{"id":80,"date":"2010-05-12T12:30:56","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T19:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunergosorphans.wordpress.com\/?p=80"},"modified":"2012-03-27T23:39:59","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T06:39:59","slug":"a-letter-from-twu-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/a-letter-from-twu-team\/","title":{"rendered":"A letter from TWU Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Dear family and friends,<\/p>\n

We are excited to let you know that we are in St. Petersburg, Russia, as you may have heard from Tatiana! Our first week has been full of many challenges and victories. We will give you a brief outline of each day since we have been here:<\/p>\n

May 7: Arrival into St. Petersburg, Russia at 11 PM! Going through customs was a breeze and they had no interest in us. We immediately separated and departed to our host families.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>May 8: Our first full-day in St. Petersburg included an outing to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the day before \u201cVictory Day\u201d. We spent our day looking at impressive Orthodox churches and a lot of artillery, with a bit of time on the beach of the Neva River! Frankie and Adi\u2019s hosts Volodya and Sveta respectively, acted as our tour guides for the day. In addition to sightseeing, we began our cultural training with Tatiana and her husband Misha. We learned about Russian History.<\/p>\n

May 9: \u201cVictory Day\u201d. We learned that this is\"\"<\/a> an important day to Russians because over 27 million troops died during WWII in Russia. This day for us was full of seeing grief and victory combined. Our second cultural lesson was about St. Petersburg history, which we would be more than happy to answer any questions upon our return!<\/p>\n

May 10: For our last cultural lesson we learned about Russian people and their customs, but before we sat down to learn, we paired off and went on excursions to a Russian orthodox church and a market.<\/p>\n

May 11: Our first day at an orphanage, an HIV Infant Orphanage was an eye-opening experience for our team because this was our first time we\u2019ve experienced our ministry. This was an especially exciting experience for our team, as Volodya and Sveta decided to accompany us and stay and work at the orphanage. This was quite a blessing for us, as they were not asked or expected to join us, they chose to out of their own interest. After our day with the children, we gathered bags and hauled them over to our new apartment, in which we as a team will be living in with Tatiana for the remainder of our stay.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

May 12: We visited the same orphanage as yesterday, which we will visit for the duration of this week. Today was spectacular! We were all more comfortable and able to understand what goes on at this facility.\u00a0 It was encouraging for us to tour the rehabilitation center they have there and the enthusiasm, care, and pride the doctor showed for his children and facilities. This facility in particular is funded by sponsors, including SunErgos, of whom the doctor and staff are tremendously grateful for, as the Russian government gives so little, such as just one diaper a day per child. Some of the children we spent time with yesterday already recognized us today and we could see a bit of impact we had just through our love we showed them. Although it was heartbreaking to realize these children are abandoned, it was also a blessing to see how well they are cared for.<\/p>\n

We are extremely grateful for your prayers and support, as we have gone through a long preparation that we are now seeing played out here in St. Petersburg, Russia. Continued prayers are appreciated for the remainder of our stay here and for you all to keep the orphans of Russia in your prayers long after our time here ends. In parti\"\"<\/a>cular we ask for prayer for, patience as we work with the children, Volodya and Sveta\u2019s hearts for the orphans of Russia to continue growing and their questions to continue about why we are here, the health of both our team and the children we come into contact with, the staff at the orphanage and the doctor and their relationship with SunErgos to stay strong. We also ask for our language abilities to strengthen, as Alejandra and Joy are continuing to work hard on learning Russian and for both Adi and Frankie with their translations as they are our team interpreters, and our team unity as we have moved in together and our now spending the majority of our time in each others\u2019 presence.<\/p>\n

We are thrilled to be here and to see what God will do in our team! Our days are tiring and long, but we are happy to report that our jet-lag is gone and our health is strong. This morning we began our day in team prayer and reading Isaiah 40:31 which discussed not becoming weary. This helped our team focus for the day and we ask it as a prayer request that we will not become weary throughout the rest of our time working with the infants and toddlers and that we will continue to keep our focus on glorifying God through serving the orphans of Russia.<\/p>\n

S Bogam (With God),<\/p>\n

Frankie, Adi, Alejandra, and Joy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear family and friends, We are excited to let you know that we are in St. Petersburg, Russia, as you may have heard from Tatiana! Our first week has been full of many challenges and victories. We will give you a brief outline of each day since we have been here: May 7: Arrival into St. Petersburg, Russia at 11 PM! Going through customs was a breeze and they had no interest in us. We immediately separated and departed to our host families.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[79,83],"tags":[16,26,32,33,38,41,51,57,66,69,70],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teams-2","category-twu-teams-2","tag-disabled","tag-hiv","tag-ministry","tag-missions","tag-orphans","tag-russia","tag-st-petersburg","tag-sunergos","tag-teams","tag-trinity-western-university","tag-twu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2j3in-1i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1337,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/1337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunergosint.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}