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Kyiv, Rivne and Chernivtsi. Your gifts go far!

12/6/2022

We have been sent recent photos from Kyiv, Rivne and Chernivsti, showing how much good is being achieved in those places over the month of May-June 2022, thanks to help received via EMF appeal funds. The images come from EMF missionaries Volodia Kostyshyn and Vitalii Mariash, as well as from Sasha Diankov, deacon in the Heart of Jesus Church, Cernivtsi. Chernivtsi has been an incredibly efficient aid distribution centre, with many people from the east being helped as they flee unspeakable suffering; Sasha and his team are tireless in their work there. Many Ukrainians have returned to Kyiv in the past weeks; Vitalii tells us about his own trips back to the capital city he has lived in for some years, and enthuses about the encouraging response to his church's evengelism there. Volodia Kostyshyn is helping to coordinate the Evangelical churches' relief work in Ternopil, western Ukraine, and is excited about just how widely their centre there can distribute aid all over Ukraine. He takes us to a children's home in Rivne.

As most readers will know, for some time we have been sending truckloads of aid into western Ukraine.

Those who go on to distribute that aid have to struggle with logistics problems, such as how to find diesel, or how to move goods around when infrastucture is devastatingly damaged. We have recently set up a depot in Uman as we attempt to help relieve some of these issues; this city is in the centre of the country, and therefore nearer to several places we are trying to support, such as Kharkiv's Osnova church, and Pastor Gennadij Prosyanko, who is based in Pereschepyne, north-east of Dnipro. The new depot in Uman is also helping Vitalii and Liuda Mariash as they reach out to the people of Kyiv.

Until the end of February 2022, Vitalii and Liuda Mariash were living a quiet life in Kyiv, where Vitalii was Dean of Studies at the Kyiv Theological Seminary. Liuda also worked and studied at the seminary, but the couple and their two small children had to flee to Chernivtsi in south-western Ukraine, where they found a new ministry in supporting refugees from all over Ukraine.


Last month, Vitalii and Liuda began to make trips back to Kyiv, and join in the relief efforts of the church where Vitalii was co-pastor.
They have been able to hold open-air meetings. The large congregations include people who chose not to leave Kyiv during its worst days,as well as others who left but who have decided to return now that they feel that the city is safer that it was; a third group of new citizens of Kyiv are refugees from other parts of Ukraine which have become too dangerous to live in.

Vitalii reports:

This time almost 300 people were present at church yard in Kyiv. We were able to serve them with God's Word and EMF humanitarian aid we received in Uman. Praise the Lord for everything.
We have distributed almost all Christian literature which was stored in our church ))) desperately looking after Ukrainian Bibles and Christian literature!

Vitalii and Liuda are thrilled at the response in open-air services in Kyiv

Back in Chernivtsi, the city where Vitalii and Liuda Mariash found refuge, and where they threw themselves into support for refugees, Sasha Dianov does not cease to visit homes where refugees are trying to survive. He and his wife Lesya help run a displaced people centre set up by their church. Most of the people supported are from eastern Ukrainian cities and tell horrific stories.

About the people in the picture collage below, Sasha writes that the images are of:

'...several people who received help.  They are from different regions.  But everyone is very upset and confused.  We were glad to encourage and support them a little.'

Aid in Chernivtsi

Volodia Kostyshyn wrote to tell us of the children in a care home run by Grace Church, Rivne. He informs us about the opportune arrival of some bedding that had formed part of a truck of aid sent to Ternopil from the Netherlands in early June:

'They got 14 children from Avdijivka; it is occupied area now. So mattresses and bedding came just at the right time'.


Thank you for helping these people. Please carry on praying for their spiritual and physical good!

Prayer Points

Please pray that...:

  1. the new depot in Uman will be able to help support more and more people.
  2. the literature received in Kyiv will be read, understood and believed, and that more literature can be sent quickly to supply demand.
  3. the open-air services in Kyiv will be used by the Lord to speak to many non-Christians there.
  4. the children in the care home in Rivne will turn to the Lord in their great need.
  5. those who receive aid and literature in Chernivtsi may understand and believe the gospel message they have been receiving.