Today begins the three most intense days of our 12 days together. We will visit 6 unsponsored orphanages in 3 days... let me bring you up to speed...
Ernie Arrant is a very active volunteer with the Russia Initiative of the United Methodist Church. He began traveling there several years ago on professional, medical, and educational exchanges with others from his area of Alabama and the Florida panhandle. They met a family member of an orphanage director and were invited to visit an orphanage. For Ernie and others, this changed the direction of their journey quite a bit. Later Ernie was in a bookstore in Birmingham and was recommended by Crystal Baltimore to read Tom Davis' book, Fields of the Fatherless. (By the way, there are tens of thousands of people who have had their compassionate journey catalyzed by this book. I recommend it. Buy it and read it.) Ernie contacted HopeChest and invited us to explore beginning our ministry programs in Kirov. I went there with him and a couple others in November 2006. We visited orphanages, met with Department of Education officials, and presented the programs of Children's HopeChest and Fund Nadezhda. Then in March 2007 I was back with 15 people. Five orphanages were sponsored by churches and a business in Indiana, Virginia, Texas, and Florida. That's a short version of the story that brings us to the current trip. There's a lot of things that happened in the meantime and a lot of answered prayer and miracles. Contact me if you want to know more about that. Back to the story...
We visited Burmakino which has about 60 orphaned kids in residence. What struck us all is that the staff were doing a great job of recruiting funding. The government generally provides enough money only for salaries and food. The staff will often need to get creative to meet the other needs: building maintenance, field trips, school supplies, furniture, clothes. At Burmakino, we were impressed with the room of sewing machines, the life skills workshop, and the home grown herbs, vegetables, and tea. But we have to remember what the main need is in these children's lives. God didn't send us stuff to save us. God sent a person. These children are aching for meaningful relationships. No amount of homegrown vegetables and sewing machines will replace the void left by abandonment and rejection. They are growing up alone.
Then we took the bumpy and long drive to Urzhum, an orphanage with about 40 children. Nadezhda, the director at Urzhum, has become one of my favorite people in Russia. It's hard to catch her without a smile on her face. She laughs, giggles, hugs and kisses, and talks a million miles a minute. We split up into groups and talked with and played with children of different ages.
We said goodbye to the warm people of Urzhum and traveled north to our hotel in the city of Kirov.
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