A pancake full of mushrooms...

How about a pancake full of mushrooms for lunch?

St. Pete is an amazing place. Full of palaces, parks like you might see in a cheesy chic flic, and cosmopolitan European styled buildings. Lots of pink, blue, and yellow multi-storied buildings with gobs of ornate moldings. Right next door might be a slum, a dumpster, or a wall of vulgar graffiti.

Another thing: I'll never gripe about Tyler traffic again. Today it took us an hour to get to the center of town. Cars and buses gridlocked and constantly honking and shaking of fists. Yeah.

This morning Kiefer, Ron, Charlie and I met Galina, a tour guide/interpreter (strike that... brilliant interpreter) to spend about 2 hours in the Hermitage. Our orphanage for the day had kids that went to school, so we had to visit them in the afternoon. The Hermitage is the winter palace for Catherine and for Peter the Great. It's HUGE! We saw original works from Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, (not the turtles) Rembrandt, and Monet, just to name a very few. They say that if you spend 5 minutes at each exhibit in the Hermitage, it would take you 7 years to get out. Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" was my favorite.

After meeting the rest of the team for a lunch of pancakes filled with mushrooms and cream (?!?) we moved onto the amazing and incomparable #40.

Orphanage #40 houses 44 special needs kiddos and man are they cute. Wow, what a time! Flexibility is the name of the game in #40! Kelle, Olga, and I spent time in a room of 8 or so special kids with various issues. Almost all had some degree of mental retardation and every one was adorable.

The trouble is, when we came, they were so overly excited to have new people to pay attention to them, they not only hugged and jumped all over us, but one bit Kelle on the ear! Didn't break the skin...she's okay, really. But these kids really were sweet and full of play. They nearly had to roll us out of there on gurneys we were so tired.

Kiefer spent time with mostly visually-impaired kids. They were so cute with their thick little glasses! They all ran around yelling "Kiefer, Kiefer." But, they were concerned that Kiefer had something badly wrong with him in his mouth. We call them braces in the states. Ha!

Here's your Word for the Day: "spaseeba" - That's Russian for "thank you."

Love,

Jennifer

Today was wonderful, exhausting, and horrible...

We spent the morning at the baby home in Lomonosov, about 3 hours from St. Pete. The home was built in the late 1800's and looked about ready to cave in from the outside. From the inside, however it was beautifully preserved. We took a quick tour of the facility housing all types of beautiful little ones, ages newborn to 3 years old.

There was a separate building for HIV babies. That's where I spent my day. These are babies without hope. There were 12 of them and I, Kiefer (my 14 year-old son), Olga (interpreter), Boris (interpreter), Bryan (Lost Lambs Ministries) and Ron were never without a babe in arms.

We fed them, burped them, bundled them up for a little fresh air and spoke Jesus' love over them all day long. They look like normal little babies. They respond to touch and love even though the staff is spread so thin that most days they only get survival attention. Kiefer held one HIV baby that also had Down Syndrome. This itty bitty tyke gut-laughed at everything that Kiefer did. I was so proud of my boy and so was the whole ministry team. All of us worked hard to give as much love as possible in a day. We're all pretty drained. The other members of the team were doing the same stuff with healthy babies.

The Lomonosov home is staffed for the most part with very caring people. They are horribly short on all manner of supplies. (Think 2 rolls of toilet paper for a week!) We came with a bus load of diapers, baby food, wipes, and anything else we could get our hands on at the local "Wal-Mart."

My baby is a little brown-eyed girl named Genya (soft, French G -jz). She was so pensive, alert, smart and 6 mos. old. She rarely smiled. These babies don't see many smiles, but she was altogether content to be held and talked to. I coaxed a few grins out of her. I have a picture of her in my lap just leaning against me; enjoying the warmth of human contact and love. I really hated leaving her. She didn't cry when I left, she just quietly watched me walk away.

(Insert tears here...)

That's today's report. More later.

Jennifer

Welcome to the Encouragement FM blog!

Hello and welcome to the Encouragement FM blog! We've launched this blog so that Jennifer Winborn can share her thoughts about her trip to Russia in September/October 2008. But we'll probably use it for other topics, as well. So, happy reading!

Jeff