Siberian Girl in the Jungle!

Tanya Lisenko grew up in a small Russian village near Novosibirsk, Siberia, where temperatures can go down to minus 40 in the winter and snow is on the ground for seven months every year. After training at the OM Russia Discipleship Centre, she is now serving on the OM ship, Logos Hope. We invite you to join us in reading some excerpts from her diary and to see the hot sweaty Guyanian jungle through the eyes of a Siberian!

“Last week I went on a missionary trip to the jungle in Guyana. It wasn’t easy to prepare for this trip – all we knew beforehand was that we would be in two villages in the jungle, visiting churches, schools, and teaching about how to work with children. We had no ideas what to expect, and so we nick-named our team ‘Everything is Possible’!

‘Everything is Possible’ began with a trip into the deepest jungle of Guyana, a country in Latin America. Here there are many rivers, and if you look at a map, it seems as if there is just a tiny part of dry land divided by hundreds of waterways. In order to get to our destination we had to use not only buses, but also motor boats. 70% of Guyana is jungle and because it is so difficult to build roads, most of the population get around by boat. At first we raced along in the boat, spray coming over the sides, but as we left houses and civilisation behind, we went slower down a narrow river where we were surrounded by parrots, bird-song and of course angry mosquitoes!

We were 10 people in quite a small boat, and our many things that we had brought were coming along behind us in a much slower boat. Fascinated by the nature around us, we didn’t notice that we had reached our first destination, the village of Manavarin, where there is one school that serves people from large distance around. All the children go to school by canoe – just a hollowed out log - down a very small river. It so happened that we arrived at rush hour as all the children were paddling down-stream to get home, and we had a wait a while in a water traffic jam!

To get from the river to the school we had to cross a marsh on wooden planks. Unfortunately some of our team were not acrobatic enough to leap across the planks and got very wet feet in the marsh. It turned out that we had to leap the planks up to six times a day to get in and out of the village!

Then we arrived at the village in the jungle. If you come from a large town of 2 million people (where I was studying at university in Siberia), and live in a warm flat with a good choice of food available at any time of day, you can’t believe that people live in such basic conditions. Here there is no electricity or gas, and you have to light a fire to prepare the same simple meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 70% of the population in this country just live on bread and a simple soup made from one vegetable. I had previously heard of third world countries, and had been sorry to hear that people are starving in Africa, but I had a great shock when I saw how the people live in the village of Manavarin. Their houses – if you could call them that – were just small wooden shacks on legs. They told me that they build their houses on stilts because of the very frequent flooding. Inside there are just wooden planks and holes instead of windows. There was no furniture in the two rooms – just a large mattress for all the family on the floor and a cardboard box for clothes. Our team of 10 was put in one of the rooms. For the whole team, there were 4 hammocks and three sleeping bags (also each one of us had brought a blanket). Most of the team lay down on the bare boards with a blanket wrapped round them – in Guyana the cold isn’t a problem! The first night I tried to sleep in a hammock. As there is no electricity and it goes dark at 5.00pm in the evening, everyone goes to bed early. So, when our bags finally arrived at 1.00am in the morning and I hadn’t managed to go to sleep yet, I decided to give up my hammock to another girl, and promptly fell asleep wrapped up in my blanket on the floor. I woke up with the dawn at 5.00am not to the ‘coc-a-doodle-doo’ of a cockerel, which I am used to from my childhood, but to the sound of parrots squawking!

We had our morning devotions, breakfast, and preparation time, and then we were off again by boat to the school. The school from the outside looks very grand compared to the rest of the houses. But the outside was deceptive, because inside there was just one big classroom! There are only classes for the younger ages – for the teenagers there is a school a long way away in the city, and so most teenagers stay at home. The children were very different from Russian children. They sat very quietly, as if there weren’t 300 children in one room, and they were afraid to move or answer questions. We shared the gospel with them, gave out New Testaments and gave them some tips on how to read the Bible. We also invited the children to our evening programme.

Once the programme got underway it was just like working back home with children from a Russian village – they were laughing, playing, singing and praying simple prayers. It was pure joy to be involved in this ministry again. Straight after the children’s programme, without a break, we had to lead a meeting for adults. Here the services are quite different from our Russian church services. First of all they sing praises to God for about an hour, and then start the sermons and the testimonies – and our team had to lead the whole service! The services here don’t run according to a timetable. If it lasts three hours, that’s OK, and if four or more, then even better! We started at 6.00pm and finished about 10.00 or 11.00pm. Suffice it to say that by the end we were exhausted and very hungry! In the church there was a generator at least, so we could see until the end, but in the children’s programme it got darker and darker, until we had to read the Bible to the children by torch light. Looking back, I’m amazed that God gave us the strength to do all this, as we were living in extreme conditions without any time to rest.

For the rest of the trip in the mornings we visited other villages by boat, meeting with Christians who needed support and prayer, and sharing the gospel with others. In the afternoons we ran programmes for the children. In the first village we had clean water supplies that we had brought with us, but by the time we got to the second village our water had run out and we had to drink the rain water dripping off the roof of the house into a barrel. Quite a few of our team did end up with diarrhoea, but we were grateful to God that it was nothing more serious like high fever or malaria, despite the many mosquitoes.

We saw God work a lot through us and in us. I am sure that God is working in every place and in every time, whether in Russia, on the ship or in the jungle. But, of course in these extreme conditions it is more obvious, and you become more open to the lessons He is teaching you and you realise how much you depend on Him. I remembered Jesus’ teaching to his disciples, not to take anything with them on their missionary trip, not money, or clothes or shoes. I understand that these Bible verses talk about God caring for us when we depend on him, but it’s very hard to actually trust Him when you don’t know what’s coming next for your lunch. It’s OK to trust Him for chocolate and ice-cream, but a brown mass on your plate which seems to taste like wood chippings? – that’s more difficult! It might not be a comfortable mattress that he provides, but wood boards. This is what the people to whom you are going to are used to and it’s what they share with you so generously from their hearts. I’m not sure I’m ready yet to trust God in this way, but I want to learn.

I know that I’m not grateful enough for all the things that God gives me, and I’m not always satisfied. On this trip I met people who don’t even have half of what I have, but are happy; happy when God gives them rain that they don’t need to drink river water, happy that they have Bibles and that they can read, happy that the coconuts grow all year round and that you don’t have to care for them at all, happy in the heat that they are not cold. We arrived home after a week in the jungle – a little bit sun-burnt and tired, but we had bonded as a team and were full of God’s blessings. God gave us a great experience and I value it very much. I want to use all that God has taught me through this trip and never to lose hold of the emotions that I am now experiencing.”