Newsletters

Greetings from all at Armenian Ministries. We praise God for enabling us to bring you yet another quarterly newsletter. It has been a rather harsh winter for us in England and we are all pleased to welcome in the warmer weather! Ivan and Sona have spent this winter and spring in England. We thank everyone who was praying for, and has asked about, Ivan’s cataract operation. It was very successful and he has recovered without any complications. Sona has been continuing with the work of Bible translation while in England. Ruth has been in Armenia since February running the Bible clubs for the children and is now preparing for the summer camps.

During the last few months, Michael and I (Perouz) have been with our family in Armenia. We are hoping to spend most of 2010 in Armenia doing intensive language study. During 2009, with Michael’s increasing involvement with the work in Armenia, we have found how much he has been hindered in the work by not knowing the language. We have been having lessons three times a week!

During the month of April, we celebrated the 3rd anniversary of the church and the 5th anniversary of the children’s work.

We are always happy and blessed to see with what enthusiasm many of the members travel and walk a significant distance to come to the meetings. During the week the visitation team and many of the church ladies visit families of those who came to the church and often get invited into their friends’ homes too. They take with them New Testaments to distribute as well as tracts and leaflets. In fact we have recently opened our last pack of tracts and have only 200 left, having printed 20,000 last year. There is not much availability of Christian literature in Armenia, and tracts, booklets and calendars are all very popular. We know that several of the older folk in our church sometimes gather together and form small, informal study groups and read the tracts we have available.

To celebrate the anniversary of the children’s work, we held birthday parties in the children’s clubs – treating the children to a game of “Pass the parcel” and a huge creamy birthday cake (or two!). We thank God so much that He has given us the opportunity of working with these children for five precious years!

The children’s weekly clubs have increased at a steady rate. There are now two weekly clubs, a teens group and a youth group held in Yerevan. Weekly clubs are also held in the villages of Arteni, Ervandashad and Baghramian. A fortnightly club is also held in the tiny village of Ardavazd. The head of the village council in Arteni has notified Ruth of another village, but unfortunately in a completely different location, whose residents are very keen to host a Bible club. Furthermore, last week Ruth and her team went to visit the village adjacent to Ervandashad, where there are also many children who are desperate for a weekly club to be started for them! Unfortunately Ruth is short of both time and workers. Please pray for the children’s work, as the need and the hunger for God’s Word are very great.

There was a lot of excitement this spring in the children’s Bible clubs as they prepared to do a presentation of an adaptation of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”. Ruth wrote the play during the spring and the children’s team organised the cast, the designing of the costumes, props and stage. The costumes were sewn using patterns made from the photographs of the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress, such as medieval trousers which end at the knees with elastic frills! It was fascinating to see all the props, such as fiery darts, shields and swords, that were made to make the play as lifelike as possible but at minimal cost, using the materials that have come in the containers as much as possible. Banners depicting the various scenes and appropriate backing music made the play more dramatic. Some of the most dedicated children, who have practically never missed a Bible club for years, were cast as the key actors and in most cases had a lot of lines to learn! Little cute girls were the flowers in Beulah land, proudly wearing colourful dresses with flowers wound into their hair and the mischievous boys were the raging waters of the River Jordan.

It was with much rejoicing that we finally emptied the contents of the container from the UK into our warehouse in Armenia. The paperwork this time caused a lot of hard work and stress but God, who is always fully in control, answered our prayers and our goods were finally released! As always we are so grateful to everyone who donated items or contributed in any way towards this container. I want to add a special thanks to the many very kind and talented people in the UK who are diligently knitting for AM. We have a couple of ladies over 100 years old knitting and one special blind lady in Wisbech also knitting for us. Thank you to everyone who spends time and effort to bring us precious things to send to Armenia. This consignment contained several brand new beds, as well as an orthopaedic bed, which were donated for particularly needy families who do not have any beds to sleep on. Since the arrival of the container Michael and I have been on several visitations to select homes for these beds and then deliver them. The orthopaedic bed was given to a lady who has such an advanced case of osteoporosis that the bones in her legs have literally crumbled.

The proud, new owner of a bunk bed

Last autumn, we spent a day visiting a number of very desperately poor families in the village of Baghramian. They had been brought to the attention of AM and we were going to see in what ways we could help. Many of them were poorer than I thought possible, but one family particularly caught our attention and broke our hearts. I never forget how I felt when I walked into their empty flat, consisting of two rooms with wooden floors and broken windows, in which lives a grandma with her two sons, their wives and about four children each. One room had a single chair in it and a pile of kitchen-like materials, while the other room had a few beds, all full of sleeping children at the time of our visit.

When we returned to Armenia in February 2010, we asked our local director, Gevork, if he had personally visited their home since last September. His reply left us all quiet for a few minutes. He had gone to Baghramian in December with a van full of food and wood that he was distributing to these families. He had gone to visit this family too, intending to give them a parcel of food. He found one of the sons sitting on the stairs leading up to the flat cutting a sheet of plastic into shreds. Gevork asked him what he was doing. He said “I am cutting up this rubbish that I have found because we have nothing left to burn and we are cold”. Gevork told him to throw the rubbish away; he had a van full of wood and would give him some.

When the container arrived this spring, one of the bunk beds (above) that it contained was previously ear-marked for this family. So in April we returned to the home of these eleven people. I think I can honestly say that I have never seen such hopelessness and such poverty as is markedly visible on these people’s faces. They don’t just look poor, dirty, uncared for and unhealthy, they look hopeless. It is this hopelessness that makes me cry every time I go to their home. The children in the house attend the Bible club and are all keen and eager to learn. The two, five year old twins (left), who look about three years old, recited so much poetry to us that they left us speechless. I gave them each two small knitted toys and their response was enough to make me curl up with pain. Each of them clutched their toy to their chest and didn’t let go of it the whole time we were there. There was not only no other toy visible in the apartment but there was nothing colourful whatsoever.

Our acquaintance with Ophelia started when she turned up one Sunday to one of the meetings. She is a very lively, little old lady and reminded me somewhat of my own dear grandmother. Ophelia became a Christian very recently following one Sunday service, and after some conversation and prayer, invited us to go and visit her at her house. After she got saved she told us that she was raised in an orphanage and has no family at all. She was over the moon when Gevork explained to her that she is now in the very large family of God and is His child.

We drove to her village on the outskirts of Yerevan. The drive itself was amazing. There was such a quantity of potholes, deep mud puddles (in which we skidded) and finally a rather scary, steep gravel path that we had to descend in the minibus. After the steep descent and being shaken from side to side and bumped up and down, we finally arrived in a rather muddy valley. After driving the minibus down the steep hill Gevork didn’t dare to drive any further and thus stopped the car literally in the middle of the path. Once parked, we started climbing on foot up the other side of the steep incline to Ophelia’s house. She lives perched on the rocky hillside in a very small concrete “shack”. When we entered her home she was so excited she couldn’t contain herself. She walked from one end of the room to the other and we could see that true to Armenian hospitality, she was desperate to spread a little table in front of us and make us coffee and serve us food. However, not only did she have no evidence of any food in the room whatsoever, she didn’t have a table either – so she welcomed us with words instead and told us how much she loves the Lord now and how she prays to Him. When asked whether she reads the Bible she proudly showed us her New Testament! As she was walking round I suddenly realized that one of her legs was heavily wrapped in a scarf – I asked her what had happened. She said that at the beginning of the year she had slipped on ice outside her house and broken her leg, she had wrapped it herself as she couldn’t afford any treatment. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that to come to church, Ophelia must negotiate the hill that I described earlier, all the rocks and pot-holes. She has at least one hour’s walk to the bus-stop, followed by a bus journey of about an hour and a half! As we came out of her home, she proudly showed us a patch of land which she gardens. Each week, she harvests about a kilo of tomatoes which, with a loaf of bread is, she says, plenty enough for her to live on! As we descended the rocky path from her home I could hear her praying out loud. I turned round to see her with her arms in a prayerful pose and her eyes directed to heaven as she said “God of the fatherless, God of the widow, thank you for bringing these people to me.”

Needless to say, the families or individuals mentioned in the Connect newsletter are a sample of the many needy families and individuals that AM supports on a regular basis. We have a portfolio of many people who we support with monthly food parcels, fuel and medication. There are many families who will never be in the newsletter who are just as needy, sometimes more so, than Ophelia or others that have been mentioned. Some of these individuals attend our church, others attend other churches, and still others are not Christians. As a policy we do not like to help one family more than we help others. The leaders of the charity and the church reserve the right to make decisions regarding how much help can be given to individuals or families, with the general aim that everyone is helped equally, and benefits from the gifts that God has given us to distribute.

Psalm 22:24 “For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.”

Your by Grace alone,

Perouz Harrison

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