Here is a copy of our official Russia Report that we mailed out this week. You can see photos from the trip on our “images” page. Thanks for stopping in.
Hello everyone!
You thought we forgot about you, didn’t you? It has been about a month since we returned from St. Petersburg, Russia, and we have finally sat down to tell you a little about it. First, we want to thank you so much for praying for us while we were away. We needed it! Thank you for partnering with us in our first opportunity to engage in foreign missions together. It was a good and challenging two weeks. Here’s the scoop:
It was a good trip and very diverse in all that happened. It was just enough to whet our appetites to go back. We spent the first week at a state-run camp, Camp Vozrozhdenie. Very quickly, each of us began to engage with certain children in a special way. A special few stood out to us, and we spent a significant amount of our time with them. Adam’s and my favorites were six teenage deaf boys: Mirian, Andre, Zhenya, Alyosha, Grisha and Nikita. Five of them live together at a deaf orphanage, and we just wrote them this week. They are so special. It was great to see how they looked out for each other. Mirian and Zhenya were mostly deaf but could hear enough to translate into sign for the others. Surprisingly, we found it easier to communicate with the deaf kids than the hearing kids because they’re accustomed to pantomime and body language communication whereas the “normal†kids just kept trying to get us to understand them in Russian—we know the feeling, “Maybe if I speak louder, they’ll understand!†We also spent a lot of time with Ollya, a partially blind little girl. She and I have so many pictures that we took together. She was one that just chattered away to me in Russian while we walked and held hands.
Not all of the kids at the camp were disabled or even orphans, but the kids that our team spent the most time with were the orphans. There was a lot more free, hang-out time in the week at camp than we had expected. First, we were frustrated that we weren’t allowed more structure in our programming, but the time spent making friendship bracelets (there were hundreds made while we were there), throwing a ball, going for a walk or singing while our teammate Cliff played guitar on the balcony of our cabin were the best times. These kids really wanted our hugs and attention, and we were free to give them.
The most special time that we had with the kids was the weekend between our week at camp and the second week that we spent in the city. We spent this weekend at an artist retreat center called Komorovo. It was another big old building that had a lot of years of neglected repair, but it was comfortable and just a couple of blocks from the Gulf of Finland. We had a music and worship retreat for 30 of the kids from camp there, and it was awesome to have this concentrated time with the smaller group. We had wondered and worried about how we would choose the 30 kids for the retreat, but as each of our team members listed the kids with whom they had personally connected, the list came to the exact amount that was allowed to attend. Thus, each of us had a weekend to spend giving personal attention to the relationships that began at camp. We had a great time, and again the deaf boys came through as the most responsive to the music! They held balloons to feel vibrations in the room, touched the body of the guitar as it was played, played the synthesizer at very loud volumes in down-time, played shakers to add their part to the songs we sang, and Mirian (mostly deaf) loved playing the recorder that we gave to him. It was fun to see Andre, very reserved and stoic most of the week at camp get involved and beam and laugh. It was really exciting. Max and Irena Borrisov, worship leaders at a St. Petersburg church led most of the music retreat, and Irena, a grown orphan, shared her testimony, and the kids were very encouraged. Our boys skipped the walk to the gulf to talk with Max and Irena further. Max invited them to visit his recording studio sometime, and we believe he will follow through with that. It was so good to connect these special kids with local Christians.
We also made good friends with our four translators– Adam especially connected with Misha who sings in a Christian Russian hard-core band and looks like he’s from California. Two other members of our team were Sergey and Grisha two 20-year-old orphans to whom Gary, our team leader has been a surrogate father and friend for several years. They don’t speak English, but they were definitely part of our team. They were with us the whole two weeks. Through them, as well as through the deaf boys at camp, we learned a lot about getting to know, befriend and love people with whom we can’t even speak. It was funny how often we forgot that Sergey and Grisha couldn’t speak English. We have friends now in Russia who we look forward to going back to visit.
It was a mixed blessing to be a small part of what God was doing in Russia this summer. On the one hand, it was a blessing to taste the heavy anguish God feels for so many whose hearts are so distant from Him. And yet, we were also blessed with the joy of encountering the fascinating, wonderful people and culture there and seeing the ways that God is healing and transforming them. During our trip to Russia, we were truly challenged to go deeper into the heart of our partnership and into God’s calling to a life in missions. We came out more raw and more wise, having seen more clearly our inability against the backdrop of God’s constant, perfect Grace and Mercy.
Our team realized quickly that it would be difficult to make a real impact in the span of two weeks. That can happen by continuing the work that we began by corresponding with and praying for those that we met. The partnership of prayer is so vital. We can’t underscore enough how much we appreciate your prayers. God protected us. We experienced some wonderful times and came through some difficult moments because you were praying.
Grace to You and Peace,
Adam and Jessica
