Portion for Orphans
 


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Portion for Orphans Newsletter

October 10, 2005

 

Dear Friends and Family,

"Slava Bohgu" (Praise God) for going before us and preparing the way for us all the time, especially in these last few days. Josh Perry and I left on Monday, October 3rd and have begun a great journey that will take us through Russia, Asia and Australasia with the pure and undefiled purpose of visiting and raising awareness of orphans around the globe. We are two ordinary people setting out to explore and offering up our hands and voices to be used as instruments of an extraordinary God for the sake of many children whose voices and cries go unheard.

“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” James 1:27 This is the purpose of our journey: to visit orphans, to help them in any way that we can, and to tell you all about them.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” Proverbs 3:5-6 When we pray and move forward in obedience to God, trusting that He will go before us and open doors… He does. In these first few days, we’ve made it from Dallas to Moscow and then on to Yaroslavl, Russia where we have settled in with a Russian Babushka named Serafima, begun Russian language and culture courses, and have visited Internat #9, the orphanage, 3 times. Though it is incredibly heartbreaking to look deep into the eyes of an abandoned 2, 4 or 14 year old child… it is encouraging to see the way in which the children in this orphanage are being cared for.

Today, when Josh and I arrived at Internat #9, we spoke with the director Irina Nicolayevna, in Russian, and decided that we would spend some time with the 2-6 year old children. Their smiles brought me great joy, their tears and reaching arms… deep sorrow. Some have great respect, others none at all. One who stays in my mind is the small 3 year old girl who would reach for me to hold her… each time I put her down she would go to Josh and would then soon be back to me again. Then there was another who seemed very angry and unsure what to do with her need for attention. She would just sit next to me and pout, or throw dirt on my shoes, if I spoke with any other child. Poor thing, she just knows that she wants something more and is not sure how to go about getting it. After teaching a few to sing ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’, we had to leave them for a little while because it seemed we were riling them up quite a bit and they were getting pretty rough.

We then met with Galina, a 25 year old member of the staff, who has been very helpful in setting up a schedule, through broken English and broken Russian, for what we’ll do in the coming weeks. Each day we will be teaching English to the staff and to the children. After that we will do one of many activities that we brought which include many things from making knit hackey-sacks to bookmarks, and hemp/beaded bracelets. Then we’ll play frisbee and football outside. I asked Galina if they, the staff or children, would like to learn about God and the Bible, she wasn’t sure. Please pray that they would be interested and that we would be allowed to share about the love of Christ.

So far, we’ve been visiting and getting to know everyone. All of the children are very friendly and interested in talking with us. Our frisbee has been a great tool. :-)

Thanks for all of your prayers… please continue to pray for God to go before us in everything that we do, and that we would be a light.

Sally and Josh

 

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Internat #9, Yaroslavl, Russia.