May 20, 2008
Hi Everyone.....Hope this email finds you all well. We just
wanted to give an update on some of the items you have been praying
about for the Care Home.
Tomorrow we will be getting propane in our big tank. Since
our last email, we have been running on fumes, but many people came forward
to help and we will have enough for the rest of the summer. Praise the
Lord!
Ileana is still in Germany going through
more training. Roberta talked with her last night and she is doing
fine. She will return to ROL the first part of June. Please continue to
pray for her and her family during this separation.
Also, Bob is with us once again. And as usual he has
brought many needed and usable items to us from England. He will be
returning home this next Saturday. Please pray for his safe return.
We are still needing a team of
2-6 people to help us with a promised camp the last week of July. It
will be a youth camp from very poor families. The camp will run from
July 28- Aug 1, God willing! Please pray about being part of the camp.
Also Lili, one of our staff, has
been sick. Please pray for God's continuing healing touch.
Stan & Virginia Edwards have been here from the US for the last
three months helping us here at ROL in our everyday work. They have
been GREAT help!!!! They return home on Friday and we ask your prayers
for their safe return also.
Keep Rosi, one of our Care Home
moms, in your prayers as she will be giving birth soon. Please ask the
Lord to help her and her daughters ( Mirela-7
& Florina-8) to really trust in Him and to have their eyes
wide open to His gift of salvation thru His Son Jesus Christ. Also the
girls have such a hard time learning in school
because of the terrible abuse in their young lives. Pray for help in
this area. THANKS!
All of us here at the Care Home send our love!!!!!!!!
Again thank you all for the constant prayers, support and encouragement
that you are to us. May our Lord shower you with His precious Love!!!!
In Christ Jesus.............Doug, Roberta, Antonio and All
from ROL
___________________________________________________________________________________________
May, 2008 Prayer Letter
Hi
Everyone, It has been awhile since we have sent out a prayer
request. Hope this finds you all well and loving the Lord more each
day!!!!
Things
here at the Care Home have been very busy. We haven't had any real
major problems for awhile now and we are thanking God for that! Spring
is here, gardens are growing and at last the kids are able to play
outside every day.
We
do need some specific prayers for the work here that I will share with
you.
1.
We are in need of a team (2-6 people) to come help us with a youth camp
from July 28-Aug 1. It is a camp for very poor kids from a number of
villages about 3 hours drive from here. We work with a Romanian pastor
and wife team from there who have a real heart for the children. Last
year we hosted their camp and 38 kids came to Cornesti for the camp.
They and we were very blessed. We had a team forming for this camp out
of a church in Nebraska, but one of the couples
dropped out and the other couple for some reason was diverted to Poland for a camp instead. So we
need some people to come help us with this. If anyone is interested
please email us soon as possible. THANKS!
2.
Please pray for Bob Sumner as he once again will travel from England to Cornesti with a large
trailer of supplies for our work here. He will leave on Thursday night
and arrive here, God willing, on Saturday evening.
3.
Also our Ileana has gone to Germany for a month of training
for leading a team of elderly care workers. Please pray for her
and her family as they are separated for this time.
4.
We are on empty in our big propane tank that heats all our hot water
and does all our cooking. We need to fill it about twice a year and we
don't have any money for it. Please pray about helping us in this
need.
5.
Also we have a team coming next Monday from the Vienna Christian School. They come each year with
about 15-18 adults and students to help us at the Care Home for a week.
Please pray for safe travel and that their stay here will be a real
spiritual uplifting for them all!!!
We
appreciate all your prayers for God's work here in Romania. Please also pray that we
the staff constantly be mirrors of Christ Jesus. We as a staff have grown
strong in unity and love for each other over the last 8 months and we
see the positive results in that with the people we minister to. Thanks
for praying!
In
His Love.......... Doug, Roberta and Antonio
_________________________________________________________
March 2008 Prayer Letter
Dear Friends and Family,
It’s hard for us to imagine but this summer we’ll have been
living and ministering in Romania
for ten years! Those of us who have watched and experienced the social
transformations that have taken place in this country are truly amazed
at what we have seen. Building is booming and prices are skyrocketing
weekly. They are even starting work to asphalt the road in front of our
care home and are planning to build a subdivision soon on the property
behind us! Here’s some of what we’re seeing:
- The laws are
constantly changing and with that comes more regulations and tons
more paperwork, resulting in higher fees and taxes. Everything
takes more time and costs more money.
Take, for example, something simple like eggs. We’re not supposed
to buy fresh eggs from the village; we’re only supposed to buy store
bought eggs to serve in the care home, and only from a store that has a
veterinarian on staff who can give us a special paper that says the
eggs are certified, which we need to get every time we buy them and
keep it on file. (And we have to have another paper for the meat we buy
and for the dairy products we buy, which adds about an hour getting the
paperwork every time we go shopping!) Each egg is stamped with an
expiration date. When we bring the eggs home, we must wash them in
bleach water and we can’t store them in the carton we bought them in,
but must store them in another container in the refrigerator, and they
can’t be stored in a refrigerator with meat or dairy products. Then,
with everything we cook, we must keep a sample in the fridge in a
marked jar for three days. And that is just for eggs, there’s tons of
other regulations and paperwork we must comply with for everything
else. We have to have a contract with a hazardous waste incinerator
company to dispose of all our leftover meat products, chicken bones and
stuff like that. When we first moved here, they sold local chicken eggs
on the counter and they never refrigerated them in the stores or in
homes. And hardly anyone had refrigerators, now we need three of them
just to comply with the laws!
- Wages are
rising. The average monthly wage that a university graduate made
ten years ago, if you triple it- is now the equivalent of the
current minimum wage. Wages have multiplied 5 to
10 times what they were a decade ago. As a
ministry, we are not a profit making business. All our finances
come through donations. But because of the ever weakening dollar
and because we are required to pay almost as much to the
government in taxes as we pay our workers, it’s been extremely
hard for us to keep up with the necessary wage increases for our
workers. And we are not able to hire additional staff that we
need.
- Costs are rising
even faster than wages. Gasoline is about $7 a gallon, and chicken
is now about $5 a pound. Every week we watch the prices rise,
sometimes 30% in just one week! With an average to good wage being
from about $10 to $25 a day, with a top wage at just less than $50
per day, you can imagine how difficult it is to survive with
prices like that. The natural gas and electric prices are
constantly rising and all of us are having a hard time trying to
keep up.
- Houses in our
village; mud brick, three rooms, with no indoor plumbing, are
currently selling for more than twice what we paid for the care
home nine years ago. And the care home was a huge 12 room, cement
brick house with indoor plumbing and two bathrooms, on a double
lot! (After renovating it and adding the upstairs, we are now a 22
room house with 6 bathrooms)
- The property we
purchased next door to the care home, (that we plan to build the
elderly care home on,) is now worth more than double what we paid
for it two and a half years ago
There are some people in this society that are doing quite well,
but the average family struggles financially, as pay rates can’t keep
up with the rising costs. All the ministries we know are struggling.
Unfortunately, for the people we minister to, the people from the
lowest levels of society, the social and economic changes that are
taking place are making life extremely difficult for them. And it seems
that those who are the most helpless, the children and the elderly, are
the ones most negatively affected of all. Record numbers of children
are being abandoned as parents leave the country for work, or by those
who just can’t afford to take care of them anymore. The number of women
abandoning their children when their relationships break up is amazing
and they don’t seem to even try to keep their kids, they just accept
that they can’t. Romania
has the highest abortion rate and child abandonment rate in all of Europe,
and there are no statistics that reflect the plight of the elderly, but
we see their hopelessness and despair. The elderly are left alone and
uncared for in little falling down houses that are beyond repair. They
don’t make enough on their pensions to even buy the medicine they need
let alone food or firewood for heat, or to pay their electric bills or
property taxes. The statistics estimate, that at least a quarter of the
population, or more, lives at a subsistence level of poverty, with no
hope of things getting better for them, only worse as the days go by.
We estimate that this level of poverty affects about 75 to 80% of the
people living in our village. But there is effectively no help for them
through the government.
We’re always getting calls to take in an elderly person in dire
circumstances, and others are coming over to beg us to let them live
here. A few weeks ago another elderly woman who lives in our village
came to beg us to be able to come and live at the care home. She said
that she hadn’t had a bath in three months and seldom had food. Her
face wore an expression of sheer hopelessness. We can no longer
legally bring elderly in to live at the care home, until we are able to
build the elderly home, do all the paperwork required to receive the
accreditation for caring for the elderly, and go through all the hoops
necessary to get all the approvals to legally function. This woman
didn’t care about all of that -she said she’d be dead by then- all she
knows is that she needs help now. We did what we could; we talked with
her, listened to her, showered her, washed and dried her hair, cut her
finger nails, gave her some new clothes to wear, washed her old
clothes, fed her lunch, and then took her back to her little falling
down shack of a house. As she stood in the middle of her hovel of a
house, the look on her face read, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me
here. Please help me- you are my only hope.” We cannot take elderly
into the care home to live, but we can, and are doing, some home
visitations to the elderly in our village. Until we are able to build
the elderly care home this is all we can do.
Last winter we visited a government elderly home and one of the
men there said they felt like they’ve been thrown in a ditch and left
to die; they had terrible conditions and heat only one hour a day in
the building where they lived. Our hearts break for the plight of the
elderly. God’s heart breaks for them too, and He’s given us a heart and
a passion to help them by building the elderly care home. He’s going
before us in amazing ways preparing for it to happen. Ileana has even
been offered a scholarship to take a course in Germany
on caring for the elderly that will give her the new upgraded
certification required by the EU for this type of work. This course
will give her the certification and the education required for her to
manage a team of elderly care workers. She’s been given this
opportunity because the school knew we are planning to build the
elderly home and would need this, and because God is moving forward
with His plans!
Many ministries work only with the best and the brightest of society-
that is where they feel is the best use of their limited time,
resources and effort; but God has laid it on our hearts to work with
the least of these, the people that nobody seems to care about, the
people that society has forgotten about or doesn’t even seem to want to
acknowledge that they exist. Jesus said that whatever we do for the
least of these, we do for Him, and we know He loves and cares for each
and every person, even if no one else does.
Ten years ago, when we were in the process of preparing to come
to Romania,
many people made negative comments to us, trying to discourage us from
coming. “What can you do? How can you make a difference?! Whatever you
could do would just be a drop in the bucket! The problems are just too
big!” Then a friend told us this story of a man walking down the beach.
It was a very hot day, the tide was out, and there were thousands of
starfish washed up on the shore, dying in the sun. As he walked along
the beach, he stopped by a little boy, who was picking up the starfish
one by one and throwing them back into the water. He exclaimed to the
boy, “What are you doing?! There are thousands of them! It’s just a
drop in the bucket! What does it matter?” As the boy threw another
starfish into the sea, he responded, “It matters to this one!” SPLASH!
Jesus saves us one by one, and it sure has mattered to this one
that He saved me! We know it has mattered to
many people that the Lord raised us up and brought us here to do this
work and to continue in this work. And it wouldn’t have been possible
without our dedicated Romanian staff as well as the literally hundreds
of people who have faithfully come alongside us throughout the years
and helped out through coming on short term teams, or helping through
prayer support, financial support, or through gathering up and sending
supplies. We couldn’t have made it through the last ten years, or even
the last month, without each of you helping and praying for us. We
thank all of you for your help! Everything you have contributed towards
this work matters and has made a difference in many lives. And it’s
more than just a drop in the bucket; or as someone once said, each drop
eventually fills the bucket!
Often, the problems do look too big, insurmountable even. The
official Romanian government statistics show that in 2007, there were
70,000 children over the age of two abandoned into the orphanage system
in this country. There are no official numbers for children under the
age of two who are abandoned, but if those are added the number could
easily rise to 100,000. Of that number only about one quarter, around
26,000 children have been placed in foster care families.
We feel that God was watching over the 6 children who had been
abandoned, last year, in our care home because, in spite of the
statistics, all were placed in foster families together with their
siblings. All the children are now in really nice families and doing
very well. One little boy, Victor, who had just turned four years old,
was asked by a social worker, before he was placed into a family, “
Where is your Mama?” “She abandoned me,” was his response. “Well, who
takes care of you?” she asked him.
“God!” was his confident response! This is from a little boy who
suffered from much emotional and physical abuse from his mother and her
boyfriend. He came to the care home when he was two years old and we as
a staff were very concerned about the effects of the abuse we saw in
him, and started to see in his newborn baby sister, under their
mother’s negative influence. Victor lived in the care home about a year
with his mother. Then for about 8 months after his mother left, our
staff, our care home moms, some short term team members, and another
Christian family, cared for him and his sister until they were placed
in the foster family they are now living with. God worked in a powerful
way in this little boy’s life, and he is now a happy little boy,
confident and certain of God’s love and care. It mattered to this one.
And it mattered to many more than him! Nothing
done in Christ is ever in vain.
Tante Maria’s niece, Doina, told me that the last five years of Tante Maria’s life were the best years of her life;
those were the years she was mostly bedridden and lived in the care
home, but she came to know the Lord as her Savior and she had His peace
and His people caring for her and loving her. She blessed all of us as
well; often she told me that she’d pray for us when she saw us leaving
in the car. She loved women to come and visit and talk in her room. I
often thought we were so inadequate to care for her and the other
elderly women we had here, and also the moms and children we have
living here; most have mental handicaps and suffer from a range of
serious emotional, medical, relational, social, and spiritual problems.
We are so incredibly inadequate, and yet we offer the best that is
available in this country for them! And most importantly we offer them
the hope and knowledge of Christ. That realization constantly amazes
me. It matters to them. When someone is referred to us for admittance
into our care home, and it will be the same for the elderly home, they
have no other options, none whatsoever. But God brings them, and it’s
He that is at work in their lives, in their hearts and in their souls;
for eternity, not just for the here and now.
A few days ago, we interviewed a young mother of a 7 month old
baby, for possible admittance into the care home. She had been raised
in the government orphanage system and is determined to raise her child
herself and not abandon him into the system. But as soon as she walked
into the room, we realized that her mental handicap was much worse than
the moms we already have in the care home. I felt overwhelmed at her
situation. She should be in an assisted living house for mentally
handicapped adults, but there is nothing like that in this country.
There is an institution that cares for extremely handicapped people,
but nothing for this girl. We are not equipped for caring long term for
someone like her, and it was clear to all of us that she wouldn’t be
able to function in our home. As I pondered her situation, knowing
there was no help for her available; God filled me with a realization
that even though there is no government help for her, He still loves
her and has a plan for her life. He is the only real hope for any of
us.
Within the last couple of months we admitted into the home a
pregnant mom with her two daughters, 7 & 8
years old. It surprised us to realize that the girls didn’t even know
their colors, or how to count or the alphabet, or even their own ages.
Because of the father’s abuse, and their poor living conditions, child
protection was called in to intervene. They were going to take the
children, but the mom pleaded with them that she didn’t want to loose
her girls. The only option child protection could offer her was our
care home; otherwise she’d be forced to give her children up and she
would have no other option but to stay with the abusive boyfriend.
Because of the accountability of our foundation and child protection
being involved, this was the first time in all the years we’ve been
doing this work that we had the support and cooperation with the police
department in a domestic violence case. (If the mother had called the
police on her own, the most that would’ve happened is that the police
would’ve issued the man a ticket for disturbing the peace. No help
would’ve been given to the woman and children.) We are proud of the way
our staff care team works together and has become so professional and
effective in how we evaluate and intervene in these cases. We have a
lot of experience now. Another positive support is that we have
counseling available now, through child protection, for our moms and
kids who’ve suffered from abuse.
We’ve spent the past fall and winter with our staff, working
through Robert McGee’s Search for Significance materials and we also
had a Janz Team staff care person here from
the UK
who worked with us, doing the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator
assessments with us. All of our efforts to focus together on our staff
have paid off and has built us up in a positive way. We all seem to be
on the same page and heading together in the same direction and working
very efficiently together, as God wants us to be as members of His
Body, the body of Christ. Our staff is dedicated and experienced and
quite capable. We believe that God has been at work in us individually
and together, building us into a solid foundation from which we will
grow. We need to add more staff for the care home work and eventually
we will build a larger staff care team as we go forward with building
the elderly care home. Our plan is that, eventually, we will not just
have one social worker, or one psychologist, but a team of social
workers and psychologists working together with a medical team, support
staff, administration, aides, and cooking staff. This team will be
comprised of those working primarily in the maternal care home with
those working primarily in the elderly care home. Both homes need
staffing and will operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a
year. It’s a big expenditure but it is valuable work and matters to
many.
Many of our care home moms are at risk socially because of their
mental handicaps and other disadvantages, but we plan to be able to
provide training and meaningful work for them in the elderly care home.
Because we are learning how to work with and mentor them, they would do
fine, under our supervision. But elsewhere, in this society, they
wouldn’t be given a chance, and realistically, they wouldn’t be able to
function. We hope to provide jobs for some of the people in the village
that we’ve gotten to know over the years, too. That would be great help
to some of the families here. Even though we struggle daily, we are
certain that God has a plan that will expand this work to include the
elderly care home, and in doing so, will expand the opportunities for
meaningful work and service for many. In the meantime, we will continue
to do what we can do while we wait to see how God unfolds His plan.
Romania
is a society undergoing tremendous social change. But unfortunately for
the socially disadvantaged, the elderly, the “at risk” children, the
mentally handicapped, the young adults who were raised in orphanages,
women and children in abusive situations, and the unborn, the social
changes taking place look bleak for them. But God does have a plan and
a purpose for each and every one of us, no matter what our
circumstances:
"For I know the plans that I have for you, “declares the
Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and
a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will
listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with
all your heart.”-Jeremiah 29:11-13
Even when Tante Maria was bed ridden,
she prayed. We can all serve God in our own way, no matter what our
limitations or our circumstances. Lavinia can
hardly read or write, but she is struggling to learn the material to
get her certification to work with the elderly, because she has such a
heart to help people. God is not raising up
the best and most qualified to work here He never has and probably
never will. The wounded are the ones that have always been drawn to
work in this ministry. And He is raising up
the wounded and mentally handicapped care home moms into His caring
service, and in the process, He is working in each one of us, teaching
us to serve and love one another. That is discipling
and the building up of the Body of Christ. That is the work of the
Lord.
"…speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up
in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the
whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint
supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part,
causes the
growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”
–Ephesians 4:15-16
“And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some
as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping
of the saints for the work of service, to the building up
of the body of Christ: Until we all attain to the unity of the
faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature
man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness
of Christ.” - Ephesians 4:11-13
The core of our work is to teach people
God’s Word and how to live it, under the authority of Jesus Christ, and
to equip Christians for the work of service and to build up into
maturity the Body of Christ, working together to attain the unity of
the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to the fullness of
Christ, in love. Weather we are working together with our staff, or
with short term team members, or with the moms and children of the care
home, or children and adults from the village, this is our primary
purpose and goal: discipling, teaching people
how to live according to the Word of God, equipping the saints for the
work of service and building up the Body of Christ in love, so that we
all mature into the fullness of Christ. God hasn’t given us the best
and most able of society to work with. He has instead shown us an
underside of society that few ever see or experience. But the least of
these in the Master’s hand become tools of glory and honor for Him and
His purposes.
In the ten years that God has had us here in Romania,
doing this work, we have seen and learned a lot. It has mattered much
to us, that we’ve been here, serving God this
way. We have seen how totally inadequate we are and how God’s grace is
sufficient. We have seen that God’s ways and thoughts are much different
than ours, and much higher. We have seen things we wished we didn’t
see, things very hard to see; but God used those very things to plant
seeds of passion in us for serving Him and pushing forward in this
work, and for not giving up when it would’ve been easier to do so.
I know this work matters. It is God’s plan that
is being unveiled and fulfilled, not ours. We contribute just one small
part of the whole, but every drop in the bucket of God’s plan matters.
In His love,
Doug, Roberta and Antonio
River of Life Christian Care Home
Cornesti, Romania
carehome@mail.dnttm.ro
www.rol.internationalmessengers.org
In the States:
If you would like to contribute financially towards this work,
please send a check made out to International Messengers, but on a
separate piece of paper, write that the donation is either for Doug and
Roberta Moore’s ministry, the River of Life Care Home (ROL), or Maria
House the elderly care home. And send to International Messengers, PO
Box 618, Clear Lake, IA,
50428
Donations are tax deductible. THANK YOU!
If you would be interested on coming on a short term team please
contact the IM office at 1-800-243-6763 or e-mail the office at office@internationalmessengers.org