(Anna is second from right)
March 2024
Dear Friends,
Thank you for praying for Elena, after her husband was recently killed by a Russian missile’s direct hit. She is very grateful for your financial gift through SCM, your on-going prayers, and having such a wonderful heart! As I mentioned earlier, we will ask for updates with this church in Kupiansk and see how we can help them going forward.
In this prayer letter, I will share with you about Anna Chehovskaya, who is one of my former employees with our children’s ministry team, until the war broke out across the entire country in 2022. When the conflict began, we helped many refugees flee the country from the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, including Ukrainian orphans in Romania for about a year.
However, our refugee assistance slowed considerably in 2023 and 2024, due to Western countries contributing to many of the refugees ongoing needs. We are still helping several families with financial support, which is more of an encouragement amount, more than enough for them to live on; it is to convey that we love them, God loves them, and they are not forgotten!
These days, most of our support goes to ministries and individuals who are unable to leave Ukraine - the families with young children, the poor, and the elderly. Nevertheless, we must not forget those families, like Anna’s, who fled the country and may never return to their homeland. Due to this horrific war, their families are forever changed, with many of them having lost everything (materially speaking); and many people are still in depression, despair, and sorrow for how this war has stolen everything from them. I like to have at least two testimonies per year, so the war isn’t just about stats, which is impersonable, but about real lives, real families, and real struggles. Here is Anna’s testimony:
WE HAVE NOTHING TO GO HOME TO IN THE FUTURE
“Hello, my name is Anna. I worked with Ron and Slavic Christian Ministries (SCM) for many years before the war. I have a husband Volodymyr and three children: an older daughter also named Anna, and two sons Mykhailo and Maksym. We lived in Kharkiv, built our own house and actively participated in our church and the ministry of SCM, working with orphans, disabled children, and with kid’s clubs. We had an amazing life before the war!
On the morning of February 24, 2022, everything changed. Early in the morning, we woke up to the sound of bombs, missiles, and sires going off everywhere. The first three weeks of the war we stayed at a friend’s home, because our region was getting demolished by the Russian forces. We stayed as long as we could, thinking the war would be over in a few weeks, but anxiety was setting in and our friends sent us money to leave the country, so we made the hard decision to leave everything we loved behind for our kid’s safety.
Before we departed, those first few weeks of the war, we tried our very best to help where we could – we took food to people, we drove people to the train station, and we helped get medicine for Ukrainian soldiers. But unfortunately, our car was damaged due to a plane crashing and hurting our vehicle.
Thankfully, Slavic Christian Ministries paid my salary for the last ten months of the year and our church offered to help us relocate to Romania, where we stayed with other Christians.
We lived in Romania for three months, but when the war became protracted, we needed to make long term plans of where we should raise our children. Ultimately, we decided to move to England because the English language was more familiar to us than many other European languages. It was a hard decision to make this decision, but I am glad we did so.
We have been living in this country for a year and a half and we thank God for so many people helping us survive. We still need guidance in life, since we have nothing to go back to in Ukraine. Please pray for us as we try to start over in life and try to adapt to a new country and culture. We are still looking for a good church and an opportunity to use our gifts to advance God’s kingdom. Our English is improving, but it isn’t good enough to hold a job yet. We have also discovered that being a refugee has hindered employment opportunities too. Our daughter wants to go to college in the future, but right now we don’t see how this will happen; but we know God is in control and can do anything. We just want her to have a bright future, as with all our children.
Thank you for praying for our English to improve, finding good jobs to support ourselves, finding a good church, and a bright future for our children. Thank you for your financial support too. God bless you!” - Anna
Dear friends, thank you for being willing to pray for Anna and her family. Because of your on-going support, we can help Ukrainians. Anna and her family are blessed to have left the horrors of Ukraine, but they still have a rough road ahead, so please keep them in your prayers. Please keep everyone in Ukraine in your prayers too. So much sorrow and apathy have set in and the PTSD is very severe right now.
Thank you for all of your gifts to the ministry; you are a huge blessing and making an eternal impact for our Lord Jesus! We just sent some money to help orphans in Ukraine, but I won’t be sharing about this for about three months. The next two months, we will be updating you on other important ministry news. God bless you all!
In Jesus’ love,
Ron