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Carelinks | Riga ~ Winter Welfare
T
he Riga Bible Center and Winter Welfare
scheme was recently visited by Bro Trevor
and Sis Alison Routledge from the Knowle &
Dorridge ecclesia in the UK. They again
demonstrated what it's possible to do
without knowing Russian or Latvian.
Trevor and Alison ran their presentations
through Google Translate, then ran the
result back into English to iron out
obvious errors, and then a Russian sister
[who doesn't know English] read out the
Google Translate output in Russian,
correcting any grammatical errors as she
did so. There's really great potential
here for brothers and sisters of all
talents to come and trade those talents
- cooking, cleaning, speaking, sharing,
building, painting. Let us know if you'd
like to get involved. You can see 30
minutes or so of Trevor & Alison's presen-
tations and music recorded at:
The week they were over saw the baptism of
two very different sisters; DZINTRA, wife of
brother Yuri, seen here with her husband, and
ELINA, an invalid with a withered arm who
lives largely on the streets. Her baptism
service was likely the only time when even on
earth, she had had so much fuss made of her
in her life [not to mention all the Heavenly
rejoicing]. Pictured above right: Vanessa
graciously ending Elina’s special moment by
drying her hair - you can see Sis Elina’s bread
bag on the table, part of the left over food
we gave her after the feeding scheme. We
continue getting around trying to help our
most needy brothers and sisters. Some can
only stay in the night shelters for about 280 /
365 days each year, and this means that in
the Winter [when everyone wants to be inside
because of the cold] some have no ‘days’
left. They can however stay there if they pay
just over 2 Euros / night. Seeing they have no
income this is also hard, so we have been
assisting with this in a few cases. It is too bad
if sisters in their 70s struggling with high
blood pressure and other issues, women who
worked all their working lives, are now let
down by the system and are basically told to
sleep on the streets in the snow.
Those with communicable diseases [espe-
cially TB and HIV] aren't allowed in the night
shelters. So those most in need of assistance
are totally failed. So many of our members
have TB. A chorus of coughs goes on
throughout our meetings. We delivered food
to two of our most needy members who are
living under the stairs in a deserted building.
Access is only through a loose window in the
building. Not much fun living in such a snow
covered building without heating, running
water or toilet facilities.
~ continued ...