We try to help the teens in two ways, both as a group and personally. They get together every Friday and sometimes invite friends, neighbors and colleagues to come along. We thank God that each topic we approach challenges them to a discussion. Last time we talked about forgiveness. Most of them are not from Christian families and we have had a very interesting time. Many questions were raised such as, "how can I forgive someone who betrayed me or left our family (people with divorced parents), or how can I forgive someone who wants to hurt me?" That provided a wonderful opportunity to talk about the forgiveness of the Lord Jesus. We are thankful that another family joined us in this ministry. Their names are Ghenadie and Tatiana. We do our best to help and equip them for this ministry. We manage as a team to spend time with each of the teenagers.

Olga and I have been spending more time with Nicoleta lately. She lives with her mother as her father has left them. We want to help her to forgive him and also to teach her to share the gospel with her mother and grandmother. We also help her with whatever we can by giving her guitar lessons every week because her mother can not afford to pay for them.

STUDENTS MINISTRY

This year the Christian students ministry had a fresh start especially for the Christian students from different parts of the country who came to study in Cahul. I was happy to see them starting a praise and worship team and nviting their non-Christian friends and colleagues to our Thursday night meetings.

I want to thank God for Slavic and Elena, who along with several students, go out and do outreach downtown, in schools and neighborhoods. They went to two boarding schools from Cahul and also to a village, Badicu, on February 14. They had a special program there. They work with several Christian organizations and want to work with young people from families with problems. They have started to work with 13 people of this nature. They actually managed to bring a group of students from non-Christian families to a Bible study led by someone from the church. I, on the other hand, pray and work with 6 or 7 more young people.This month we studied about spiritual and moral purity. We had brother Anatol deliver a message last Thursday. He motivated the young people to walk in purity and spiritual things.

WORKING WITH DEAF-AND-DUMB PEOPLE

Viorel who is 19 years old is deaf-and-dumb and an orphan. He became a Christian several years ago while at camp. Our church made efforts to help him and meet some of his needs. One of the families provided a place for him to stay and also offered to take care of him for a while, Several other families decided to help in various ways. Brother Anatol has a Bible study with him every week. As a church, we made the decision to give him financial support so that he could go to Chisinau once a month and participate in a training course for deaf-and-dumb people. I am also involved in his life. He has a vision and actually started a ministry for people with this kind of disability. The school he attended is in Cahul and there are children coming there from all over the country. He is always welcome there and he goes on a regular basis and he does Bible study with the students. I am now trying to help him start an evangelistic project that involves table tennis. We would like to teach the deaf and dumb students to play it and organize sport contests for them. This will be a good opportunity for them to hear the gospel. Last year, Viorel would bring 13-15 students to the table tennis competitions. But we want to start something exclusively for them.

THE YOUTH MINSITRY IN THE SOUTHERN PART OF MOLDOVA

It's been two years since I started to coordinate this ministry. I thank God for the dedicated leaders from the churches. It is not easy to work with youth nowadays because there is no stability. Due to our economical problems, many young people choose to go work abroad. Even the youth leaders are sometimes tempted to leave because they lack support.  I do my best to encourage and equip them. I do that during our monthly meeting and over the internet. They feel encouraged and we all come to understand the vision better. I want to help them particularly when it comes to counseling youth. Most of the young people need more than a church service, they need a personal relationship and good counsel for specific problems. If the leaders can provide that, they can overcome the crisis in their lives and grow spiritually. We already have testimonies of several young people who said how they were helped in being prevented to sin by counseling sessions. Other leaders need basic training such as how to lead a Bible study or how to organize a youth event. I do this thing with some of them such as Ion from Pelinei. We used to meet every week and do Bible study together and then think about different activities we could do.

COUNSELING

We continued to work with two young people, Maria and Andrei. They are going to be married. Some things were not very clear for them and we needed to talk more. They were challenged to walk in obedience and to be accountable. I think God has gotten a hold of their heart. I pray that they would take their relationship with God and with each other seriously.