I want to share a blog that is new to me. Markus Wolf has been living as a missionary in Ukraine for over a year now.
He has run a summer camp for orphans in Uzhgorod and has a great sense of humor.
July 15 2006
Imagine if this happened to you. You’ve been assigned to lead a camp of 90 gypsy orphans, but you can’t speak their language, and few of them can speak yours. You want to run a program to meet as many of their needs as possible, but they range in age from maybe 6 to 18. Many of them have mental problems, some of the girls have been pregnant.
advertisementThey’re also accustomed to doing whatever they want with little to no adult supervision, many are hard core smokers. You have a staff of 25 people who also can’t speak their language, but a few can speak Russian or Ukrainian.
And only one translator shows up, but she thought she was translating for a woman going shopping downtown. Oh, and at the last minute you have 115 children, with twenty more possibly coming later in the week.
The venue? A former military base in Western Ukraine. Now, give ‘em Jesus.
He works with the Mother’s Care mission. A team of mostly woman (plus Markus) visits 4 Kyiv hospitals every week just to hold the special needs babies.
Search his blog for Mother Care and Oleg. He has many interesting stories.
Alana, Mark and Luka received a referral to a young girl in Donetsk. Their last blog entry was on February 10, 2007.
Dan and Becky Lambert adopted an other boy, Roman, from Bredyansk. The judge didn’t count Sunday as part of the 10 days. So they cannot pick him up from the orphanage until Tuesday morning.
The family arrived in Ukraine on Jan 16, 2007.
And then there is the story of Cinderella, Belle and SnowWhite. This family is trying to adopt a sibling group from Ukraine and unable to get their dossier accepted.
The system in place for submitting dossiers is very difficult. The SDA will only accept 2 dossiers per month per facilitator…. if they can get an appointment. The number of appointments per months seemed to be very limited.