Snippets

Last week I traveled to the Donetsk Region in Eastern Ukraine to visit various groups involved in ministry to orphans/adoption. I wish I could share everything I saw and heard on the trip--it was really incredible--but I think I'll just stick with a few snippets.

Snippet #1:
The first place we visited was Pilgrim Republic Orphanage in Mariupol. It's actually not so much an orphanage as a street kids' rehabilitation center. They pick kids up off the street, filthy, flee-ridden, addicted to drugs, covered in sores, HIV-positive, with tuberculosis, and utterly neglected and unloved, and they turn them into the smiling urchins you see on the right. They help them recover from drug/alcohol addictions, get cleaned up and healthy, catch up in school, and get used to living indoors, and then try to reunite them with their biological families, find foster/adoptive families for them, or if they turn 16 by the time this whole process is complete, they will help them find somewhere to live and help them get into college or get a job. They've literally saved hundreds of children's lives, and they have changed Mariupol from being a magnet for street kids from all over Ukraine, into a town that street kids avoid like the plague!

Snippet #2:

I think the highlight of the trip for me were our visits to 5 adoptive families in the next town we visited, Slavyansk, playing with their adorable kids and hearing their stories. The family at the left lives in very primitive conditions--basically a shack that is falling apart, no running water, heated by a wood-burning stove, three tiny rooms--but they decided a year ago to adopt then 4-year-old Diana and 2-year-old Daniel. And now they've learned that Diana and Daniel have an 8-month-old biological brother with heart problems who has also been abandoned by their mother, and they want to adopt him too! Oh, and did I mention that they also have their 20-year-old biological son living with them?

Snippet #3:
Another family we visited that really stuck with me was the family on the right. The older daughter is biological; they initially adopted younger daughter Veronica, then they heard that Veronica's birth mom had given birth to a boy and then died (of TB or AIDS, I can't remember which), and that there was something wrong with him and his relatives didn't want him, so they decided to adopt him as well. Two-year-old Nazar has cerebral palsy, and has progressed hugely since they got him. His progress is partly due to them taking him to massage once a week, despite it being a two-day ordeal, and costing $20, which for them is a lot. And amazingly, they are interested in adopting again!

Snippet #4:

We also visited 2 rehab centers in Mariupol. They are absolutely Spartan, but they are really changing people's lives. We met a woman who had killed her abusive husband and spent 10 years in prison for it; another woman who came to the Lord, got married, and had a daughter all while in prison--now she's at the rehab center waiting for her husband to serve out his term; the director of one of the rehab centers is an HIV-positive former drug addict, married to a wheelchair-bound HIV-positive former drug addict, but amazingly they have a healthy son!

There are many more stories I could tell, but that will have to do for now...