by Abby S. (9th Grade)

Do you know any missionaries? Have you ever wondered why or how someone would decide to uproot their lives and move to a foreign country? How do they know it is their calling? As an MK these are questions I have wanted answered, so I interviewed my mom, Christina S.

As a college student Christina didn’t think she had the special something to be a missionary. She could never have predicted that many years later her daughter would interview her about doing God’s work and she would say, “I feel like I have done it until now, I feel like there’s a lot more for me to do. I feel like I am where He wants me. I’d like to be a lot more active, but I’m trying to have a healthy balance.” After all, God hadn’t given her a vision or appeared to her in a dream. However, sometimes God is more subtle than that.

Every summer her university had a missions trip and, convinced by a friend, Christina signed up. The trip that sent her all the way from California to Ukraine changed her life. “I was working with orphans in Ukraine on a short term trip. It broke my heart and made me want to dedicate my life to that.” 

After a year teaching in Ukraine she applied to be a missionary, but the organization she was working with needed more people to work with the orphans here in Bulgaria. 

When she first started she was doing summer camps for an orphanage in Trun. The longer she was here in Bulgaria the more people she met and the more orphanages she had the chance to work with. When she met my father who, being from Dupnitsa himself, was able to  introduce her to the director of an orphanage in Dupnitsa. 

When Bulgaria joined the European Union a requirement was them having less orphanages or tweaking the childcare system. As a result a lot of orphanages were closed down, but also foster care was allowed and adoption was more freely given as an option. 

As the other orphanages she worked in closed, the only one left that she worked with was the one in Dupnitsa. Until a friend asked her to help at an orphanage in Dragoman, where she still works to this day. 

Approximately six and a half miles from her old home, she kept working and was determined to make a difference in her new one. She has started many projects and has organized so many summer camps. Her work has changed with time, mostly for the better. When I asked her what was different about the work she does now her proud answer was this, “When I first came here, the only place for kids to live without parents was to live in these huge orphanages. They weren’t allowed to be in foster care and adoption was almost not a thing…And now adoption is happening quite frequently and foster care is not only allowed but encouraged. So, now I’m working more and more to support foster care and adoption, and less and less in actual orphanages.”

Sometimes we cannot see what God is planning, but we can trust that in the end we will be seeing His glorious results.