Greetings from all at Armenian Ministries and from your brothers and sisters in the work in Armenia.

Rejoice with Us!

First Year Anniversary
This spring, AM celebrated the 1st anniversary of the church work. The team in Armenia celebrated in style at the charity’s campsite with a barbecue and a game of football.

We are so thankful to the Lord for His abundant mercies and blessings to us. It is very encouraging that the church continues to grow; the meetings are on Sunday evenings and Friday evenings. There is a prayer meeting every weekday morning and a ladies’ meeting on Wednesdays. Many of the people attending these meetings have been converted very recently or indeed, are as yet not saved but very interested. Please pray with us that the Word of God will be preached with power and clarity. Ivan is the main speaker at these meetings; in his absence there are visiting speakers and also local new Christians who are learning to preach.

During the spring, the church held a day of prayer at the campsite. The church members split up into prayer teams and prayed extensively for the work of the church, the charity and the work amongst the children. Prayer is such a vital part of the work. Please join with us and commit to praying for the Lord to work in Armenia.

Freely you have Received, Freely Give...
In the meeting hall we have an offering box in which everyone gives their monetary offerings to the Lord. The majority of the believers are all in receipt of regular help from us. Nevertheless, they have expressed their desire to give a tenth of what the Lord gives them and this money is all earmarked for very poor Christians in their community. This last month they decided to send their offering to the Christians in the Irrawaddy region of Burma.

Three Years of Children’s Work
The work amongst the children has expanded dramatically during this spring. The weekly Bible clubs in Yerevan, Baghramian and Ervandashad are growing continually. The number of children in our weekly Bible clubs in all the different regions is now about three hundred. The clubs in Yerevan are held in the charity building; Wednesday afternoon, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon for the teenagers. In contrast, all the other clubs involve the children’s team going to the location and taking their entire equipment with them. I have to emphasize what I mean by that last statement. The facilities in these villages, which various individuals have kindly provided, include a bare room... and that is all! In Baghramian, AM rents three rooms from a kindergarten. These are also completely unfurnished, and as AM does not have enough furniture to equip all the villages we visit, the workers are forced to take chairs weekly to this venue also. The weekly clubs in Ervandashad are an entire day’s project for the children’s team. Not only does it involve a rather bumpy drive which lasts approximately two hours, but all the necessary chairs, drinks, craft and teaching materials must be taken with them. The children sit on their chairs to listen to the story and sing, and then they get up and kneel on the floor and use their chairs as tables to do their crafts on.

We are very excited to announce that the Lord has opened the door for us to work in two new villages this spring. The leader of the village council of Arteni village actually approached AM and asked if we could start a Bible club there. The team now travel to Arteni every Tuesday, once again taking all their equipment with them, and tell the gospel to these precious young children. There was once an evangelistic outreach work in Arteni but there is now no work there nor is there an established church. There have been four clubs held so far in Arteni and the attendance now is over eighty children! They are so keen to hear Bible stories. Please pray for the Word of God going out to this little village. Pray that as the memory verses and crafts go home to the parents of these children, an open door will be found to witness to many people in this village. In the village of Hankavan there is a family with five children who AM supports and visits regularly. On one occasion Ruth was telling the children a Bible story and discovered how interested the children were. They now go to Hankavan once a month, on a Monday and run a Bible club for these children and their friends, in the family’s home.

The children’s clubs in Yerevan are held on the fourth floor of our premises. Therefore every time the children’s team travelled to any other location, all those chairs had to be fetched down from the fourth floor and stacked in the van, and on their return the process reversed. A container recently arrived in Armenia sent to us by Christians in Australia. This contained a large quantity of children’s chairs! These chairs are now installed permanently on the fourth floor and a lot of effort has been saved. Thank you so much for your help!

Summer Camps
Nine weeks of summer camps are planned for this year. A full update on these will be in the next newsletter. Please pray for health and strength for all the leaders, safety and protection and for open, receptive children’s hearts. The Australian container also brought us a lot of children’s playground equipment – slides, swings, toy cars, etc. for which we are very thankful. These will be installed in the campsite and put to very good use!

Going inside their Homes...

Ruth and the team have been regularly visiting the children who attend the clubs. During the visits the parents get to know the team leaders who work with their children and this encourages them not to be “scared” of sending their children to “a sect”.

We have found that personal friendship and visitation, although very time consuming, is important for several reasons. Often friendships with the parents are made (which results in lots of birthday invitations!). The parents or grandparents will then give a good report to their neighbours who will usually also send their children. Word of mouth in the neighbourhood is vital in the Armenian community. The mother or grandmother will often attend the meetings in the church to find out more about what is going on.

Recently the team went to visit the home of two children who have been attending the clubs for about six months. The father of the home was perpetually beating his wife. He finally left, leaving the mother as the only bread-winner. She goes out every day and works very long hours and is forced to leave her children to raise themselves as best they can. When the team went to visit they found that the grandmother of the children was at home, visiting them temporarily from Russia. She told the team the sad history of these girls and also told them that for a very long time the children’s mother had declined to send her offspring to our Bible clubs fearing we were a sect. However, every day she would see the neighbours’ children come home and show off their beautiful crafts and tell of all the exciting things they had done and she couldn’t bear for her children to miss out! In the last newsletter I emphasized the importance of these crafts that the children do every week. It is often the only chance the majority of these children get to do anything of this kind – none of the families we support would ever be able to afford anything on top of the basic necessities of life, which certainly don’t include coloured pencils and paper.

Personal visitations also enable the charity workers to identify critically poor families. It still amazes our local workers when they visit the home of a child they have known for several months, who turns up to the meetings looking clean and nourished, and it transpires that their home-life is starkly different. As an example I would like to introduce you to two sisters. These sisters have come to the Yerevan clubs faithfully. They are always neatly dressed and clean, and are incredibly bright and intelligent. One of them had the star role in the Christmas play last year and learnt many pages by memory. Since attending the Bible clubs they have learnt lots of Bible stories and memorized many songs and memory verses. Finally, it was time for the children’s team to pay their family a visit. Their home is extremely basic, and from early morning and very often past midnight, their mother sells vegetables by the side of the road to earn a living. The photograph was taken last year and shows the girls being taught their weekly English lesson by Melissa, a young girl who came from Australia and spent two months teaching English to some of the children in our clubs.

Visiting the families of the children enables our team to share the gospel with the parents of the children. It is relatively easy in Armenia to start a conversation about the spiritual state of the family and they are usually very keen on receiving a free children’s Bible, New Testament or a calendar with Bible verses. These calendars, translated by Sona Pambakian, are produced by Trinitarian Bible Society, who donates a generous number to AM to distribute.

Giving them Help...

When the visiting team find poverty-stricken families, the families are assessed and according to their needs help is given to them on a regular basis. People we help on a regular basis are generally single-parent families, orphaned children living with other relatives, or families with ill or disabled parents, or elderly people. Giving them help can include paying their rent for better accommodation, giving them a monthly stipend of money, giving them clothes, food or fuel according to their necessities or paying for surgery or medication.

A forty foot container packed full of clothes, schoolbags and other items was sent to Armenia from England in April. We are waiting for its arrival in Yerevan. Please pray that it arrives safely and the paperwork goes through smoothly.

Thank you so much to all of you who send clothing and other humanitarian aid for our containers. Thank you to the people who spend hours knitting beautiful blankets and babies’ clothes which are given out to these families. Thank you also to those who have packed schoolbags. When these are distributed we include a children’s Bible and other literature in them and often giving the bag provides an opportunity to witness to the family about Christ. Thank you also to those of you who send money for fuel, food and medications. We thank you in the Name of Christ, reminding you that what you have done for one of His “little ones” you have done for Him.

Our local director, Gevork, sent us a number of photographs following one group of visitations during the very early spring. The team had gone to distribute wood, food and clothes. Wood is bought locally, chopped by our team and then distributed. Food is also bought locally in bulk. One parcel of food usually includes oil, sugar, flour, pasta, buckwheat, bulgar wheat, lentils or beans, as staples. In addition there will be other items that have been found inexpensively, for example, raisins. Such a food donation costs the charity approximately £10.

Some of the elderly are completely house-bound during the winter, so the visits are also an opportunity to check that no-one is ill and to pray with and encourage the believers. The mother and son photographed together struck me as looking so poor and sad and I asked Gevork why they looked to be in such a bad state. His answer was “Who knows? There are so many just like them; desperately poor and with no income or external hope”. What a revealing and sad answer. Please try to imagine the joy on the old ladies’ faces or on a young lonely mother’s face when the charity van drives up to their cold home and delivers them wood, food, warm clothes or a wonderfully colourful and warm knitted blanket. This can all happen because you help, because you care and because you pray with us. Thank you and God bless you.

Yours by Grace alone,

Perouz Harrison

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