The Organizations

For those of you who aren't familiar with my history with Donetsk, I suppose I should talk about how we came to know about the city. This plays into Galya's story, so background may be helpful.

Shannon and I (with the girls) attend Grace Church in Roseville, Minnesota. Our church has, through the past decade or so (someone from GCR can correct me if I'm wrong) had a partnership with two ministries here in the area: Donetsk Christian University and The Good Shepherd Shelter.

Donetsk Christian University (DCU) is a university with a mission to train up Christian leaders, ministers and missionaries, with a mind especially to support the churches in the former Soviet Union. It was started in 1991, at the time Ukraine became independent of Russia. The history of the university is found here. Pictures are here. It's a good university, with (as far as I can tell) a good reputation. They are facing challenges, and I recommend that the interested keep tabs on their needs and perhaps contribute. No pressure, and they didn't ask me to say it. I'm just a believer in what they're doing here, and I think they do it well. (Better yet, come to teach one of these summers.)

One of the things we do on our trips here is to help DCU with their summer English Intensive program. DCU has a school-year Saturdays program for teaching English as both a marketing and a fundraising tool. It also helps with outreach and community involvement. Every summer they have a four-week "intensive" session where students sit for morning English classes, and then in the afternoons they are turned over to us for a number of activities designed to foster English conversation practice. This involves things like giving us tours (in English) of the city, playing games, one/one conversations, etc. It's a great experience, and if you can't tell by my writing, I enjoy communicating with lots of words. This is, as it turns out, a useful skill here at DCU. The English Intensives are built as two two-week sessions. Grace comes for one of those sessions each year to help with the afternoon and evening English programs.

A photo album from one of the 2007 English Intensive session is here. This would have been the first session, I believe, since we were not here for it. And here's a blog from the team from Asuza Pacific University who was with us here in 2008. Great fun, that was, working with them.

One of the highlights is that we can keep in touch with many of our students, as you may have noticed from this blog. I've had the pleasure of introducing a few of them to the family while we're here, and via email and Facebook (join now! I need more friends!) I'm keeping in touch with friends from both of the past two years, which are the two years I've been able to attend.

By the way, the Olga of whom we've been speaking so highly is highlighted in this story. Lawrence, Colleen, Olga and other teachers are shown here. Sergey is mentioned and shown here. Just thought you may want to put faces to the names we've been giving.

The other part of our work here is to visit the Good Shepherd Shelter in Makeevka. (While the rest of this post is for Rene', the rest of you can read this too.) And I'll get this out of the way up front: Pictures, donations, history. The Riccardellis were here working at Good Shepherd, and have some stories and pictures on their blog too.

I'm not posting that lump o'links to give the shelter short shrift. Actually, I wish I could do more. We haven't been able to visit Good Shepherd while here, although in hindsight we'd have liked to have planned something while the Riccardellis were there. It's one of the highlights of our teams' visits to spend time with the children and encourage the staff. We visit the shelter on some of the mornings and weekend time while here for the DCU English Intensives. We spend time doing crafts and playing games. I'll even bet you didn't know I was fast becoming a beadie-baby expert from these visits. And now I'm not sure that I should have told you...

Some of my favorite memories have been doing tie-dye t-shirts last year, with the accompanying water balloon fight; this year's making of winter hats (which they were wearing for the next few hours in the summer sun); and not being able to go without receiving multiple hugs.

Good Shepherd is not technically an orphanage. Kids staying there either have a parent/guardian who can't/doesn't care for them, or are on a stop on the way to an orphanage. As such, kids from the shelter can't be adopted from the shelter - at least as I understand it. This past summer, Rene' (a member of our team the past few years) was able to bring a number of the older kids to DCU for the English Intensive, so we got some extra social time with them even on campus. Having Dasha join the Grace teenagers in my room watching Pirates on my laptop was fun, for instance.

On a complete tangent, while Googling Good Shepherd Makeevka for potential links for this post, I noticed that this here blog appears on the first page. How's that for heady/prompt service?

I'm a big believer in groups like these; DCU and Good Shepherd do wonderful work, and I'm glad to have some small part in it. And when I'm back in the States I'll try to remember to post some pictures from the past two years so you can see some of what we've done. But beyond the work we've helped with here, these two organizations have a soft spot in my heart because without the two of them we'd never have met Galya.

To that tomorrow. (Or later today; just noticed that for the third night in a row I'm up past 2:00 AM.)

God bless,
Ron