ADRA : Adventist Development & Relief Agency International

An initial emergency response is underway targeting areas affected by the deadly earthquake, which hit 57 miles from Chengdu, the capital city of the Sichuan province, destroying up to 3.5 million homes. ADRA volunteers are in Dou Jiang Yan, one of the most accessible areas in the affected region, to conduct emergency assessment. Based on initial findings, the most urgent needs of survivors are water, food, blankets, shelter, and first aid medical service.

The current situation on the ground continues to be tense and uncertain due to ongoing aftershocks and heavy rains.

The quake, considered the worst since 1976 when more than 240,000 people died, hit at 2:28 p.m. local time (6:28 a.m. GMT) and was felt as far as Beijing and Bangkok, Thailand. Updates will be released as response efforts expand.

To send your contribution to ADRA’s emergency response effort, please contact ADRA at 1.800.424.ADRA (2372) or give online.

ADRA is present in 125 countries, providing community development and emergency management without regard to political or religious association, age, gender, race, or ethnicity.

Paulo Lopes has a confession to make: "The more challenging the position, the more I like it." And he has had his share of challenges—blessings too—since accepting his first job with ADRA fifteen years ago.

Listen to an Audio Interview with Paulo Lopes

A challenging initiation

Paulo received a baptism of fire on his very first day on the job in 1992, when he joined ADRA Angola as its finance director. With a civil war churning and foreigners fleeing, the country was an extremely difficult place to live. "I remember my very first night in Luanda, the capital city, like it was yesterday," he says. "Seven kilometers away from where I was staying, a huge blast woke me up in the middle of the night. The blast was so strong that the house trembled as it would during an earthquake. Later on, I learned an ammunition storehouse had exploded."

Six months later, his wife, Edra, joined him in Angola, holding their infant son Lucas in her arms. They arrived in an almost empty plane; most everyone else, it seemed, was determined to avoid the country all together. At the airport, security was rigorous and brutal. Walking towards Edra tangled up with baby and suitcases, Paulo made a step past a location guarded by the Angolan army. "If you make one more step, I'll kill you!" warned a heavily armed soldier. Paulo knew by the soldier's tone that it was not an idle threat, and served as a reminder of the harsh reality into which his family had arrived.

Food was scarce. Electricity had been cut months before, and water from the tap was non-existent. The family had to buy muddy water from local vendors, then boil and filter it before use. Often, they had no milk for the baby.

With armed patrols at every street corner and frequent night bombings, life was stressful. Only one week after the family's arrival, the airport was shut down and the civil war erupted, making travel out of the country impossible. Six thousand people were killed in one single week.

After nine months of serious discussions, United Nations representatives allowed Paulo—representing ADRA— and UNICEF staff to fly to the town of Huambo, a civil war hotspot in the center of the country, to assess needs, evaluate logistic challenges, and meet with the rebel forces. As a result of weeklong negotiations, Paulo and the others established a trust with the rebels and organized the first food distributions. ADRA's food distributions, coordinated with the United Nations' World Food Programme, continued for a full year. Each week, seven planes brought desperately needed food to the region, feeding hungry Angolans.

"I knew God was using me to help in this crisis, despite the dangers and difficulties," remembers Paulo. "Those were my best years with ADRA."

From nursing to numbers

Growing up in Brazil, young Paulo's ambition was to be a nurse. However, he soon found out that he didn't much like sciences. Instead, he focused his studies on accounting and theology, and made plans to become a pastor. Though he liked theology, he realized that he preferred budgeting and analytic accounting. In college, the decision to study business came naturally, as did the decision to begin dating Edra, whom he had met in high school. The couple married immediately after graduation and Paulo was hired as the college's cashier. Later, he held high-level accounting positions in different areas of Brazil.

After those first two difficult years in Angola, the family moved to the ADRA office in the neighboring country of Mozambique, where ADRA managed large post-civil war projects that included food distribution operations funded by USAID. The program was complex and challenging and again, Paulo’s special gift for finances was put to good use as assistant finance director for ADRA Mozambique. It was during their six and a half years of service in Mozambique that baby Marcos joined the family.

From Mozambique Paulo moved to finance positions for the Adventist Church in Armenia and Irkutsk, Russia. What a challenge it was to adapt to the harsh climate with long freezing gloomy winters after nine years of work in Africa! Learning the Russian language presented another challenge. So far, the family had served in countries where Portuguese, their native language, was spoken. Now in Siberia, they had to learn Russian to communicate. As expected, the children learned it easily at school and adapted quickly to their new environment and culture. Paulo and Edra struggled a bit more.

After two years in Siberia, they moved to Zaoski near Moscow, where Paulo worked as finance manager for the Adventist Publishing House.

Pray and trust

By the time the Lopes family left Russia a few years later, they were fluent in Russian. Paulo, however, admits that during the years he worked at the publishing house, he truly missed working with ADRA. "I visited ADRA's Web site almost every day!" he says. Consequently, the family asked God to open up a position at ADRA.

As they waited for an answer, they planned to return to Brazil, their home country. Tickets were booked. Cardboard boxes multiplied. They grew anxious to see their families again, their thoughts already centered on Brazil.

However, just one short month before leaving, Paulo received an unexpected phone call from Heriberto Mueller, at the time director for the ADRA Asia Regional Office. The Indian Ocean tsunami had struck India and several other countries a few months before, in December 2004. With significant tsunami emergency and recovery programs developing, ADRA India was eagerly looking for a good finance director; Paulo's name was at the top of a list of potential candidates. When Heriberto asked if he would be interested, Paulo was speechless from shock. God's answer was so evident and so perfectly on time! But, the family still had to agree. . . .

The decision to accept the job in India took the family less than ten minutes. God's answer to their prayers was simply too clear to ignore.

A Passage to India

In July 2005, six months after the tsunami, Paulo started his new position as ADRA India's finance director. Though it demanded much time, energy, and travel, Paulo relished his work organizing and managing the finances of the tsunami-related projects. After a first phase of relief and rehabilitation projects (mainly housing reconstruction and water and sanitation projects), the programs naturally evolved into a post-tsunami recovery phase with more income-generating and agricultural projects.

In March 2007, Paulo was promoted to country director, a role that allows him to direct not only ADRA India's tsunami recovery program, but the office's projects throughout the country. He notes especially the recurring polio eradication projects in northern India. "India is a huge country with huge needs, especially in the health issues such as HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and maternal/child health," he shares. The office also responds to seasonal emergencies, such as the recent severe flooding in the eastern portion of India.

While Paulo keeps busy directing ADRA, Edra continues to be very much involved in the church and also enjoys her teaching job at a local kindergarten. She's finally had her chance to learn English, and the boys, Lucas and Marcos, are now perfectly fluent in both English and Hindi. Though they have spent their childhoods in far-flung countries, the boys maintain a thoroughly Brazilian love for soccer. However, this has not prevented them from also becoming expert players of cricket—the national sport in India.

Married to his work?

Edra is very supportive of Paulo's passion for and dedication to the work of ADRA: "In all the countries we lived in we were always able to find help when needed. Sometimes a neighbor, other times a church member or a local friend. We always had our angels taking care of us."

And then Edra smiles and winks as she says, "Paulo really has two wives, both with very similar names: Edra and ADRA!"

Out of central Tajkistan's rocky, war-hardened soil, ADRA is constructing greenhouses and helping families in the Rasht region grow hope in an area still recovering from Tajikistan's brutal five-year civil war.

Since the end of Tajikistan's civil war in 1997, the region has suffered a full collapse of its economy, leaving many people struggling financially. In a region already characterized as "less developed," the civil war destroyed the region's financial infrastructure. Many of the survivors lost their homes and livelihoods in a conflict that reportedly killed at least 50,000 people and forced another 1.2 million to flee from their homes. Thousands of families were left to mourn fathers and brothers who never returned home. And when the war ended, those who remained wondered how they would survive.

The greenhouses built by ADRA Tajikistan provide an answer to that question, allowing families to grow dill, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and other vegetables during the cold mountain winters.

"The home-grown vegetables enrich the families' diets, provide an income, and increase their overall wellbeing," said Victor Muhanov, project assistant for ADRA Tajikistan. "Also, children can watch the process of carrying out greenhouse agriculture and learn valuable skills and abilities that will be passed down from generation to generation."

The greenhouse project, showcased in ADRA's 2007 edition of The Original Really Useful Gift Catalog, began in June of 2007. Each greenhouse costs $1,500 dollars to build, and can be constructed in two days. So far, ADRA has been able to provide greenhouses for six families.

Sanchagul, a rather shy woman with soft brown eyes and dark, kerchief-covered hair, is the wife and mother of one of those families. Fifteen years ago Sanchagul, her husband, Mirzo, and children were a typical Tajik family. Then war broke out, filling each day with insecurity, terror, and confusion. And when a missile fired by a military helicopter destroyed their home and belongings, they were forced to join other war-displaced families in a settlement known as Pitomnik. Mirzo was able to build them a small, four-room house, and Sanchagul has done her best to make the simple house a home, with traditional rugs to warm the floors and family portraits to line the walls.

The couple and their 25-year-old son, Mirzorahim, bear deep scars from the war. Mirzo struggles with crippling states of depression caused by the trauma and horrors of the war that make it hard for him to work and provide for his family. Before the war, Mirzo enjoyed a successful career as an accountant and business manager for the Rasht region government. Now he works as a laborer working to reconstruct the local roads. But with his depression, he often is unable to work, and the family often does not have enough to eat.

Mirzorahim was a normal, healthy, 10-year-old boy when the fighting began, exposing him to the hard realities and deadly violence of conflict. Since then, he periodically battles epileptic-like seizures doctors believe were triggered by war-caused trauma. His three younger sisters, Khangoma, and twins Fotima and Zuhro, attend school in a nearby settlement, though without proper shoes the walk is often difficult, especially in the snowy winter weather.

With both her husband and her son ill, the responsibility of providing for the family has fallen squarely on Sangachul's shoulders. Like all mothers, Sanchagul wants to make sure that her family is provided for, that her children are safe and their lives easy, and that they grow healthy and happy. But without help, each day becomes a struggle to survive.

Sanchagul received a greenhouse from ADRA this past November, and is just about ready to harvest the first crop of vegetables. Mirzo and Mirzorahim enjoy working in the greenhouse, cultivating vegetables that will supplement the family's meals and be sold for much-needed supplies, such as new shoes for the girls.

Grateful for the assistance from ADRA, Sanchagul knows the hope she holds for her family's future in this rocky, war-torn land will now grow as strong and healthy as the vegetables in their new greenhouse.

ADRA's relationship with the people of the Rasht region began back in 2002, with a project that distributed wheat, sugar and oil among the people in need there. ADRA has continued working in the Rasht region, reconstructing schools, providing community development assistance, and distributing gifts to children from vulnerable families.

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 Stepping through the front doors, we get our first clue that something big happens here. Lining the walls, from floor to ceiling, are crude wooden shelves. Each shelf is heavily packed with the reason we are here … crackers, small cakes, cookies, and bread.

If you walk through a small door in the back of this room, your eyes won't believe what you see. Hidden by this small storefront is a huge bakery, where production is happening at a rapid pace. On the left, a man sticks a long paddle into a deep wooden oven and effortlessly picks up a pan of baked goods lying deep in the oven, twirls it on the end of the paddle, then lays it back down again to finish baking. On the right, someone else is mixing huge batches of dough, and another person presses the cookies into shape with ingenious makeshift equipment. Huge bags of flour and other ingredients are stacked along the wall. What once was a small, struggling business is now a thriving enterprise.

This is the home of Maritza Molina, a baker and mother of five, and a member of an ADRA-supported community bank, which was named "Together We Triumph" by its group members. She began working with ADRA 10 loan cycles ago. She started with a loan of 3,000 lempira ($180) and has worked her way up to receiving a loan of L15,000 ($800). Before the loan, she lived in a small wood house and rented the bakery property, which she staffed with four employees. With the loan, she's been able to build a larger brick home and hire six employees, and she now owns the bakery property. She also used to have to buy her baking materials on credit, but with her loan, she can now buy her ingredient inventory with cash and get a better price. Her clients have increased by five distributors, who take the product and sell it to clients. In production, she used to use six 100-pound bags of flour per day. Now she uses up to twice that amount. As for sales, she used to sell L1,500 ($80) per day; now she sells nearly L3,000 ($180) a day and is able to give a commission to her distributors. She still has goals to grow her business and get more equipment, such as a mixer, and replace her wooden oven with an electric one.

Her entire family is involved in the business. She works with her spouse, also a baker, and her son and daughter help after school. "I thank God for the opportunity to be in this bank, and I thank ADRA for investing in me, for the loan to improve my business, and for teaching me money management, how to run my business better, and the importance of good customer service," says Maritza. "The extra profits have also helped with our health and education expenses."

Maritza is part of ADRA Honduras' credit program for micro and small enterprises. The program promotes the socioeconomic development of mainly low-income women who do not have access to conventional forms of credit in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and who are presently involved in microenterprises. Loans are made available via more than 100 community banks of solidarity groups consisting of approximately 30 women each. The loans are used by women for such activities as wholesaling, retailing, small manufacturing, tailoring, auto mechanics, agricultural activities, and others. Amounts of approximately $100 to $600 are loaned in incremental steps for four months at a time. More than one loan will be allowed as long as the previous loan was successfully managed and the interest and capital duly returned. Repayments are made biweekly with a flat interest rate of three percent per month. The solidarity groups are expected to save 10 percent of their individual loan amount. ADRA-employed credit agents monitor the loans, each facilitating 10 to 12 groups of up to about 300 members total.

At the time of our visit, ADRA was targeting three neighborhoods of Tegucigalpa: Flor del Campo, San Francisco, and Nueva Suyapa. During a four-year period, the program directly benefited 2,830 women, 150 men, plus the owners of 20 existing small businesses.

The middle and lower income sector of Tegucigalpa numbers about 700,000 in 316 townships. Water for the townships is in short supply, and few have sewerage systems. Electricity is also rationed, and unpaved, eroded streets are standard. Other factors aggravating the problem are illiteracy, single motherhood, limited or nonexistent manual and professional skills, frequent illnesses, and exploitation by harsh merchants and clever entrepreneurs. All have combined to provoke a vicious cycle of destitution as well as food insecurity. At the time of our visit, 65 to 68 percent of the economically active population was underutilized or unemployed.

Poor entrepreneurs are unable to access formal forms of capital and must rely on local moneylenders, who charge very high interest rates. With low or no savings and no access to credit or formal lending institutions, entrepreneurs have no capital to invest in business activities.

To enhance the beneficiaries' entrepreneurial skills, ADRA trains them in organizing and managing solidarity groups, opening and managing bank accounts, operating pertinent machinery and equipment, bookkeeping, small business management, and production techniques.

Maritza is just one person who has benefited from this program. I also met Felicidad, who has a small grocery store, and Nora, who has a beauty salon. Lourdes enlarged her tortilla shop, Suyapa sells chickens and snacks, and Miriam is a diesel mechanic with a taxi business that grew from one taxi to 11! Maria sells spices and herbs, and Plasida has a produce stand. Each of these women was selected by ADRA because they have a favorable attitude toward change and organization of the community, as well as a desire to participate in the development process. They were already entrepreneurial women and eagerly joined hands with ADRA to grow and expand their businesses to become profitable enterprises that bring income support to their families, enabling them to purchase ample food, pay school fees and doctors bills, and become self-sufficient.

At each home and business we visited, we saw joy and pride on the faces of women empowered by ADRA. But also in each neighborhood, there remain more women in need of a hand of assistance to attain the dreams they have for their families or their businesses. Your continued support enables more women and their families to reach the business and personal goals they so long to attain. It's just as Maritza's community bank members believe: Together We Triumph!

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She wanted me to meet one of the students. I knew that this must be something special she wanted me to experience. I did not need a second invitation. At 3:30, I pointed the old Land Cruiser into the wall-to-wall traffic and fought my way to the district where the school was located.

Schools #29 and #116 are located next to each other and work with the deaf and the blind, respectively. The four-story gray building with cement-brick walls resembled a prison rather than a school. I walked up those uneven concrete steps to the third floor to the classroom that had been assigned to our project. As I stepped into the classroom, all 20 students touched their foreheads, then put their fists to their chests and pointed their open palms toward me in greeting from their silent worlds. A smile was evident on each face. Private conversations took place in sign language between the students as we waited for the teachers. Just a week ago, these children lived in isolated worlds; now they had been brought together and given a sign language to communicate with each other.

I made a little speech in English that was translated into Mongolian by Battsetseg and then into Mongolian sign language by one of the teachers. I challenged the students to make the best of the rest of their life’s journey now that they could communicate. We gave each one a certificate, and I shook each precious hand that is now being put to such valuable use in communicating. I took a photo of the group, each student holding their certificate with one hand and pointing their other hand with loose fingers to the ceiling and wobbling it back and forth, which is sign language for clapping and joy. They were so proud of those certificates.

Battsetseg then asked them who the best student had been. The students all pointed to a thin, pale, and emaciated man about 30 years of age. Was this the student she wanted me to meet? Tsendjav’s story unfolded as I spoke to his parents alone afterward. He was one of triplets that his parents were so proud of. While still a baby, he was given an antibiotic for an infection. His parents claimed that it made him deaf. For 30 years these respectable parents—the father is a Mongolian language professor at the University of Mongolia, and the mother is a teacher at an elite school—hid this child from every visitor to avoid the embarrassment of anyone knowing that they had a child with a disability. Every time anyone knocked at the door, they would hold their index finger across their lips, and he would go scampering to the bedroom and remain out of sight and quiet till the visitors had left. Not a single person ever knew that they had another son who was deaf. They loved him, but they did not know how to communicate with him. The only sign he knew was the index finger across the lips.

One week ago, the parents, who had heard about the ADRA sign language course, plucked up enough courage for the first time in 30 years to take Tsendjav out of their apartment. The first day in class, he would not lift his head and made no sign of taking anything in.

But I saw him this afternoon, just five days later. He was at the center of many conversations. This week he learned all 35 letters of the Mongolian alphabet for the first time in his life. He could not even count when he came on Monday. Oh, the joy of his parents as they clutched the precious 600-word sign language dictionary, their key to communication with their son. Soon we hope to have a new 3,000-word dictionary in their hands. Tsendjav came up and shook my hand, gave me a rose, and pulled my head toward his so he could press his cheek against mine as a sign of respect and thankfulness. I had a lump in my throat, and my eyes misted over. This was a child who had been brought out into the light for the first time in his lifetime. How many more are still hidden?

The parents thanked us over and over. The father is going to give us a list of 3,000 of the most actively used words in Mongolian so we can corroborate our list with his. I challenged him to become the first professor of sign language in Mongolia.

We are at SMP4 Junior High School, and 545 students are lined up in the school yard listening to speeches from ADRA, a representative of the district education department, and their headmaster, Mr. Zainun Zakaria.

The headmaster delivers a powerful motivational speech to his students, urging them to be strong. They are survivors and should not let the tsunami ruin their lives. They need to look forward and rebuild their future through education. He reminds them of the two bombs that destroyed Japan at the end of World War II. The students should look to the Japanese to see how successfully they rebuilt their country after their disaster. It was through education and determination that Japan rebuilt a strong economy.

He wants his students to get on with life. He believes that through school the children can return to some sort of normality in the midst of personal tragedy. They have this opportunity because of the work ADRA is doing in his school. He expresses his gratefulness for the many NGOs and in particular ADRA. He urges his students to learn from ADRA and the other NGOs that have come from the other side of the world. He tells them that they are important. The world cares about them and their future. In return, they must do well in school and rebuild their lives.

These are strong words for children who have recently survived earthquakes and a tsunami. After the formalities, the children receive their new bags. I catch up with Mr. Zakaria. He shares that he has worked 34 years as the headmaster of this school. He pulls up his trousers to show me the marks, scars, and discoloration on his legs. “Tsunami—tsunami,” he proclaims. I quickly get a translator so I can understand what he wants to tell me.

On December 26, 2004, Mr. Zakaria had attended teacher training at the school and was on his way home. As he got to the bridge in town, the earth shook. He quickly jumped out of his car and lay on the ground, holding his arms around his head. When the large earthquake stopped, he hurried back to his house to make sure his wife and daughter were fine. Confirming that his family was all right, he went to the mosque to gather information and see if someone needed help. Not many people were in the mosque, so he returned home. On the way, he met people screaming about the rising water levels.

He ran to find his daughter and tell her to go to her grandmother, who lived farther down the coast. The daughter, like any teenager, wanted to change her clothes and pack a bag. Both Mr. Zakaria and his wife urged her to leave on her motorbike. Finally, she obeyed her parents and drove off. His wife ran over to the neighbor’s two-story house, bringing a small bag of documents. Mr. Zakaria watched his family leave. The water level was rising; by now it had reached the side of his house.

He got on a motorcycle and tried to drive off, but the bike stalled because the water level was too high. Everything happened so fast. Suddenly he found the water carrying him away. He tried to grab hold of something, anything. He grabbed on to a jeep. The car was tossed around, and he was back in the water. Struggling, he tried to grab hold of a building, but the current was too powerful and he was swept away. After an hour of struggling, he was finally able to grab the roots of a Beringin tree. As he pulled himself up onto the tree, he found that he was not alone. Also clinging to the Beringin tree were a civet with three of her kittens, two mice, and a chicken.

For hours, they clung to the tree, not seeing any other living being. The water was filled with dead people. It was pulling back to the sea at a stronger and faster pace than it had come in. All Mr. Zakaria could do was sit and wait. The sun was scorching hot and burning him, but he thought only of his wife and daughter. Where were they? What was happening to them?

After four hours, he decided to try to reach a patch of dry land that he saw in the distance. He removed his shirt and trousers. He tied his trousers around his waist and his shirt around his head. He knew that his clothes would slow him down. He estimated that it would take about 15 minutes to swim to land, but the current was strong and he was weak. He swam from branch to branch. He found a board and pushed it ahead a bit and then swam to it. While he was trying to swim, he was afraid that another wave would come.

 At some point, he realized that he had lost his clothes. He felt pain in his leg and saw that it was cut in many places. Finally, after an hour and a half, his feet touched dry land. Mr. Zakaria was tired and worn-out, but determined to find out what had happened to his family. He staggered to his relative’s house, which was situated in an area that was unaffected. There he was able to rest for some time and eat some food. His thoughts were with his daughter and his wife. He was particularly concerned for his daughter; had she done as he had told her? If so, he knew that there was little chance that she had survived, as her grandmother’s house was close to the waterfront.

Regaining some strength, he started his search. He walked around the city and saw destruction and dead people. He ended up at the mosque, and there he finally met his daughter and wife. It was around 4:00 p.m.; he had seen them last at 8:30 a.m. For once, he was glad that his daughter had done what she thought was best and had not followed his directions. Had she obeyed him, she would not be alive.

Mr. Zakaria still smiles; he knows that he is lucky and is grateful that his family is safe. All the material positions they have are the daughter’s motorbike and the small bag his wife took. However, this is not important; they have each other.

After hearing his story, I understand that his strong speech to his students was not out of insensitivity to the children’s experience, but out of care and to motivate them to continue life. Seeing the work ADRA is doing to rehabilitate the children’s school and give them back a future, I too smile with Mr. Zakaria and promise that ADRA will not forget him or his school.

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The cold tarmac at the Vladivostok airport was the end of the line for me. The air was about 17 degrees Fahrenheit, as warm as it was going to get for a mid-winter morning. Twenty dull hours of flying had set my wrist watch no less than fifteen hours ahead of Washington D.C. to a distant time zone in the Russian Far East. Here, if not for strict border crossings, a person might drive to North Korea for lunch or go to China for an all-afternoon shopping spree. I was, for the moment, in a different dimension.

The moment we stepped off the bus that ferried us from the plane, the main terminal door swung open and we entered reverently in a single file. Down the hall a crowd of eager Russians, shapkas on every head, searched our group of new arrivals for a glimpse of their husbands, girlfriends, and business guests. I, too, was looking deep into the crowd for a man who just two days before had promised in a short e-mail to meet me here. He had sent me his telephone number in case one of us failed to show up, but he didn’t see the likelihood of that happening since he had booked himself on a flight that would arrive several hours before mine from a distant city in Siberia. The only thing he noted with some level of concern was,  “I have problems with English language.” And that was it.

It was almost 11:00 a.m. by my watch, and I stood in the middle of the hall wrestling with my bag before I set it down on the shiny floor. For a moment it occurred to me that he would not arrive. After all, there are still many things that can keep two complete strangers 9,343 miles away from each other from converging at the same time on the same spot of earth in a place unfamiliar to both.

On the Trans-Siberian Railroad traveling to visit ADRA projects along the way.

That impossibility, however, came only as a passing thought.

I watched a family, anxious to see a relative arrive, stretch out their arms as he approached their side of the airport hall. As for me, I imagined the meeting with my local contact being something like this:

“Am I glad to be here! I wasn’t sure if we’d meet, but I’m certainly happy that you made it. So, good flight from Novosibirsk? Are you ready to get on with the trip? By the way, when do we catch the train tonight?”

Which is why, a minute or two later, when I found myself standing in front of a man wearing a suit and tie and an elegant black shapka who spoke to me only in Russian, but to whom my identity was fully known, I was only half convinced that this was Nikolay Grebenyuk, director of ADRA East Russia, the person with whom I had corresponded for a month and who had replied to all my inquiries in a series of messages in well-written English. How could this be? I was flummoxed. Then I said:

“Nikolay?”

A wide smile spread across his face, the kind that says unequivocally, yes, it’s me.

He had immediately recognized the stitched ADRA logo on my windbreaker jacket when I walked into the terminal. He pulled out a paper folder with the same logo printed on it, as a gesture to ensure mutual recognition.

“How did you manage to write in English?” I asked.

He fumbled with some words, and said, “Computer program.”

Pointing to the exit, he asked (I could only guess), how my flight from Moscow had been, and was I ready to get on with the trip? He patted me on the back. As we walked out into the brisk morning air, I sensed that perhaps he was also glad to know that neither of us had flown all this way just to be stood up by the other.

At two o’clock that same night we were seated comfortably in a spacious and mostly empty sleeper railroad car on our way to Irkutsk, a city three days away that lies near Lake Baikal’s southern extremity not far from the border with Mongolia. Although we had enjoyed the convenience of a local translator during the day, our communication was now restricted to loose Russian and English words, wild hand signals, and doodles on a small paper pad.

I crawled into my sleeping bag. Nikolay, who still seemed to be working out some words in his head, stood up and said, “Chai?” The word would have gone past me had I not visited northern Pakistan a year earlier where drinking tea is a part of every social event and is offered to any guest who enters a home, much like a calumet among American Indian tribes, to extend friendship and peace.  He quickly dashed through the narrow corridor and got two tall glasses from a train attendant, then filled them almost to the brim with hot water from a boiler at the end of the railroad car.

“Good chai,” I said. Nikolay responded in Russian and seemed pleased by my appreciation of the local tea.

“My country drink chai. All people,” I said.

A puzzled look settled on his face. The confusion, perhaps, had something to do with my assertion that everyone in my country, like Russia, was a tea drinker. Or that he wasn’t sure what country was my country.

“America?” he said pointing to me.

“No, no. No America,” I said putting my index finger to my chest. “Chile.”

I drew an imaginary map in the stale air of our compartment, and after a brief pause, he said: “I Ukraina.”

“Not Russki?” I said in the best bit of Russian I could summon.

Until now it had not occurred to me that Nikolay could be anything other than an authentic born and bred Russian. Perhaps, if I’d known the language well I could have detected a slight foreign twist in his voice, but then again, he had lived outside the Ukraine for so long that he surely had by now left out of his pronunciation any clues of having been born elsewhere.

In his work for ADRA, Nikolay Grebenyuk oversees all of Siberia, an area equivalent to nearly nine times the size of Alaska.

His mother and father, who raised him Russian Orthodox from birth (he would later become Seventh-day Adventist), still lived, he said, in his childhood home in Kumejki, a small rural village 110 miles southwest of Kiev, where they had a large field of bright sunflowers, which they tended to year after year. They loved the Ukraine and would not live anywhere else, even if that meant seeing their son, who had lived in Siberia for the better part of two decades, only from time to time. Fortunately, his older brother lived just down the road from them, and that gave Nikolay a measure of comfort.

Family was sacred to him; one doesn’t need words to sense the love of a man for his wife and children. Opening his notebook computer, he clicked on several photographs which popped onto the screen: holding a big fish with his 12-year-old son, Pavel; daughter Katya, 16, posing near the door of her grandparents’ home in Kumejki; and Lena, his wife of seventeen years, sitting on a beach during a recent summer trip. I was sure, then, that being on this train with me meant that Nikolay was losing time with them; it was the nature of the work. We’d all been there: far-removed, longing.

Presently, as we sped through the darkness across the vast Russian countryside, we were taking sips of hot tea. It was late in the night, but there seemed to be a sense of interest in each of us to know where the other had come from—and perhaps where he was going.

The train traveled the entire night along the Chinese border all the way to Khabarovsk, then turned west at the northern end of the city and crossed the Amur River. Nikolay was delighted to see the river flowing undisturbed under a hefty layer of ice possibly as much a three feet thick, he said. To sink a fishing line into the river a man would need to drill by hand for the better part of the morning, a sweaty task even in the deep freeze of winter. But no amount of ice, nothing really, was going to get between a man and his fish.

This was apparent the next day when it came time for lunch. Long before boarding the train (when exactly is anyone’s guess), Nikolay got his hands on a trout that only two or three day ago, I imagined, had been swimming up a river in Kamchatka, an extensive peninsula opposite to Alaska across the Bering Sea whose fresh fish products are considered the best in the region. Now, the trout lay smoked inside a plastic bag. Using a small kitchen knife, he cut the flesh into thick slices; the outside was clearly well smoked, but bringing a piece of the fish to my mouth, I tasted the raw gelatinous body.

“Good,” Nikolay said, “Very, very good.”

One bite was enough. In Russian he offered to give me half of the fish. Taking the knife, he pointed to the slices that were mine. I declined, offering my upbringing as a poor excuse for not being accustomed to eating fish. He said no problem, and having eaten his share of the trout, he put the rest back in the bag and placed it by the window where the deep cold from outside would keep the meat fresh until the following day, in case I changed my mind.

By now it was customary after every meal for us to read from a book or stare out the window or simply sit back and choose a conversation topic to pursue. We had somehow managed to discover words in Russian and English that we both vaguely recognized, and soon we were having lengthy exchanges.

One such discussion started hours after we left Khabarovsk as the train worked its way across a vast, uninhabited plain colonized by birch trees and little else. We were in the Siberian taiga proper, Nikolay said, a biome that extends all the way to Norway and, skipping the Bering Sea, into Alaska and much of inland Canada. A man takes a measure of pride in saying he has been in it—in winter especially. It is, after all, a place of infinite beauty, but which can test even the most rugged of men. In years past Nikolay had ventured into the open taiga for days at a time, not necessarily alone, but always in the spirit of adventure.

“My friend professional hunter,” he said.

It was with his buddy Sasha and two or three other friends from Irkutsk that he would walk into the wild on weekends to camp, rest, and sometimes hunt. He was showing me some photographs of one such trip when he said he owned three carbines. It was with one of these that he went into the forest one day and killed a bear. At present, however, he kept his carbines stored at home, because he hadn’t found much use for them in recent years since he moved west from Irkutsk to the bigger city of Novosibirsk.

Life in Irkutsk had been memorable: hunting trips to the Siberian taiga, visits to Lake Baikal, friends, romance. But Nikolay had not moved there postulating that he would achieve those things, but rather that those things would come to him in time, as one must often do upon arrival in a strange, foreign land. This was 1986 and he was enjoying the relative freedom of having finished four years of training at a military academy in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka rivers 250 miles east of Moscow. The Soviet Army, naturally, would expect a return on its investment. Before the blanket of winter dropped on Siberia, Nikolay arrived in Irkutsk to report for duty and begin, he said, a career as an acquisitions and logistics officer. The job meant supplying the base—from the grunts to high commanders—with everything from socks to the lard used in the kitchen. He was organized and watchful of every detail and over the years he rose steadily, as did his love for Irkutsk and his new wife and later his two children, to become major—by now in the Russian Army. 

A few days later, in late afternoon, he would take me to the main entrance of the army base to show me his former home. A Sukhoi jet fighter was propped handsomely on the snow near the gate. A young guard was standing out of the cold inside a yellow building. Nikolay didn’t say a word. He just smiled. But I knew that he had thirteen years of memories tucked away behind those tall black metal gates.

Siberia, if you didn’t know it already, is enormous. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains not far from Moscow and southward to neighboring Kazakhstan, and runs along the borders of Mongolia and China all the way to the other side of Asia where the land dead-ends at the Pacific Ocean eight time zones later. If you take a cutout of the map of Alaska and set it down over Siberia, it will easily fit no less than eight times and leave plenty of wiggle room to add California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Connecticut, and two Districts of Columbia.

To approach the size of Siberia in a different manner, one comes to the conclusion, after some simple mathematics, that Nikolay must oversee—and try to crisscross—as many square miles as the vast majority of ADRA country offices in, say, Africa (twenty-six out of a total of thirty-four)—Mauritania, Mali, Cape Verde, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sao Tome, Angola, Namibia, Madagascar, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Malawi, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe—alone.

One man.

He tackles distances by plane and car and, as we were doing now, also by train. Getting around remains a very big undertaking.

Nikolay, however, had not let a single moment of frustration slip out of him since we’d met. If he ever felt overwhelmed by anything—by the size of the territory he was meant to bring relief to, by the needs of the people, by the time away from home—it was never apparent to me in any way. Perhaps, Siberia had had the opposite effect on him. Or he had dealt with it long ago. The reality, nevertheless, is that eight years after leaving the army to work for ADRA he remained driven, optimistic, confident, and, best of all, cheerful to the marrow. 

In the process, he had managed to stay deeply human, too.

“Every time I go to a project I dedicate myself to the people,” he said later through a translator. “I try to do my best to help them and make their lives a little better.”

I saw this side of him even more clearly in Irkutsk, where we arrived in the middle of the night after seemingly time traveling 2,569 miles over the frozen Siberian taiga sipping hot, sweet tea.

The next day at noon we gathered in Novolenino, a residential district of the city, inside a spacious, sunny room at the Regional State Organization Orphanage #2. Here, sometime ago, ADRA had brought food to supplement the pantry of the orphanage and improve the diet that the children needed to grow up healthy. Lunchtime was well underway and two dozen little children, one to four years of age, sat around tiny square tables eating hot soup and bread. A few, too little to master a spoon full of soup, got help from the staff. When lunch was over, the children ran inside the room chasing each other around until they slowly grew tired.

An ADRA volunteer helps a little boy eat lunch at a center for HIV-positive children in Irkutsk, Siberia, Russia.

Many of the children staying in this orphanage wing, called Aistenok (it means “stork-baby” in Russian), are living with HIV. Some arrived at the orphanage soon after birth, abandoned, in some instances, near a bus stop, in the snow, or in the alleys between houses, well before they would know the love of a mother or understand the cruelty of the world outside these walls. Fortunately, on this day none seemed aware of the latter yet.

The happiness in Nikolay’s face was palpable. He held a little girl in his arms and whispered a few short words to her. She was shy. Quiet. He said something else, tickled her chin and she broke out in a wide smile.

Many children who have been abandoned live in infant houses until they can be adopted or transferred to homes for older children.

“This is what drives me to do my best,” he said. “The children.”

We stood quietly watching the staff put every child in bed for a nap. Not every child was willing to go to sleep. Minutes later, however, the room grew peaceful. Silence.  We heard only the gentle, rhythmic breathing.

I was certain that the faces of these children, of so many others, too, would stay with him beyond this day. He had said to me, “Each time I return home after several weeks, I feel pain for the people. I am touched by the sorrow I see in many places in Siberia. But then I tell myself that I’m working for them.”

Nikolay standing on the ice of Lake Baikal.

We drove to Lake Baikal the next day over newly fallen snow. The icy surface of the lake was a clear window into the depths of the water. So clear, we could see the bubbles trapped inside the ice. Nikolay walked to an open market not far from the edge of the lake. When he returned, holding something wrapped in a newspaper under his arm, he said,

“Baikal fish.”

I sensed right away that Nikolay Grebenyuk wasn’t going to let my upbringing get in the way of a good fish.

We spent the next hour eating fish with our bare hands.

“You like?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Eating omuel, a popular fish from Lake Baikal.

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