Orphanage and home children

On Tuesday evening, I brought down all the clothing that we had brought for the children at the orphanage. The Lord had amazingly provided so many clothes on clearance at Walmart, and we used some money that had come in for our trip.

The ladies were awed at all that the Lord had provided.
Heather, Kandi, and Natasha (the house mother) sorted the clothing into three piles:
a pile each for two different orphanages, and one pile for Natasha and future girls of this home.

Here Heather is getting a picture of the sorting. It made me so happy! We had filled nearly three whole big suitcases with clothing.

But not only clothing. There was also all that herbal medicine that I'd found on clearance, and Natasha was so thankful especially for the allergy drops.

She and her little boy were suffering with itching from a food allergy, and she had scratched till she was bruised or raw!

Praise God, these allergy drops, called Aller Calm, worked for her! Within days she was almost completely cleared up, and she said the drops worked even better than medication which she has to use when she reacts.

The next morning, I woke up with heaviness in my chest, and soon began to feel very achy.

I really didn't feel like going along to the orphanage administration building, but I went anyway.
Here Natasha (to the left) is translating for us to two ladies who help run the orphanage.
The man in the picture is Robert, who has been a big support of the girls' home.
The Durhams were thankful for the clothing we brought, as the gift of it was good for their relationships with the directors of the orphanage.

In actuality, the orphans are not housed in a central building as I expected, but are rather farmed out to ten or twelve homes, so that no home has more than about ten children, as I understand it. 

It is felt that this is a healthier way of taking care of the children than having them in an institutionalized setting. 

Below, we are looking at the posters on the wall that picture the different children in different settings.

We did not get to see any children ourselves that day.

This is the administration building for the orphanage, where we dropped one batch of clothing.

This is Robert's lovely home, which he is losing along with his nursery business, due to being taken advantage of in a dastardly way by someone who was out to take advantage of his  money, business and possessions.

The bank is taking over everything, as we understood it, and he and his wife will have to move in with his wife's mother. This is very hard for this family, as you can only imagine.

Pray for special grace for this precious Christian couple as they navigate these bitter waters.

Robert seemed like such a sweet man.

Here are apartment buildings that the government built for gypsies, but like in the inner cities of America, you can take some people out of the slums, but you can't take the slum out of them.

They have made a big mess. Windows were broken, and the government learned that it didn't do any good to try to help the gypsies. A large percentage of the population in Slovakia is gypsies.

One family of six or seven children in the orphanage is there because their gypsy parents would not send them to school, and so the parents were put in prison.

This is the one young lady who is presently at the girls' home we worked at--Martina.

I dearly and deeply loved this precious girl.

Here she was drawing a picture of a beautiful girl.

When I asked if I could take a picture, she went for a notebook in which she had drawn other pictures, and showed it to me. Here is a similar picture to the other one she was drawing.

I noticed the missing face.

And I wondered if the faceless girl was a cultural thing or if it came out of the deep emptiness in this girl's heart--the lack of identity, and the deep yearning to be something beautiful like this beautiful rose she had drawn in place of a face.

This girl had lived with a foster family since she was one year old. She said she has talked more to Natasha in the short time she has been in this home than she talked to her foster mother in her whole life.

It was a joy to us when Martina started sitting down with us to our meals. She hadn't for several days.

She attends a technical school where she is training to be a hair dresser.

The day before we left, her assignment was to curl someone's hair. 

I permitted her to try her hand on Hannah's hair, while Hannah patiently sat for an hour or an hour and a half!

Her hair was an awful mess by the next morning, but Martina got the job done and a picture taken to show in class! Someone teased that it was a good thing Hannah was along for her to work on, or she would have had to curl Ed's hair! What a laugh we all got!

Hannah had a practical lesson in the time and effort necessary to curl hair and decided it wasn't much to her liking. She seems to be very content with the braids or other simple ways her mother and sister make her hair!