by April Ossewaarde

Missionary life is exciting and fun! One of our mottos is, "Anything can happen... and usually does!" Alan and I and our two older siblings (who are in the States) have all been involved in the ministry with our parents.

Because the public transportation is so handy here in Oryol, we do not own a car. We ride on buses, trains, vans, streetcars, and trolleybuses and walk. This helps us to know our town, meet the people, and get more exercise.

Besides home schooling every day, I have taken piano lessons with a private tutor and Alan has taken accordion lessons at the Oryol Music College. Our sister Cindy learned accordion and guitar when she was here. Alan and I play accordion and piano for our church’s congregational singing and special music in our three weekly services - two in Russian and one in English. The Russians love the accordion and most Russian homes have a piano.

When we first came, our family took Russian lessons every week. Now we speak well enough that we don't take lessons anymore. Often we visit in Russian people's homes for dinner or have them over to our apartment for games and a meal.

Every Saturday Dad prints out 1000 tracts, and we cut and fold them at the dining room table. Our fellow missionary helps us distribute them in town. Sometimes we give out Bibles on the streets, in public squares, and in parks.

For recreation in the winter time, we go cross-country skiing in the woods across the street from our home. We also go ice-skating and sledding. In the summertime we play tennis, volleyball, and basketball with our youth group at church.

Every Friday night our family has a special time with pizza, popcorn, and games. We also have cookouts and throw the baseball around. Several times a year, Dad has to go to Moscow for some business so we go along. The train ride is always an adventure! Moscow is an amazing place to visit. We love to ride the subway, see Red Square, and the Kremlin.

As missionary kids living in Europe, we have visited other countries including Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, England, France, Germany and Holland. We have met other missionaries, attended summer youth camps and youth conferences, and made lots of new friends.

Alan and I will be leaving for Bible College soon and are looking forward to our new life in America, but we wouldn't trade our life on the mission field for anything! As we have helped our parents start a church in the heart of Russia, we have seen people saved and baptized, and have watched them grow in the Lord. The greatest thing in the world is to be right in the middle of God's will for your life.

Why Oryol?

And Who is the Guy With the Beard?

By Don Ossewaarde,

Like most people in the world, I had never heard of Oryol, Russia, before I became a missionary. Oryol is not very big compared to most Russian cities, so how did we end up here?

When God called us to the mission field, I knew He wanted us to go to Russia. We spent the first few years in Kiev, Ukraine, where I studied the Russian language in the university and worked with another missionary. Daily, we prayed about where in Russia God would have us serve.

Often I would spread our large map of Russia, the largest country in the world, out over the kitchen table to pray over it. I looked at the vast expanses of Siberia and wondered if we should work with the missionaries there. This eastern part of Russia covers 80% of the territory, but it has only about 20% of Russia's people.

Almost 80% of Russians live in the western part of the country, known as "European Russia.” I prayerfully considered that this should be our place of service, but where exactly? The Lord did not give us peace about working in the two largest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Our map showed a great concentration of large and medium-sized cities (where most Russians live) in European Russia, south of Moscow all the way down to the Ukrainian border. The cost of living is lower, there is less crime, and the environment is cleaner. This is Russia's heartland. I felt that God was leading us somewhere in this general area. As I looked at the map, I imagined that I could see, as Robert Moffat once saw, "the smoke rising from a thousand villages whose people are without Christ, without God, and without hope in this world." We continued to pray.

Meanwhile, I spent six hours a day, five days a week, at the university, studying the glories of the Russian language. Even as a good student, learning the Russian language was the most difficult assignment of my life. Learning a new alphabet with 33 letters and a whole new vocabulary was not too hard. The tricky part was the grammar – memorizing an elaborate set of grammatical rules and word endings. Putting together a simple sentence is like solving an algebraic problem! I often wondered if I would ever be able to speak Russian.

Fortunately, the Kiev State Linguistics University has a very good program to teach Russian to foreigners who know nothing about it. Besides courses in phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar, my classes also included Russian history, geography, and literature. These helped me with vocabulary as well as the culture, too.

Russian literature didn’t interest me at first. As we began to study the flowery poetry of Pushkin, the massive novels of Tolstoy (WAR AND PEACE - 1424 pages), and the gloomy philosophical works of Dostoevsky, I was not very impressed. I did enjoy Chekhov’s short stories, but literature class was not my favorite. Then, one day, our teacher introduced us to Ivan Turgenev (he’s the guy with the beard).

I thought, "Oh, great, another strange Russian author...” As the teacher gave the author’s biography, she stated that Turgenev was born in Oryol. When she pointed at the map of Russia, it startled me to see that Oryol was right in the center of the area south of Moscow to which I had felt God leading us! It seemed to me that the teacher's finger was a spotlight beam pointing at ORYOL, RUSSIA. As we studied Turgenev, I could not get my attention away from the map, and that city, Oryol.

After that, Oryol jumped off the page at me whenever I looked at a map in geography or history class. When I prayed over our map at home, Oryol always caught my attention. But I didn't know anything about Oryol except that “Oryol” means “eagle,” and an author who died in 1883 had lived there. It might be a Stone Age village for all I knew. I determined to visit the city soon.

During my university break, my son and I spent a week in Oryol; we found it to be a lovely city with green parks and gentle hills between two rivers. It even has its own symphony orchestra! During that first visit, God allowed us to meet a man who eventually helped us to get our papers to live and serve in Russia.

We are very happy serving here in Oryol, the city of Turgenev. The population is about 330,000, but the city looks and feels like a smaller town because the people live close together in apartment buildings. It is only 250 miles south of Moscow, so a visit to “the big city” is easy for us. Oryol is big enough to have all we need, but small enough that people know that we are here.

Presently, we are the only Americans living in Oryol. Until recently, we were the only missionaries within hundreds of miles of here. Now there is a good missionary family in Mtsensk, about 30 miles away. We pray that God will send more laborers to this region, in the heart of the former "Evil Empire.”