Help Wanted – The Team

Anatoliy and the children

Ira talks with Masseuse

Mikola, Mark, and Volodya

Anya, in gray, talks with mothers

  When you see these two very common words side by side, Help Wanted, what thoughts come to your mind? My first impression is that a job is available, that there is some work to do. Think about the word help. If I replace it with the word to assist, I immediately envision a very different concept. If I am asked to assist someone, it means that he or she is the captain. I am only the helper.

As a humanitarian aid missionary, I was called to assist God in His work here in Ukraine. Going one step further, I was called to assist the people of Ukraine to care for their children. How could that be accomplished? If I was called to come to Ukraine to do a job, and then leave, that is pretty easy to imagine. But that wasn’t the case. As a matter of fact, I was not exactly sure what God was calling me to do.

My first outreach ministry opened up in Marganets when the father of a friend took me to visit an orphanage. It was his dream, his desire, possibly his calling, to help these children in some way. When I saw the children, the surroundings, and the emptiness in their eyes, I felt the deepest compassion in my heart that I ever had felt. But there was nothing that I personally could do to help them on a regular basis. I would be living in Illichevsk, 320 miles west of Marganets.

This was to be the beginning of my work to assist the people of Ukraine to make changes in their country. This retired 63-year-old father, Anatoliy, had the knowledge, energy, and the drive to make things happen. God had prepared him to be ready to do this work through a lifetime of experiences. He did not have the funding, but by the time that I met him, he had already begun to raise money for the children from the local merchants. The community was very poor, so he could barely raise enough money to help one child, much less 156 children.

Over the next nine years, Anatoliy started programs to help two other groups of children in his city. While that was going on, three more people in three different cities were introduced to me who had hearts to help the children of their country. Ira is my assistant in Illichevsk, Anya manages a massage clinic in Froonza Crimea, and we support a program in Dobromel that Volodya has been operating for 10 years.

Team is the key to any work that will continue successfully. Each one of us, more than I have mentioned, has a particular gift that makes our contribution special for the children. How can one person help more than 500 children in six different organizations, in three cities and a village? It can happen only with a team effort. God has blessed our team and we are seeing many wonderful results.