Jerry Guibor, a native of California, was graduated from then-San Jose State College with a bachelor's degree in journalism. Over the next 40-plus years, he worked as a photographer, reporter, page designer and editor at newspapers in California, Arizona and Oregon.
In 1994, he moved to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he served one year as a missionary. After several subsequent short-term mission trips to Russia and Ukraine, he moved to Kiev, Ukraine, in 2004 and lived there for 13 months, working again as a missionary. The stories in this book were told to him by his friends from those two countries.
Jerry is retired from the newspaper business but continues to travel to Ukraine as a missionary. He has two married children and five grandchildren, all of whom live in Arizona. He resides in Fresno, California, where he operates a photography business, JG Photography.
Career and volunteer missionaries from the West have been presenting a Christian morals and ethics curriculum to public school teachers in Ukraine since 1992. More than 220 teacher/leaders have been trained and are teaching the curriculum in their public classrooms. The life stories of some of those key leaders are told in From Nyet to Da.
For "A Candle Burned," Jerry Guibor interviewed friends of his who were born into Soviet oppression and survived those terrible times to find out there is a living God who loves them. Others stubbornly cling to their atheistic upbringings. Nevertheless, their stories are just as compelling.