Worries, Gnats, and Storytelling

June found us bouncing down remote, back village roads, heading into mosquito territory armed with children's Bibles, puppets and balloons. The plan was to do a mobile kids' club in the northern villages. It was bound to be a grand adventure, as it was every year, but I had my worries and concerns.

My parents were visiting from America--two adventuresome pensioners, who trekked halfway across the globe to see yours truly and my three exuberant offspring. They had braved multiple flights on multiple continents, overcome merciless jet lag, and endured hours of intense Lego playing on the floor. But when I informed them of my imminent trip to the villages and my plan to leave them alone in this foreign city for 3 days, their eyes widened in disbelief and maybe a little horror. My attempts to assuage the situation by informing them that my 3 year-old would stay and keep them company seemed to no purpose.

Before we set out I left detailed instructions on all the essentials: how to use the dishwasher, how to answer the doorbell, how to use the oven, how to use my cell phone, how to turn on Luntik (a Russian cartoon.) To my dismay I forgot to write down the phonetic pronunciations for "milk," "bread," and "water" in case an emergency trip to the store would become necessary.

We set off in the wee hours of the morning (which in Russia in the summer are as bright as mid-day.) Roughly two hours into our trip my husband's cell rang. Through a weak connection I heard my mother's voice say, "I pressed something on your phone and now it appears to be blocked and is asking for a code or something. What do I do?" This call did nothing to allay my fears at leaving them behind in my apartment in the city.

Setting my concerns aside we bounced onward. Arriving in the northern villages, we dove right into our kids' program. We unpacked outside in a park. Curious children played nearby, watching us. We got out our puppets, baseball bat, Frisbee, and balloons. Soon all the kids who had been hesitant a few minutes ago were learning to throw Frisbees and chase fly balls. We talked to the owner of the little house next to the park, and he allowed us to plug our speaker into one of his electrical outlets.

I was up first, to welcome the kids via an orange-haired puppet with green skin. I took my place behind the curtain and got on my knees with Mr. Green on my right hand. The park's ground was surprisingly uneven, and I couldn't find a space without tree roots. Soon the music was on and the program began. And so did the feeding frenzy. The bugs in the Russian taiga and the surrounding villages are not just terrible--they're like killer mutants. As I struggled to stay in place the mosquitoes, gnats and horseflies fed on my lower legs (why oh why didn't I wear long pants???)

Into the 2nd skit and we had forgotten that we needed all staff to perform, and there was no one to hold up the informal puppet stage aka blue-flowered bed sheet. We quickly recruited my two sons, aged 6 and 8. My dear Sam, the 6 year old, could not understand the delicacies of this task, and constantly lowered and raised the sheet. I overcompensated with my puppet and the children giggled and snickered at my puppet bobbing up and down. Our 2nd microphone stopped working and so the 1st one was passed back and forth between the huddled and squatting puppeteers. The mike was hurriedly shoved to my mouth for my line and my lip received a jolting shock of 220 Russian volts.

Our puppets sang and danced as the tree roots ground into my knees and the mosquitoes and gnats called their 3rd and 4th cousins to come and eat at the feeding bonanza. We found another willing volunteer to hold up our sheet after Sam ran off to play and left it flapping in the wind. After we finished our program I stiffly stood up, willing the blood to return to my extremities below the knee. The team began to pack up our equipment, looking in vain for the baseball bat that had been carried off when we were occupied with the program. My right eyelid had been bitten by gnats and was already starting to swell (it stayed swollen for 3 days.)

I smiled weakly to the kids and was ready to go home and lick my wounds...but then one girl after another came up to me to talk...to take pictures. They hugged me and joyfully took children's Bibles. They asked if we would return the next day. Other team members were also talking to thrilled kids. They had loved the show. Teenagers had even stuck around through the puppets' songs, and wanted to talk to us now afterwards. It was a success. Even though I'd had my worries and concerns, and the program had not gone very smoothly in my opinion, I loved it too. From the moment I slid my hand into the green-skinned puppet and began to tell silly jokes into the microphone, I knew I was right where I belonged, doing exactly what I was created to do--to share stories with children--to tell them The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Tangerines, Balloons, and Missions

What does it mean to be a missionary and a mom? What does that look like in my life? Are there days when I am one or the other, or do the two run together and blend like yellow and red becoming the color of tangerines?

My desire is for my kids to treasure the values that we pass on to them, while catching the vision too for evangelism and mercy ministry. This means including them in our work as much as possible. We do this by sharing with our boys about what we do, having them join us in prayer, and sometimes bringing them along on different projects (their favorite part!)

A few summers ago I was thrilled that my then 6-year old was joining us to do a village kids' club program. He couldn't contain his excitement, sitting in the back seat of our mission's van, as we bounced down deeply-rutted remote roads. The back of the vehicle was packed to overflowing with puppets, prizes, a limbo stick, and a helium tank for balloons.

We pulled up to the village school and 100 smiling kids of all ages surrounded our van. My son helped us unpack all our stuff into the school's gymnasium. He soon found some other boys that rivaled him in exuberance, and they began to run around the gym together.

Content that my son was enjoying himself and participating, in his own way, in our project, I busied myself with setting up. We began our program and shared with the kids about how each person is special and valuable. We talked about respecting one another, regardless of physical appearance or mental ability. I was very busy leading the program and organizing the puppets, but I could see my son out of the corner of my eye and knew that he was OK. We had a rousing game of limbo, followed by a question and answer time, that soon grew chaotic. For every correct answer to one of our questions, a child earned a balloon. My fellow missionaries worked quickly to fill up the red, yellow, and green balloons with helium to meet the demand. Soon we ran out of balloons and passed out candy until our bags were empty.

As the pandemonium died down, I felt a tap on my shoulder. "Your son is crying." A young girl pointed to the corner of the room. Alarmed, I hurried over and saw my son, turned toward the wall, sobbing.

"What is it? What happened?" I asked. Had he been wounded?

My son turned his wet face toward me. "I knew all the answers," he said, tears dripping off his chin, "and had my hand up the whole time, and you never picked me. I wanted a balloon too."

Suddenly I had a flashback of 3rd grade. I saw myself raising my hand and waving it for every question, and hearing the teacher say, "does anyone OTHER THAN ERIN know the answer?" I was crushed. After a while, I just stopped raising my hand at all.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "You're right. I should've picked you."

I hugged him and dried his tears. He quickly forgot his misfortune and ran off to play. But I didn't forget. What a lesson I had learned!

As much as I want my son to be a member of our team, and participate in our projects, he is first and foremost a little boy. A little boy who wanted a balloon.

As I navigate this adventuresome life of being a mom and a missionary, I am still learning. Learning how to balance. Learning how to blend the right proportions of reds and yellows in life. As I reach out to others, I hold my own little ones closest to me.With God's grace, He is teaching me how I can share His love with others, while keeping my own children my main mission.

Prison, Banana Bread, and Marriage

People always ask me two things: how did you end up in Russia, and how did you meet your husband? In honor of recently celebrating nine years of marriage, I decided to answer the 2nd question in this blog post.

It's impossible to tell our story without first telling his. Rashid was born in the republic of Karakalpakstan (today located in Uzbekistan) in the Soviet Union. His Ukrainian mother and Russian Tatar father had both moved there with their extended families to work in the booming cotton industry. Rashid grew up headstrong and determined, driving his teachers nuts and forcing his school director to say she had never met such a boy in her 20 years in education. He found himself a bad group of friends and often got into fights with other boys.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in the 90s, Karakalpakstan was hit with financial woes, as well as ecological disaster. The Aral Sea had shrunk to 1/3 of its original size, due to over-zealous irrigation, and the cotton fields were polluted with unregulated fertilizers and pesticides. The health of the region plummeted as the water became dangerously dirty and the infant mortality rate shot sky-high. Rashid's baby sister had been born sickly, and the family decided they would move to Ukraine, which had been known as the "Bread Basket" of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, like any place after a revolution, there were also financial difficulties as one collective farm after another went bankrupt. Rashid's parents were hoping the change in scenery would help him find a better group of friends, but he was soon skipping school and hanging out with a bad crowd. One day in their village they saw a Volga--not the river, but the car. There were few cars in the village at all, and the Volga was the coolest car of them all. Rashid and his little brother hotwired the car and took it for a joyride, then left it a few blocks from where they'd found it. The car, it turned out, belonged to the county prosecutor. The boys were arrested for car theft, and Rashid received a sentence of 4 years.

Rashid soon found out that life, even in juvenile detainment, has its own order and he did his best to get in with the "bad guys." In prison he was in constant fights, so he was often punished and sent to solitary confinement. He figured when he got out of prison he would become a part of the Ukrainian criminal underworld, what Russians refer to as "bandits."

After he had been in prison for about 3 years, he found himself repeatedly stuck in solitary confinement. Finally he was put in there for 3 months. After a while, even his hardened heart began to despair. He began to think. A lot. There was nothing to do in there but think. They even folded up your bed during the day so you couldn't sleep. Soon he began to go back over his life. He realized he had done nothing his whole life that he could be proud of. He thought of his mother and how she wrote him tear stained letters, begging him to wisen up. He realized he was nothing, that nobody wanted him or needed him, and even society thought him a burden. He began to think if he could just change his ways, maybe he could do something helpful for people like become a surgeon. He asked the officers for books and they brought him books from the prison library. He began to read book after book, teaching himself how to speed read, but the emptiness inside of him grew and grew.

One day he remembered how, as a child, he had seen his grandmother reading a Bible. After she had laid it aside and left, he grabbed the book and started to read it. His uncle then came and took it away and said, "That's not for you to touch. That's the Book of Life." That phrase "Book of Life" now stuck in Rashid's head. Maybe that book, he thought, will help me to change my ways. He asked the guard for a Bible. He brought him a little Gideon's New Testament. Rashid quickly sped through it, understanding nothing. He decided to read it again, slowly. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with what he read. He felt like he had been searching his whole life for what was written in this book. And more than anything, he was sorry for the way he had lived, and he wanted to live like it said in the book.

Rashid came out of solitary a man changed. The emptiness in his heart was gone. His fellow inmates couldn't believe the change in him. They began to call him "Batushka" or priest. No longer did he hang out with the hardened criminals. Although that can be punishable in some cases by death, they left him alone and almost seemed to respect him. When he was released from prison, his parents were in shock. The neighbors also heard that he had become a Christian and they came too to see. His neighbor kept saying "I can't believe it's you. I just can't believe it's you....you're so different."

Work was scarce in the village. When a group of young people from a church in Perm, Russia came to vacation in his village, they invited Rashid to come back to Russia with them and study in their Bible School. "I have no money, and almost no belongings," he said, "I've only just been released." They assured him that he could work for his room and board. So Rashid left for Perm. He studied a year in the Bible School, and then stayed on, working and serving in the church.

OK for those of you who are still reading this very long tale, this is where I come in! I came to work in Perm in 2001. I worked with the local church, serving in their orphanage for street kids. The building that housed the orphanage was also a dormitory for some of the people at the church, including Rashid who worked making furniture, remodeling the building, and fixing and building all sorts of things. So I met him and knew him as one of the guys at the church.

In the fall of 2001 I got a phone call from another street kid worker, telling me that Rashid was sick in the hospital with tuberculosis. His condition was serious. He had contracted TB in prison, where it's an epidemic among the malnourished and perpetually under dressed (read--freezing,) prisoners. Rashid's TB must not have been treated completely, and now it was back.

The other worker and I agreed to visit him in the hospital. We visited him twice, bringing him vitamins and fruit, and both times he talked only to the other girl, and ignored me completely. I decided not to visit him again (what's the point of visiting someone if you're just going to be ignored??) But then one day, late in the evening, I got a call. I was so surprised to hear Rashid's voice. "Are you going to come back and visit me again?" he asked. I didn't even know how he got my number! I asked if he wanted me to come, and he said he did, so I said I'd come.

I began to visit Rashid weekly in the hospital, bringing him banana bread and other baked goods. The bus ride from my apartment was an hour and a half, so I wrapped the things I baked in several towels so they'd stay warm, and then prayed I'd find a seat on the jammed-pack bus so I wouldn't have to hold the pole and juggle banana bread for an hour and half ride. That winter we'd had a ton of snow. After I got off the bus I walked through a park to the hospital, where a path had been cleared. The snow on either side of me towered almost as high as my head. Rashid waited for me every Thursday evening, and as I arrived in the small TB ward, the other male patients would smile at me and start calling down the hall "Rashid! Rashid! Your visitor is here!"

Rashid would bundle himself up and then we'd go outside the hospital to the park and talk and talk until the last bus was ready to leave for the city. When Rashid was released from the hospital several months later, he met me with a bouquet of tulips and asked me to marry him. 

Our official wedding ceremoney, Skadovsk, Ukraine November 2, 2002

Since we're both foreigners (Rashid has Ukrainian citizenship) Russia refused to marry us. But we still wanted to have our ceremony in Russia, where we had our mutual friends. So we traveled to Ukraine in November 2002 to sign our marriage papers. Our civil ceremony was scheduled for noon, but there were no buses at that time from Rashid's village to the county seat. Rashid thought it would be no problem to catch a car, but we stood by the side of the road for an hour without a car stopping. I began to wonder if I'd miss my own wedding. We finally found a ride and made it to the ceremony just a few minutes late. They had waited for us, and as we stood in the lavish Ukrainian hall of culture, Rashid in jeans, and me in a corduroy skirt, with no marriage party, they began the ceremony. I understood almost nothing, since it was in Ukrainian, and at one point the lady stopped and looked at me expectantly. I didn't know what to do, so finally she said to Rashid "Translate for her!" so he turned to me and said "Will you marry me?" I agreed, and signed my Ukrainian wedding license in English.

On December 21, 2002 we had our real wedding at our church in Russia, with our friends, and even my parents flew in and a friend from college. That was nine years ago. Rashid has been free of active TB since he left the hospital. I am so grateful to God for my wonderful husband. Life is truly an adventure.

Our wedding, Perm, Russia, Dec 21, 2002.