Email From Moldova

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 10:48:39 -0500

The following is an email I received from Ben, one of the four people from our church who went to Moldova with CERI (Children's Emergency Relief International) They have gone to work with children in a camp setting, but toured some of the orphan facilities on their way.

Good Sabbath friends,

Just to share some impressions from our first couple of days...

Visiting Internat II, the orphanage in Chesinau where the kids live during the school year. 631 kids currently. Orphans, including "social orphans" whose parents are alive, but who have for a variety of reasons abandoned them. We're met by Ms. Galina, the director of the orphanage and principal of its school (orphans stay until they complete 9th grade; usually by 16 or 17). She is 53, though she looks older. Drill sergeant exterior, but as she talks on through the interpreter she more and more divulges her humor and genuine warmth. She faces a complex of deteriorated buildings (yes, the pictures of the latrines on the Covenant bulletin board are just what I observed walking through the "dorms") and a pitiful budget from the Moldovan government (basically $1 per day per child). But I don't hear hopelessness, or even cynicism. Just realism, (she says that 60 years of state-enforced atheism has left much of their culture spiritually impoverished) and an amazing faithfulness to her role. As if from no where, I absorb the full scene, including my material blessings in some impossible comparison to what I am experiencing here, and I have to step away for several minutes as I weep hard for the first time. We tour the school buildings and the dorms, and move on.

Steve Davis shows us a large, unfinished building just outside of Chesinau. Beautiful views of the rolling hills countryside. CERI has just bought the land and this building shell, and Steve shares his dreams of it serving as a transition house for the orphan girls who have finished 9th grade at Internat II and are headed into what for Moldovan girls are pretty dramatic risks of prostitution, including the slave traffic profiled recently by 20-20 (young women from this tiny country comprise a whopping 60% of the violent prostitution export that the country's police are at this point clearly incapable of stopping). The transition house idea Steve knows well from his work in South Texas has already begun paying dividends here, with several of the Internat II graduates living in CERI sponsored apartments while they learn sewing, quilting or other skills that may make them self supporting. I begin to understand the value of our "grandmotherly" team members. Turns out San Antonio builder David Weekly has put up a challenge grant of $50,000 to help finish out the transition house. Steve is excited.

Am introduced to women whose passion and perseverance are making a difference. We visit "Speranza", a facility in the middle of Chesinau where a mother of 2 disabled kids has over several years built a pretty modern rehab facility to mainstream disabled kids. It's the nicest facility we've seen by far, funded by private entities. How has this very common single mom (touring us though the facility barefoot, willing to spend all day if we could've) pulled this off? Tammy, a mother of 2 from Nashville, TN, has been staying at the team house for going on 3 weeks now, tenaciously returning to the bureaucracy trying to get officials to finalize a student visa they've promised for the 17 year old she has committed to bring to the United States to finish college prep work and then hopefully attend an American university. I realize I wouldn't bet against Tammy, even up against the bureaucracy. The third woman (fourth I guess if I count Ms. Galina) is Jen Gash, early 30s lady who came to Moldova on a CERI trip just a couple of years ago. She was haunted by the beds in the Internat II orphanage (among other things) and has returned to the US and raised the money to fund a new bed building and eventually replace every bed in the place. Her efforts have sparked a new ministry under CERI called "Sweet Sleep,' and it employs boys who have finished the 9th grade, learn carpentry skills, and work for Sweet Sleep. How did this young woman have the nerve to think she could do this? Even Ms Galina gets gushy when she talks about this American woman and the new beds. OK, so the deal is "no despondency" no matter what we experience. Got it. Or at least I'm trying.

Final stop just outside Chesinau at an "infant orphanage", where some kids from birth to about 4 or 5 live. This is the only time we will see them, so the team brought candy and simple toys for a 30 minute party of sorts that turns into an hour of course. Yep, they are absolutely precious. Digital cameras are suddenly worth it, as they love to instantly see the picture you just took. I ask about these red and blue blotches all over their faces, hair, legs and arms, and learn it's medicine for various ringworm type sores. No, it doesn't stop anyone from loving on them. Several surround Danielle, who is doing some great acting like they're "getting her" with the little puppets they just got. One 2 year old comes up to me for a hug, and then just buries her head in my neck for 2-3 minutes straight. Finally, I see her beautiful little face (a lot of the children here are strikingly beautiful, and danged if I don't worry more about what that may mean when they are older) and her "blue teeth" smile from the ring pops Brittney gave her a little earlier. As we leave, we realize we brought candy and toys to 27 little ones who don't even have a pair of shoes. At dinner, the team votes to pass the hat for shoes for them, and we offer a team gift to Ms Galina - $725. That will cover the shoes and the rest will be way more than Ms. Galina expects. Hey, there ARE some things we can do.

Realizing we haven't even met the kids we will be working with all week yet (around 150 or so who are staying just for the summer at Internat II's camp facility outside Chisinau), I'm feeling somewhere between emotionally drained and strangely empowered.

Got to go now. Will write again, hopefully with pictures (we do already have a bunch, but I need Jenny to do the downloading for me and she has been the "one armed paper hanger" busy thing as team leader; so I will have to wait my turn. Damn I'm proud of her).

Love from Team Moldova

PS You guys must be praying; it's just too obvious. I have my first sense why missionaries invariably just go on and on about that. No doubt the matter of knowing you have no chance of controlling any part of this sinks in pretty clearly.

rlp

A Prayer For Friends In Moldova

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:19:22 -0600

I work hard to keep a fuzzy boundary between my calling as a pastor and my writing here. I try not to have agendas, spiritual or otherwise for this blog. I write what is in my heart, trying not to concern myself with how you might receive it. I need this boundary. I need something in my life that is just for me.

This posting skirts the edge of that boundary because it is the prayer I’ve been praying for a week now. Something of its sentiment was in yesterday's sermon. This is what’s on my heart. Thanks for “listening.”

A Prayer For Friends In Moldova:

There is a place in this world, Lord, a land of great poverty and need. It is called Moldova. I know you’ve heard of it.

Orphans are abundant in Moldova. They wander the streets begging for food and searching for shelter. If they are lucky, they are rounded up and warehoused in overcrowded orphanages where metal cribs fill every room and exhausted women drop off bottles and change as many diapers as they can.

In Moldova evil men are everywhere, attracted like rats to garbage. They snatch young girls off the streets with promises of clothing and food, then whisk them into a dark underworld of prostitution, slavery, drug addiction, and death.

The terror of the moment when these girls first understand what is in store for them is an evil so dark and horrible that it causes us to quake with loathing and revulsion. It shakes our faith to its core, and we wonder where you are and why you do not protect these little ones.

For surely you must know, dear God, that this great evil is one of the foulest malignancies ever to worm its way through the stinking flesh of humanity.

And it happens every day.

In Moldova.

And to this needy land, you have called four of our friends from Covenant Baptist Church.

Ben, a lawyer, who has spent his entire career wondering if you really wanted him to take care of children. He has only just found peace with his life and vocation, and now you will break his heart.

Jenny, a young nurse who works in the special care nursery of one of our hospitals. She gives herself every day to the sickest and smallest children. But you will break her heart in new ways.

Brittney and Danielle, two high school girls who live in the schoolgirl reality of America, a world of music, chores, and Friday nights. They have saved their tips and tiny paychecks for a year, and now they go into the darkness to have their tender hearts broken.

These four heard your call and answered it. They have counted the cost and made good plans. You lead and they willingly follow you.

Even unto Moldova.

What good will our four small friends be in the vast ocean of misery that awaits them? What difference can four people make? These questions are above and beyond us. Ours is to follow your Spirit and our hearts. Ours is to offer our gifts into your service. And now four of our own have given themselves in Christ’s name to the least of your children in the lowliest of places.

We do not pray first for their safety, for you have not called them first to be safe. You have called them into harm’s way, and they have followed you there. We do not pray that they be untouched by misery, for you often call those with the strongest and kindest hearts to see the world with your eyes and be broken on the rough and jagged altar of human weakness.

So we take a deep breath, wanting to be right on this, and we pray that their hearts be broken indeed, but that you keep their spirits whole. Yes, break their hearts, but let the breaking lead to a new vision, a higher calling, and a desire to serve humanity with love and with grace.

When their time of service is done, bring them home to us, freshly wounded and newly passionate. We will hear their stories and look at the pictures they took. Our hearts will be broken along with theirs.

And then we shall see what you can do with a hundred or so people whose hearts will beat…

For Moldova.

rlp

Links:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071965/

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0305-06.htm

http://www.usembassy.md/en-ambassador_hodges2.htm

Real Live Preacher - Moldova

Email From Moldova

A Prayer For Friends In Moldova