to these needs!

I (Andrew) have been trying to keep up with our own kids, and giving them as stable a life as possible, while also processing with them, their own emotions, and their thoughts about the current realities of our world, their Ukrainian, Polish and Russian neighbours, and classmates; talking together about how we as a family and church respond. The main part our 3 have been playing, is handling a more unpredictable schedule, and seeing less of Momma.

The first blurred picture was taken as our first guests, Nazarenes from Ukraine, arrived at the Poznań station. The second is of our 3 kids today, waiting outside the restaurant Hayley was bringing our guests to join us at.

If you would like to partner with NCM Polska go to https://give.nazarene.org/donate/f/137043. Or if you’d like more specific details about how you could get involved, send us a direct message.

Find more updates Nazarene Compassionate Ministries - Ukrainian Help in Poznań, Poland

Peace & Thanks! 💙💛

01/29/2022

We have been in language school for about 2 months now. We each have private lessons with different instructors. We feel it is such an honour to learn Polish, but it is an extremely difficult language to learn and understand. Not only are verbs conjugated in several forms, but there are 7 cases for nouns, pronouns and adjectives! 😩😂 Luckily we have awesome instructors. Pictured here is Hayley’s teacher, Gosia. She is an incredible human and a great friend to Hayley. We hope to someday be able to have basic conversation skills. We’ll update you in a year from now 😂😅 Please pray for us!

01/21/2022

A personal update from Hayley: Over the Christmas holidays, I made a fairly urgent trip to Northern Idaho to visit my parents and my sister. My mom has a condition called multi-system atrophy. It presents similarly to dementia. My mom’s condition is worsening and so much so that I felt it was important to make a trip to see her before waiting much longer. I was able to spend 2 weeks there with my parents and sister Kendall (and her family). Unfortunately I was not home with my family in Poznań for Christmas but we Zoomed… as one does in these modern times 😉👩🏼‍💻 I was grateful for the small moments where I was certain my mom recognized me. Those moment lasted only a few seconds, but the remaining time I was able to just talk to her and share what I had on my heart. We also watched the classic Audrey Hepburn film, “How to Steal a Million”. Please pray for my mom, that she would be comfortable in her remaining days and she would feel God’s love and peace. Please also pray for my dad, who in the past day or so, has become ill and has needed urgent medical attention. Pray for his peace ❤️ I am doing well. Though it is hard to know how to best support my sister as she helps to care for my parents and help manage their lives as well as her own family and her career. Pray that she would be given extra energy and stamina to take care of all these responsibilities. Thank you! ~ Hayley

10/21/2021

Merry early Christmas to the Tarrants!! Our shipment finally arrived after 125 days. Hayley had started to believe it was at the bottom of the Atlantic 🌊. Now we can start dressing in our warmer fall clothes and the kids can enjoy playing with their toys as if it were the very first time 😁 Thank you Jesus and International Movers Network 😉

09/17/2021

09/07/2021

Today was our first day of teaching conversational English at a Catholic school in Poznań! Our good friend, and English teacher at the school, Ania Dorożalska, invited us to lead her English classes every Tuesday to give her students time to speak English with native English speakers. Today we played the game “Two Truths and a Lie” (not very holy? 😂😅) which gave the students time to practice speaking English and also acted as a good ice breaker. We’ve made good initial connections with the students, teachers and nuns/sisters. We’re lucky to have this opportunity as it’s such a good way to get connected in Poznań and we also love being with youth! Emily tagged along with us and was a dream.

08/30/2021

We really enjoyed our time in Berlin…rain and all! A tip for those touring a city with young children, just ride the city bus…pick a route that goes by some of the interesting sites! (pics for you!)

08/29/2021

We’re off on our first family weekend outing! After 2 months without a vehicle (which was totally doable with public transport & Uber!) we finally found a van with low mileage and for a reasonable price. We feel a sense of freedom and eagerness for adventure now that we have our own wheels. Thanks especially to those who have made financial contributions to our mission! And we also have been settling well into our home which we also love! It’s a great home for our family. We feel so fortunate. 🙏 Our first solo journey is to Berlin, Germany which is just under 3 hours from our home.

07/17/2021

The team preparing for their upcoming English camp. We’re so happy to be partnering with them! Jay & Teanna Sunberg and several Nazarene missionaries (and Lay people) have teamed up with Lighthouse in the past for their English camps in Poznań. We’re looking forward to joining them for this next one which happens this coming week. Many of Andrew’s family members are here with us to volunteer as teachers and camp helpers: , Paul Tarrant, David McColgan, and Dorothy Tarrant 🥳 Lighthouse endeavours to build a bridge between English speaking cultures and Polish culture here in Poznań. Many more updates to come...

06/28/2021

3 full days in Poznań, and we are doing so well!! So grateful for the warmest of welcomes from our ministry partners here, the Sunbergs! We are loving exploring this new place, sampling its delicacies, learning the transport system, and adjusting our sleep schedules. Here are just a few images that depict some of this.

Thank you so much to everyone who has partnered with us thus far; you are making this possible!! Thank you!

Many more updates to come.

06/24/2021

Poznań, here we come!! 🇵🇱

Thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey so far; so grateful! Updates to come.

06/21/2021

When you spend a couple days in an empty house, cleaning and packing, you realize that it is 100% the people who make it a home. Hayley and the kids flew to Idaho on Friday, and today, I (Andrew) start the drive to join them. We leave from there for Poland 🇵🇱 on Thursday. I am excited to be reunited with them and then to continue this adventure together!

06/17/2021

Making some final s’mores in El Paso before we leave for Poland 🇵🇱. Hayley and the kids depart for Idaho on Friday, Andrew leaves Sunday; then we all leave Idaho for Poland on June 24. Thanks for all your support on the journey!!

See you there!!

06/11/2021

05/22/2021

Super Exciting News!! Rees is excited to have found his water bottle we left at the Park last week, and also to announce we now have our flights booked to Poland. 🇵🇱
We are scheduled to arrive June 25th, and by the grace of God we will!

Thank you so much to everyone who has made this possible! We are within touching distance of our fundraising goal for the next 2 years. Naturally there will be plenty more opportunities to partner further with us in the days ahead, so stay tuned.
Go to tarrantfamily.com for info. about how to join the Poznań Impact Team.

Peace and love and thanks!!

04/29/2021

List of Lasts Run

So grateful to those who have donated in this week of donations being matched. $1800 of $5k matched so far and 3 days to go. give.nazarene.org/fund/tarrant if you are able to help.

Today I (Andrew) completed another item on my list of lasts -
Run along the Juan de Herrera Canal to Hwy 375.
It’s a route I’ve often done... but until today I haven't run the whole 9k in one go. Normally I run part way out and back. Today I did it all and Ubered home.

The Canal has been such an important sacrament for me these last 4 years; a place where I could root myself in the Neighbourhood in which God has placed us. I will miss the quiet dusty canal paths all over the Lower Valley. But I also look forward to finding new routes and roots in Poznań this summer!