The Social Hotel

Have you ever been to a social hotel before? Chances are you might have visited one doing some community service. It's ONE of the ways that you can say, homeless shelter in Russian. I had the opportunity to visit the shelter in Tyumen today with a group of 5 Americans visiting from West Virginia. They needed some help with another interpreter, so I volunteered to help out.

As far as the language stuff is concerned, I did okay really. A few grammar mistakes here and there, but I know the message got through. I was paired up with the p@stor, Bert, and one of the team members, Nancy and we visited 3 rooms with 3 people in each room. We asked basic questions like: "How long have you been here?" "How did you get here?" "Do you have any health concerns?" "How can we pr@y for you?"

The basic situation for the residents of the shelter comes down to the following… physical injury or stroke. Many of the residents are missing limbs because homelessness in Siberian winter results in the loss of limbs. It's VERY dangerous to not have shelter. Many residents are there waiting for documents so they can find work. If I correctly understood the situation, many people never got official documents during communist times and they still don't have them. When they try to get a job now, they can't prove that they even exist, because there is NO paper trail. This is a HUGE problem. I need to learn more about it, and it's VERY difficult for people to navigate the system.

It was really wonderful to be able to help the US team and to encourage the residents. Two situations were quite difficult for me. There was a man who had had a stroke and it was so difficult to understand his Russian for me. I just pr@yed that G0d would help me to understand and He really either opened my ears, or gave the man back his speech, because it became much easier to understand. The second situation, was a deaf man. I so wished to use American Sign Language… but it's exactly that - AMERICAN. So we were about to pass him by when I remembered my notebook! So I wrote out the interpretations to share with him!