Making a Difference a World Away
Every summer my church sends a team of volunteers to minister to orphans in Moldova. And every summer we take one Sunday morning to hear from those volunteers about their trip. My first visit to Rolling Hills coincided with one of those Moldova reports, and that was all I needed to know that this was the church for me. Today at church we heard about the most recent Moldova mission trip, and, as usual, I wished I had brought a Kleenex with me.
If you don’t go to Rolling Hills, you may not know much about Moldova. It’s the smallest and poorest of the former members of the Soviet Union. It’s also a major source of sex trafficking in Europe, and orphans are particularly vulnerable. Of the female orphans, close to half of them end up as prostitutes. The boys don’t fare any better–about half of them end up in organized crime.
Moldova is a beautiful country, and the political and economic systems there have been slowly improving since the fall of Communism. But it’s a tough place to be a kid. Sometimes parents will decide that they can’t afford their child, and they’ll drop the child off at an orphanage with no more than a single change of clothes. Can you imagine being a six-year-old kid, abandoned by your parents with all your worldly belongings fitting inside a shoebox? It breaks my heart just thinking about it.
We sent almost 50 volunteers to Moldova this summer. This was our 11th year doing missions there, working with a number of orphanages over time. Mostly our teams just love on the kids. These kids need love desperately. Most of these kids have had no one in their lives who has loved them unconditionally. No one. A kid who spends a couple of days with a volunteer from a church half a world away learns that she can be loved. That she’s worth something. That her life can have meaning.
One of the mission volunteers who shared today talked about this part of the trip, leaving behind one’s self and the day-to-day distractions and focusing entirely on loving these kids. He said that it must be “a taste of what Christ lived daily.”
One of the challenges of the Moldovan system is that orphans “age out” of the system when they turn 15 or 16. They’re too old to stay at the orphanage, but they’re too young to make it on their own. To help meet this challenge, Rolling Hills, through its non-profit missions organization, Justice & Mercy International, has set up two transitional programs, Grace House for girls and Boys2Leaders for boys. These programs provide a small number of young adults with the training, mentorship, and security they need to navigate these tough years. Although the capacity of these programs is small, the difference they make in the lives of these young people is incredible.
A third way Rolling Hills ministers in Moldova is through sponsorships, which provide kids there with clothes, toiletries, school supplies, and medical care. There are dozens of people at my church who sponsor kids in Moldova, and the connections that these sponsorships lead to are heart-warming. Our pastor, Jeff Simmons, and his family started sponsoring a young lady named Elena a few years ago. If you really want a good cry, go read Jeff’s blog post about walking Elena down the aisle at her wedding a couple of weeks ago!
Listening to the report today from this year’s mission team, I couldn’t help thinking about my little girls. How precious they are! These orphans on the other side of the world are just as precious, and it tears me up that they don’t have the love of a family like my girls do. The kids in Moldova may not have fathers, but they do have a Father who loves them, and I’m so proud of my church for showing them that love.
Image: “Hands,” Barnaby Wasson, Flickr (CC)