Outreaches to poor in Kherson
Remember that it’s a very icy cold winter in Ukraine at the moment, with much snow on the ground, and minus temperatures. What we’ve been doing is buying firewood that has come from old wooden houses that have been bombed or fallen apart and delivering it to poor village people who can’t heat their homes because Russia has bombed all the nation’s power stations.
Our main purpose with the House of Hope is to accommodate those who have lost their homes, and to reach the poor in bombed and damaged Ukraine. Every day our drivers are out visiting destitute and bombed villages. While distributing Survival Packs with non-perishable foods, hygiene products and medicines, they begin to give beautiful Children’s Bibles to the poor. As each group receives their gifts, they all gather around the van, and the van driver shares the Gospel Message with them, leads them to Jesus, and prays for them.
These mini gospel meetings most times draw a crowd. Some elderly person starts singing a hymn, and that draws other people to the van. This continues until all the Survival Packs and Bibles have all been handed out. Then it’s back to the House of Hope which is southwest of Odesa, about five hours’ drive from Kherson, where the van is filled with provisions and Bibles for the next day’s journey.
There is a sense of urgency that drives our workers to push themselves to reach people with the Gospel, especially the poor and handicapped. There is always the offer to evacuate these people (to the House of Hope and beyond the border to relative safety) but many don’t want to leave their homes, even if they are bomb-damaged. They don’t want to move too far from their men who are defending the area, and they are frightened to go to an unfamiliar country that may speak their language but have different customs.
If the other vans are not evacuating people, they are taking Survival Packs and Bibles to the hundreds of villages in the Odesa province, north of the House of Hope, as we have mentioned previously, where over the two years of COVID (before the war started), our teams, which included the teenagers who had been rescued from the ghettos, sewers and drains under the city, reached to over 485 villages and brought over 12,000 people to Jesus, gave them Bibles and started “House Churches” where the people gathered their neighbours, gave them food, and read from their children’s Bible to them. During that time, one of the very old pastors noted that this huge spread of God’s Word and the Gospel Message had not been seen like this in 200 years. And to think it was facilitated by homeless teenagers and our van drivers, not by some great evangelist.
Nuclear Attack threatened.
We are pushing hard to evacuate people and children as quickly as possible due to Russia’s threats to use chemical and nuclear weapons. As typical bullies, they are destroying parts of Eastern Ukraine which they claimed as Russian territory. The locals didn’t want that and fought back. At that point, the Russian attitude was revealed, that “If we can’t have it, no one else will either. We’ll destroy it.”
Bakhmut, mentioned so much in the press, is a clear example of this. A Russian train was filmed delivering chemical bombs that were buried very close to the Nuclear Power Plant at Zaporizhzhia nearby. If this exploded, the nuclear experts say the devastation would be the equivalent of six Chernobyl explosions. A mushroom cloud was seen after one of the recent explosions – perhaps a test by the Russians. This motivates us to get as many as possible out of that area, and to safety in another nation. I anticipate we are going to have a rush to evacuate hundreds of panicking people and children out of Ukraine – in a hurry!
House of Hope Teenagers to stay in Düsseldorf until June 2023
Sasha wrote from Germany a few days ago, “We had a good meeting today at the Germany Welfare Centre. God gave us favour to speak with a very nice lady official, who took her time explaining how drastically the refugee welfare system is overloaded. We’ve had to wait in line for almost 12 months for this initial meeting to start the process. Eventually we resubmitted all forms and applications for all the House of Hope Children and Vitaly and Nadezhda – that is all the children evacuated, which took us more than 5 hours to get through. Then they said that we could expect to hear from them with a letter confirmation in about four to six months.”
They are recognised as refugees, but a glitch in the system hasn’t allowed them any welfare payments – they don’t get any benefits as refugees until the letter of confirmation arrives. So, nothing changes - we’ve paid for their wellbeing for the last year and will continue to do so.
When they left Ukraine in a desperate hurry in February last year, apparently there was no time to get the papers signed by the Child Protection Services that these children were orphans in the care of the House of Hope. Sasha’s meeting with the German lady sorted that out. But these papers are necessary to get them into Norway, because Norway is not in the European Union and operates according to different rules. That is why Esther, their “house mother” is in Ukraine at present getting those papers signed and in order. Even in a war situation, complicated paperwork is necessary.
Please pray for this tumultuous situation and the finance we need to keep it all flowing smoothly and meet the children’s needs. They have had a terribly rough time leaving their country in war time, and being disappointed with the politics in a country that they thought would welcome them.
These are our budgets for each month –
Ukraine
Survival packs (food, medicines & hygiene products) 400 families x $25 $10,000
House of Hope running expenses & maintenance $ 3,600
Food for those in the house $ 2,500
Survival Packs for the Eastern Ukraine villages $12,500 (As we can’t get money into Ukraine, we buy what’s needed outside and take it in, with the vans returning from evacuating refugees)
Fuel for the vans $ 2,500
Germany
House of Hope children’s needs $ 4,500
Rental of the house for the 9 senior students plus house mother $ 3,000
That's a total monthly requirements $ 38,600, please pray and seek to stand with us to help
these needy children and adults.
Also, on March 1st, two Christian volunteers were driving their van to a village, in the Kherson region. They had just delivered some emergency aid and three minutes later were on their way to collect and evacuate a family with many children. Fifty meters before arriving at the house, a Russian shell hit their van. Miraculously, the two men survived but are in a serious condition, and one of them is in danger of having his arm amputated.