Happy Giving Tuesday! This is Anika writing, part of the original team and now board member of Open Arms. You know what we do here at OAU – we serve the people of Ukraine, from orphans to elderly, families to individuals in prison. We are able to give love, share a meal, provide clothing, purchase blankets, offer a ride, encourage the disheartened, spend time with the lonely, and share the love of Jesus. That part you know. What you may not think about as much is that none of this would happen without our team being there in Ivanivka. Living in the village, the days can feel exhausting, boring, accomplished, useless, eventful, miraculous and really hard. But whatever the day brings, our team continues to serve. This year on Giving Tuesday, I would personally love to see your donations go towards making sure our team can keep serving. Our team also happens to be some of the people I love most in the world, doing work that is very important to me, so this cause is very dear to my heart. Having been a part of the team for years and now, a couple weeks back from a trip to visit them, I wanted to share some thoughts and current needs I hope you will be generous enough to give towards.
Sasha & Melissa
If you didn’t already know, our full-time team is made up of Melissa and her husband Sasha.They are expecting their first child in March and I personally couldn’t be more excited! Living in the village is not for the faint of heart, and adding a baby into any living situation is a new challenge and adventure. Especially in light of this, here are the main needs I’m hoping you will join me in supporting with your donation today. And for the record, Melissa and Sasha are not super comfortable asking for donations for projects that feel like they’re “for them” but I pushed for it this year.
We (and by we I mean mostly Sasha) built what we call “the new house” from the ground up over the course of a few years. Some parts of the house are finished and some they just live with in whatever state they stopped in. The house has needed exterior insulation ever since it was built but that step got skipped. Insulation is needed not only for temperature control but to protect the cinder block-ish material that makes up the walls of the house. Materials and labor will cost around $1500 when all said and done. My hope is that today we can get enough money raised to hire someone and get that job done!
The new house on the right last summer
Another thing I’d love to see purchased is a generator. While I was visiting in November, one afternoon the electricity went out. This is a fairly regular occurrence. No lights in the house is a pain since from October to about March, it gets dark in Ukraine pretty early. Sunset today is 3:38pm, so it’s dark dark by about 4pm some days. And lights aside, everything in that house runs on electricity. From the obvious things like the fridge, the wifi and the coffee maker, to living essentials like the stove, the oven, the heat and the pump that turns on our water (including the water to flush the toilet). So when the electricity is out for an undetermined amount of time (sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes hours), you notice. And when it’s below freezing and the heat turns off, you notice very quickly. We would love to get a generator to be able to at least keep running water or heat going as needed. Depending on what we get, it will cost us anywhere from $350 to about $750.
If you get really crazy in donations today, I think another $1500 could add on an additional room for the baby! The house right now is about 700 square feet of one bedroom, a living room and a small kitchen. They would love to add on a small bedroom for the baby after the winter. I would love to bring a team of builders out to do a mini home makeover in the spring and get it all done in a couple of weeks… but that’s another idea. If we could raise an additional $1500, we should be able to get the foundation, walls, ceiling and roof covered to get that project at least off the ground.
So in all my goal would be to raise $3750 today. It feels like a lot in one day, but on Giving Tuesday 2019 you donated about about $3170! From the bottom of my heart, I am so, so thankful to each of you who have donated in the past and will donate today. You have no idea what it means to me to have your support! Donations can be made on Facebook, via PayPal Giving Fund by clicking here and by check mailed to us at no cost to us. If you have questions, please feel free to ask. You can email me here or send me a DM on Facebook in Instagram. I can’t wait to see what you all do today! Thank you for joining us!
Anika