Early Sunday morning - March 6

My personal weekly review from my point of view.

Last week ended with the welcome meeting of Marie Willermark and a trip to Daugavpils for the Sunday morning meeting together with Marie and Johnny Kleman.

This week started by introducing Marie and Johnny to some of the Salvation Army operations in Latvia.

We started Monday morning by visiting the village of Sarkani where we are building the Chilmdren´s House right now. It is an old house we bought from money from a donation, given for this purpose.

Here is the entrance to the house the way it looks today. The house is part of our "Change a Village"-project. The people in the village lives in cold apartment houses which uses to be used by Sovjet Army staff during the Sovjet time. Most of the houses lack water and sewerage, toilets, heating and they are full of mould. Most of the parents have big alcohol problems and the children are very much left alone, or have to act as parents for their own parents.

In the "Children´s House" there will be warm and cosy. Showers, laundry machines and computers. There will also be meetings, Bible studies and a programme dealing with addictions.

Inside the house the work is proceeding very well. Outside the house we have been drilling for water 110 meter deep.

After coffe and information about Sarkani in one of the apartments we have renovated we went on to Skangale for information about the orphanage and the Crisis Center at Skangale.

After Skangale we drove to the corps in Liepa, a village where the Salvation Army has had corps work in more than fifteen years. Marie received a wooden candle-holder from the corps-leader, who is a gifted carpenter.

The last visit for that day was in the new Social Center i Riga. Here you can see the two officers telling about the new sewing machines which will be used to help the poor families to fix their clothes.

On Tuesday Marie and Johnny participated in our monthly Leader´s day. They were interviewed about their lives and about themselves. 

.

Saturday Ruth and myself went to the funeral of one of our faithful leaders. Lelda, the leader of the orphange at Skangale has been working for the Salvation Army for many years. We will really miss her and her love and ministry for so many children over the years.

We are praying for Lelda´s family, and at the same time we will be praying for you and we wish you a blessed week.

Now it is Sunday morning and it is soon time to go down to the service at Riga 1. It was a long time ago we were in Riga a Sunday. It will be good to see everybody in our home corps.

/Peter Baronowsky