Today, we brought out the weaving cards so that the 1-2 year old children in the Baby Home could begin this activity. The speech therapist who had been with us and all our activities the whole week began to explain to the translators that this wouldn’t work and the kids couldn’t do that. Susan Bollinger was persistent that we should try and the therapist agreed. The kids immediately took to this activity and the kids were weaving away! One little girl would raise her hand and exclaim “Yeah” each time she finished threading a hole! She was enthusiastic! The speech therapist was… speechless! At the end of the day, she asked for us to leave the weaving boards so that she could practice that with the children! We knew then we had a hit and had won over the confidence of the speech therapist in what we were doing to try to teach the kids. It was a huge success for us and should lead to developmentally better children for years to come!
At the hospital, we had won over the staff with the tea earlier in the week. Now today there were 12 kids that came in! Wow, we were excited, but hoped we had enough supplies and crafts for everyone to do! In addition, we had three young girls from the Lomonosov Baptist Church join us to help. Two of the girls were the niece’s of Pastor Andre! Of course, we wanted them to do the crafts too! As we counted we had enough! It’s amazing after all the planning we do months ahead; God already knows who will be there when it’s time to do a craft!
I was looking forward to today’s craft with the kids. Months ago I had found these wooded cross trivets that the kids would put mortar into and then decorate with mosaic tile and different colored beads. It took up a lot of volume and weight in the ministry suitcases, but I thought it would be worth the effort. Fortunately, Mike Nevil was there and mixed the mortar for the trivets. It was the mortar that made the project look great! Of course, the kids had something to do with it too!Today, I had Tall Anya, one of the former residents of the Road of Life Family Home; share her personal testimony with the kids at the Hospital. I thought that hearing a young lady not much older that they were would have an impact. She shared in Russian of course and I hope it planted some seeds for these kids that were there. God had already ordained this meeting and had these kids there who needed to hear those words.
I told our team before that we may not be able to measure the success of our mission trip with statistics or a count of the folks led to salvation. Sometimes we don’t know what impact we will have. It’s like what Mother Teresa said to a reporter who asked her about how she would measure the success of the orphanage she was opening that day in India. Mother Teresa responded and said, “The Bible doesn’t talk about success, only obedience”.
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