A Year for the Lord

We have a new program that has just begun in January. It is a response to the huge problem of emigration in Moldova - so many people leave the country to find work elsewhere. Many young people feel that if they go to another country, they can get lots of money and have a better life. Often parents leave their children at home or young people leave illegally and end up getting into all kinds of problems and trouble. So our new program is a challenge to young people to give a year for the Lord instead of leaving the country. Moldovans are required to commit a year to mandatory service of some kind and so this is a similar idea, except the service is for the Lord. It is called the D.E.L.T.A. program and the initials are for giving a year to the Lord (in Romanian).Here is a photo of the first team participating in this program - the 4 girls on the left are the team and the tall guy is Spiridon, the program coordinator. Three of the girls are Moldovan and the one in the green is from England, Kate. They will spend about 3 months in each of the girls' home village, serving in partnership with the local church. They will return regularly to Chisinau for training and debriefing and hopefully by the end of the year they will be ready to consider more long-term involvement in missions or just a more committed involvement in their local church. Meanwhile they are serving their communities by working with children and young people, feeding and visiting elderly people, doing service projects of various kinds and generally just making themselves available for however the Lord wants to use them. On this team, two of the girls are native Russian speakers, one is English and one is Moldovan. They are having a challenging time communicating among themselves.