Dear Fellow Laborers,

January 2010

Tolya Loses his fingers, Hears about Christ

Through difficulty sometimes we get our greatest chances to witness to people. One of the members of the football team I am coaching is studying to be a construction manager. This month Tolya lost half of two of his fingers on his left hand. As you can tell from our recent pictures, building here involves a lot of heavy equipment and manipulating heavy concrete blocks and panels into place. When a crane lifts a large panel into place, it is then rotated to the right position. On this day, while the panel was being rotated, it came way to close to bumping a nearby truck. Tolya worrying more about the truck than himself, tried to stop the panel from hitting the truck. Two of his fingers got caught in between, and before he even knew what happened, they were smashed beyond repair.
After it happened, I went to see him in his apartment. His apartment is pretty poor compared to what Americans are used to. I brought a Bible with me to give to him and started talking to him about salvation. He listened, but was more interested in talking about his family history and other things. I would like you to pray for him.

Construction Team in Place

Tolya is a very honest kid who will graduate from our construction college this spring. The team I hired for the foundation also graduated from the same college, and are about the same age. I have decided to use Tolya for the rest of our house/church project and am very excited about it. We will be using labor from the students on our football team, many of which have experience in construction and could use the money. It will give me an even better opportunity to get closer to our players and witness to them. So we have our construction team pretty much in place.

Gas Project Started

We have hired a lady to help us with hooking up our gas connection. We already have our “technical conditions” which should mean we will have no problems connecting, but until we are connected, I would like to ask you to continue to pray. We have paid for the project (which is the paper schematic of how the connection needs to be built) and it should be done in about two months. After that, we will have a firm estimate about how much it will cost to build the connection. Thank you for your prayers concerning this as well.

Yours in Christ,
Adam, Angela, Alex, Amelia, Alisa, and Austin