Report #9 April 17th and 18th.
Well it’s still raining here. They have got much of their garden in but won’t be on the land for a while with the steady rain we have been getting.
We were not planning to leave town today but rather visit some people in town who have been coming to meeting. The first was a lady named Anna. She is a very quiet but comes to all the meetings and came to Lviv Assembly on Sunday for the first time. She lives alone in one room. Her family of 1 unmarried son and a married daughter live in other cities and never come to see her. Her son has not seen her for 14 years. She cried a little but seems to hold it in after having a very difficult life with an alcoholic husband who left her when the children were babies or at least very young. She gave us coffee and we prayed with her before we left.
We then went to another lady Maria who always wants a visit but cannot get out as she is crippled and has serious diabetes. When we got there we were met by a young man who was either drunk or mentally unstable. We sent Svetlana to see what was going on and she found her very unwell but still wanting us to eat a meal she had prepared. With much persuasion, we convinced her we would come back another day. She went into hospital that night and then phoned from the hospital and booked us from hospital for a visit on Saturday. She is a very nice lady and would claim to be saved, we trust so.
We had a good meeting; with a good number out. After meeting we were invited to another Maria for supper. She lost her husband a year ago and lives also in one room with her son. She has been reading some Pentecostal book and has many questions about demon possession and if a person can get rid of a demon by themselves. We feel so angry at the wrong teaching being spread to simple Christians.
We headed home and had a good night’s sleep, even with the rain still hitting the roof of our porch.
Keep praying.
Wednesday.
We headed out for the long trip to Vicovena, the school on the Romanian border that we put new washrooms into. Although it rained and drizzled all the way, with a little fog as we went over the top of the mountains, the 2 hour trip went well. We knew that the children would not be in school as they were all home after an outbreak of Chicken Pox. But we met with Oxana the director and had a “tour” of the washrooms. The men surely did a wonderful job of them. There is only one problem. The town left it so long to join up the sewer pipe that the ground froze and it isn’t hooked up to the main sewer yet. They said it will be done soon! We had hoped to speak to the staff, but some education department people were interviewing each teacher and they would not allow them to meet in a group???
So we went to look at their latest bureaucratic demands that had to do with the schools “sports-hall” as the call their gym. It is heated by fairly modern radiators from a distant wood fired power house. However, there is never enough heat left in the system to heat the whole school and the gym. The bureaucrats now say, and we saw the letter, that if she doesn’t have an electric boiler installed as a separate unit for the gym, by September, they will close off the gym and there will be no more PE for the kids all winter. The letter finished by saying that Oxana would be responsible to find the money to make the renovations. No help from the government AT ALL.
I asked her to get the total cost of doing the job and send me the estimate and we will see what God will do. Remember this school has 450 children in school and approximately 250 live there from Monday to Friday and some stay all the time as they live too far away to go home every week-end. This school is wide open to the Gospel and we have been invited to come and stay for a week and have meetings. We have not been able to do anything about this yet.
Please pray for this project and the open invitation to go to this town that has no evangelical presence, according to Oxana.
Malcolm & Dan
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