At the Children’s Home

That’s what the Russians call the orphanage, the children’s home. There’s a second name too, which ironically enough is only one letter different from the Russian word for Internet (it sounds like Intranat). So you can easily see why I was confused that we were going to spend our afternoon at the Internet with a bunch of kids.

The second session of camp was packed with 100some kids and 1/3 of them were orphans. One of these orphanages just happens to be in Talitsa, so Amy and I had the opportunity to go and visit.

The system is so strange to us in Russia. Not all of the kids in the orphanage have no parents. In fact of about 150 kids, only about 40 have no parents. So 110 of the kids go home for the summer. Their parents want them home to work on the fields and help out. About another 1/3 of the kids have parents who are alcoholics or who are in prison. They have been sent to the orphanage by the government. Then there is the last 1/3. Their parents either can’t afford them or don’t want them. So they drop them off at the orphanage. It’s really tough to know that these kids remember (most of them) that mom or dad dropped them off, because they didn’t want them anymore.

So when the opportunity came to go and visit with about 12 kids who were at camp who live in an orphanage, Amy and I jumped at the chance. About 30 or so of the kids at the orphanage actually came to spend time with us. We sang songs from camp, played games, gave them some candy and shared our testimonies with all of them.

This is gonna blow your mind: I talked for about 15 or 20 minutes straight in Russian. And everyone understood. I didn’t even really make any mistakes for the first half of it either! It was really cool. I could tell that G-d was helping me to communicate, because words were just tumbling out of my mouth that I didn’t even know that I knew! I told them about growing up, about losing my mom, about the joy of a second parent. I talked about Our Father and how He loves us. I talked about how I was called to come and work in Russia and that He has a plan for all of our futures (Jer 29:11)