Dear Friends and Family,
I am back in Moldova after a really wonderful WMF staff gathering just outside of Omaha, Nebraska during the month of July. These past few weeks back in Eastern Europe have been unusually warm with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, so we’ve been glad to see that the kids at the boarding school camp have been allowed to enjoy extended time in the pool each morning and afternoon!
During the month of August, almost all of the kids from this particular camp have gone home to be with parents, relatives or friends for the last few weeks before school starts on September 1. Those who are left behind, a group of roughly 40 children, however, are the ones who have absolutely nowhere to go. They will leave camp on August 31 and will move directly back into their dorm at the orphanage in Chişinău to start school immediately the next day. We are glad that we have these three weeks available to us to be able to spend lots of quality and concentrated time with these kids at the camp before they go back to school. We want to continue to become friends with them, to hear their stories and to understand how they are speaking into the direction of our work as a community.
In more practical pursuit of this direction, we met this week with a lawyer who explained to us the process of officially registering an NGO in Moldova, and so we now have the practical knowledge to begin this process. We have decided to go ahead and to work with this particular lawyer as she is extremely competent and seems optimistic about our succeeding in making WMF official in Moldova in a relatively short amount of time. Having status as an official NGO in Moldova will give us many advantages, such as being able to hire Moldovan staff members, being able to obtain living permits for international staff members more inexpensively and being able to really start developing our work with vulnerable children.
We will meet in the coming weeks with the director of the orphanage about our activity there for the 2010-2011 school year. Our hope is to continue to help children with their homework, to organize activities for them and to play with them, but we would like to begin expanding our realm of work as well. We want to find a place that we can call our own, whether it is a room at the school that we can use for activities with the kids or some other place where we can create a secure and healthy environment.
We will be taking a short staff retreat during the first week of September to pray, reflect, dream and plan for this upcoming school year. As I mentioned in my last letter, our experiences with the children this summer at camp have spoken profoundly into the direction in which our work is moving, and so we want to take some time as staff to just reflect on those things and to invite God to lead us forward.
Please pray for us this month as we seek continued direction from God. There are many areas in which we could get involved, and we need much discernment and wisdom. Ask that we would be open, moldable and ready to love well.
Thank you all for your continued interest in and care for the lives of these children that we are coming to know as our dear friends.
With love,
John Koon