This time, was a breath of fresh air for all of us

Dear Church, family in Christ, friends!

We are thankful to God and to you all for all the prayers, all the support yoг’re showing to Ukrainians and our family in particular. Despite the nightmare Ukraine is facing day after day we want to share with you how God is working through our family where we are now.

Slava

Slava is doing good. This Monday she started school after 6 weeks of summer vacation here. In June-July she had bad headaches, almost every week. We thank God that she didn’t have them the last couple of weeks. We have regular scheduled doctors’ appointments and also met the neurosurgeon here. We liked him. He also knows the professor who performed a surgery on Slava in Turkey. We thought it was a good sign. She had her MRI here a couple weeks ago. The neurologist called and said everything seems to be without changes in comparison to last year’s MRI. Which is a good thing in her situation. But we are waiting to hear from the neurosurgeon what he’d say.  

We praise God for how she is doing today in general, and for her 7 years of life.

Youth and kids Camp for Ukrainian refugees

Basically the whole summer we were doing preparations for two camps. We are so very thankful to all the brothers and sisters who trusted us and supported this project financially. We are thankful to a local congregation in the Hague for their trust and for providing this opportunity to have a camp in the church building.

This project was very special and important to us and to people who participated in it for many reasons. We encountered many unpredictable challenges. But from the very beginning we prayed for this and put everything in God’s hand. We didn’t fully know what to expect because it was the first time when we did everything by ourselves starting with fundraising and finishing with communication with parents and kids. Every day we saw how God was with us and how he provided in every situation, and gave solutions to every question.

One of the goals was to support kids who fled from Ukraine because of war. On one of the days an 11year old shared in detail how she was hiding from russian soldiers who broke into her house in Bucha. Many kids experienced events that will linger with them for the rest of their lives.

We received feedback from dozens of parents and the kids how the camp helped them psychologically, gave them back a desire to live and showed an importance to help others.

Our main goal was to let the youth and kids know that God has confidence in them, and continues to take care of them and love them. We were not limited in preaching the Word, so every day the kids heard about God’s love and, most importantly, were able to feel it through the camp.

This camp was also a very special time for the team. Our team - youth and teenagers from Kharkiv Church and Kharkiv Youth Club. We were working on bringing them here from around the whole Europe and even Ukraine itself.

For most of them it was the first time they saw each other since the full-scale war started. They haven’t seen each other for more than five months. They said they felt as though their life was on pause these past 5 months.

This camp, this time, was a breath of fresh air for all of us. It is hard to put in words the importance of this time together. Sleepless nights because we had so much to talk about, tears on seeing each other and saying our good-byes again, uncertainty of what the future brings and when we’ll see each other again - all of this made every day spent together meaningful. 

On one of the days we also had a special night of thanksgiving and prayers to God. There were only a few of us who were able to speak without tears. It was truly special.

Thoughts about future activities

Do we plan to have activities for the kids after the camp? Yes, we do.

They are already waiting, asking when we’ll meet again. For us it’s an excellent opportunity to share the gospel with the youth. This is how the Youth Ministry started in Kharkiv.

During these two camps, first shift we had 54 teenagers aged 11 to 17, and 28 kids at the second shift, aged 5 to 10.

We had 82 kids in total.

We thank God for this opportunity to minister to kids. We thank everyone who trusted us and participated in this financially.

We are already thinking about doing a similar project on Christmas, God willing. I think it will be a good opportunity as many Ukrainians who live in the Hague know of us. 

Staying in Netherlands for one more year?

We are still staying in the Church building. The situation in Ukraine is not improving. Today we think we’ll stay in the country this year anyway. The kids started school here and Slava is being taken care of by the doctors here. We are praying to be able to live by ourselves. Now there are 9 people living in the building together. Living together with different families with different backgrounds and upbringing turned out to be more difficult than we’d expected. But we are thankful for the opportunity to be here. We are thankful to the Church for having us here. 

We ask for your prayers for us. It is difficult to understand what to do next but we know one thing for sure that Slava’s health is our top priority and that whenever we are we can be useful for His Kingdom.

Thank you again for being there for us.

Sasha, Nastia, Mia and Slava.