Infinitely More

by Krutov, Alex; Davis, Jackie

  Whenever Doug was out of the room, however, Constantine took every opportunity to scold me. “Shut up and stop whining about your life!” It was at this point that I vowed to start learning English for myself so I would never have to depend on a translator again. I would sit quietly on the couch of the Americans’ apartment and intently listen to their conversations, trying to pick out vocabulary. I grilled the Americans for definitions and pronunciations. Once I started learning words, I would ask them to help me put together sentences. I didn’t want them to make fun of me, but I gave them permission to correct my attempts to speak their language. Slowly but surely, with slightly “broken” English, I began to communicate with my new friends on my own.

  One Sunday Doug invited me to attend church with him at the International Church of St. Petersburg. The church had been started by missionaries and probably half of the congregation were foreign missionaries from all over the world. The church was meeting in one of the Houses of Culture buildings. I remember being greeted by ladies at the door, who shook my hand and welcomed me to their church. I was amazed to see so many people carrying their own Bibles, and even more surprised to hear the congregation singing praises. It was a far cry from my former church experience. In the Orthodox Church no one had their own Bible and only the choir did the singing. Devoid of any fancy building or elaborate rituals that I associated with church, there was nonetheless something very attractive in this body of believers who called themselves a church. I began to go every Sunday with Doug.

  Some of the American influence on the orphans was more tangible. With the influx of Western money and American sponsors, Orphanage Number 51 got showers with hot water. You would think that kids would be lining up each day for hot showers, or at the very least, every week. Not so. I guess if you aren’t used to something—if you don’t grow up with it—it’s just not a priority. I had always been more inclined to personal cleanliness than most of my peers, but now that I was around the Americans so much of the time I became very motivated to step up my hygiene game. I welcomed my hot shower every morning. Since the orphans had a tendency to destroy things, the nice, new shower rooms were kept under lock and key. On Sundays I had to get up before 7:00 to make it to church. I was given special permission to have a key so I could take my early Sunday morning showers.

  I would go to Doug’s apartment for breakfast (where I discovered hot chocolate!), then we would go to church, and often to lunch with others after the service. Sundays became the highlight of my week.

  After about six months of attending this church with my American friends, the pastor, an American missionary from California, gave an invitation for folks to come forward at the close of the service and accept Christ into their lives. My heart was stirred. But I did not want this to just be a mental decision. I somehow felt that if I walked forward and said a prayer to accept Christ it would be a transaction that only involved my head, and not my heart. I knew that if I was going to do this I needed it to be more. Though I had begun to ask eternally significant questions when I was thirteen, it was only now, as I had just turned sixteen, that I was able to understand the answers to those questions. I was desperately seeking someone who would never leave me. I looked deep into Doug’s eyes and told him that I didn’t want to walk down to the stage, but that I wanted to accept Christ.

  Doug shared a Bible verse with me as I sat beside him: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18). With Doug praying beside me, I accepted Christ that Sunday in December 1993, first as my heavenly Father, then as my Savior.

  I got even more involved with The Navigators and the church. While my new life with my American friends and their church was very exciting to me, life at “home” had not changed. If anything, it was worse. Everyone at Orphanage 51 came to realize that I was more involved with the Americans and their church than I was with anything at the orphanage and many of them hated and resented me for that. The English teacher in the orphanage resented the fact that I could speak the language better than she could. Others felt that I was a deserter who was betraying my own country. One of the caretakers came up to me and said, “You mark my word. The day will come when you will come to me on hands and knees and beg me for bread and water when your American friends are gone—and I won’t give it to you!”

  The summer of 1994 was a lonely time for me. At camp that summer, I didn’t fit in anymore. At sixteen, I was no longer a child, and my affiliation with the American Christians set me apart from the others. So I spent most of that summer working on special projects around the camp, and spent more time with the counselors than the kids, and the counselors were drunk most of the time. My roommate was a seventeen-year-old boy named Dima. He hated me and physically abused me. He, too, was often drunk, which only heightened his anger towards me. One night, however, his drunkenness almost certainly protected me. As I lay sleeping in my bed, Dima came in, drunk as usual. He came at me with a powerful punch aimed for my face. But because of his drunken stupor, he missed my face and slammed his fist into the wooden headboard of the bed, splitting it down the middle.

  Summer camp took me away from my time with the missionaries and the church for three months. I began to ponder my decision to trust Christ with my life and sometimes questioned it. Is there really a loving God? Why can’t I feel His presence or hear His voice except when I am with the American Christians? Is this “personal relationship with Christ” for real? I even contemplated, once again, taking my own life. While I never again attempted it, I still cried a lot that summer and spent hours alone, desperately seeking assurance.

  The first day back at Orphanage 51, after camp, I was sitting at the table eating when Dima walked by and spit in my food. While I was no match for Dima in size or strength, I had had enough. I took off after him and shoved him to the ground. Fearing his response, I beat a hasty retreat. He took off after me and the next thing I knew, his foot came flying up and hit me square in the back, sending me crashing down, sliding across the granite floor.

  I was taken to the trauma room, and fortunately nothing was broken. I called my old friend Valentina at the police department. She was the police captain now, but had been the Inspector for Youth Rights during my runaway days. Over the past several years I had run into her several times and had even, on occasion, stopped to visit with her at the station. Apart from Melana in my younger years, Valentina had been my most consistent protector. She came out to the orphanage and had a talk with Dima.

  “If you ever touch this boy again, you’ll have to answer to me. I have enough in your case file to make your life miserable!” she said, all the while jabbing a finger in Dima’s chest. He never touched me again.

  Back in 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev had made a law that each Russian orphan would get a monthly allowance. It amounted to only a few American dollars, but for us that was a lot of money. Melana and Irina used our money to buy extra things for us, like birthday gifts. It wasn’t until we were older that we started receiving our monthly allowance ourselves. Most of the kids used their money for alcohol and cigarettes, both of which were cheap and there was no law restricting their purchase by minors. Some of the kids used their money to purchase drugs. Ed and I used our money to buy things like deodorant and shampoo. Our big luxury was “Ring,” a Russian cologne. When the other kids would run out of money for their alcohol, they would sneak into our room and drink a capful of our cologne.

  Not long after my incident with Dima, the old schoolhouse attached to Orphanage Number 51 was shut down. Now housing fewer orphans, the configuration of living space was changed. New walls and doors were put up, making for smaller rooms. The fourth floor that once housed only the boys was now divided into two sections, separated by a wall, with a number of smaller bedrooms in each section, some for the girls and some for the boys. Somehow Ed and I, still with our own personal room, ended up on the side with the younger, fifth, sixth, and seventh graders.

  This seemingly random decision proved to be a huge blessing in my life.
Ed and I were not exposed to all that happened on the other side of the fourth floor. Besides the usual smoking and drinking and drugs, the boys began sleeping with the girls. One of the girls, aged fourteen, became pregnant and was rather suddenly transferred to another orphanage. There was also a lot of homosexual behavior, not just among the boys themselves, but also the male caretakers molesting some of the boys. It was sad for me to see how much my class was falling apart. Most of my classmates had made a mess of their lives. Admittedly, though, I also felt very thankful to be protected and separated from them.

  Conversely, because we were the oldest of the orphans on our side of the wall, we became surrogate caretakers for the younger kids. We knew from our own experience the value of a loving caregiver and it became our mission to provide that for the young orphans.

  Years later I learned that Orphanage Number 51 was designated for orphans with “mental learning disability.” That was just a classification for children with slow development due to lack of parenting, nutrition, or nurture. Many of the orphans had suffered as babies from fetal alcohol syndrome, for instance, but they were not mentally retarded. We did, however, have one little girl who was mentally handicapped.

  In 1992 we had the first black child come to Orphanage Number 51, a young boy. One day his teacher left the classroom for a time to have tea, or possibly a drink, with her colleagues. While she was away from the class four of the children decided to go down to the river. Among them was the black boy. As the children sat on the riverbank, dangling their feet in the water, “the crazy girl,” as the children called the mentally handicapped girl, suddenly came up behind them and pushed the little black boy into the river. Another girl jumped in to try to save him, but the current was strong that fall and she soon found herself in trouble.

  Her screams solicited help from passersby. While they were successful in rescuing the little girl from the water, there was no sign of the boy. It took the authorities eight hours to find his little body, almost seven miles downstream.

  Nina, one of the caretakers, contacted the morgue and the cemetery. When they found out that the child was not only an orphan but also a black boy, she was told they had no caskets available for him. It took her two or three days to locate one—a six-foot casket for a seven-year-old boy. The cemetery, again outside the city, agreed to dig a grave but told the orphanage that we would have to bury him ourselves. I will never forget that day, as we all stood there, using sticks because we had no shovels, trying to move enough dirt to cover the very large casket.

  The teacher, who had neglected her classroom, was removed from Orphanage Number 51 but there were never any charges brought against her.

  There was another little boy that winter who ran away from the orphanage. Tired and cold, he laid down under a parked bus to sleep. The bus driver had no idea the boy was there and ran over him, crushing him to death.

  Over a ten-year period I knew of at least ten children from Orphanage Number 51 who died. I point this out because orphans were dispensable. No one really cared about the death of an orphan, and no one was ever charged with negligence or liability for such “accidents.”

  I continued to go to church and Bible studies, but my newfound faith in Christ was fragile at best. One day just before my seventeenth birthday there was another incident at Orphanage 51 that shook me up, but it also served to strengthen my faith. I was outside the orphanage talking to my friend Maria, when an eighteen-year-old, for no good reason, threw a large glass bottle full of water out of the fourth floor window, aimed directly at my head. I happened to move at just the right moment and the bottle crashed to the ground in front of me, shattering into a million pieces. That incident made a deep impression on me as I contemplated what could have happened if I had not moved just when I did.

  Shortly after the bottle incident I met Sam and Pam Rhine from The Navigators’ team. I shared the story with them. In turn, they shared Jeremiah 29:11 with me. “‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’”

  With the seemingly random bottle incident in my mind and that Bible verse on my heart, my faith took hold. From that point on, I never again considered ending my life. Rather, my whole life became focused on discovering what plans and future my heavenly Father had for me.

  Sam and Pam Rhine lived in a large apartment near Number 51 and I began inviting friends from my side of the fourth floor, including the younger kids, to join me at the Rhines’ home. We would have play time, cookie and tea time, and then Bible study time. The kids loved it.

  My English was getting better, but not well enough to serve as a translator, so there would be translators there. My new friends, my new faith, and my new language were all converging together to offer me a new life.

  The Navigators were on a short-term rotation. Doug Jester had left just after he led me to Christ, and when Sam and Pam Rhine left, Bob and Rita Lyon came to take their place. The Lyons had two little girls, Molly, age three, and Lisa, age seven. Being around all the various missionaries and now around a missionary family, my attitude toward Americans began to change. I began to think less about what they could do for me, and to think more about the sacrifices they were making. I began to feel very appreciative of their work.

  The Lyons expressed an interest in adoption; not of me, but of a fourteen-year-old in Orphanage 51, named Galya. A year later, the adoption went through. This was only the second foreign adoption from our orphanage, and this time, instead of feeling sad or jealous, I was excited for both the Lyons and Galya.

  As my English improved I became a tour guide for many of the Navigator teams that were in St. Petersburg. I welcomed the opportunity to make a little money, see the city, and get out of the orphanage. I also began relationships with dozens of American Christians.

  Some of the missionary families began to ask me to babysit for them. I also became a “gofer” of sorts, running errands for the missionaries. It made me feel important to be delivering documents to government buildings and to be dining at nice restaurants with the various missionaries. My life was vastly different in 1993 and 1994, primarily because of the ministry of The Navigators in St. Petersburg. I will forever be grateful.

  The summer camps of those years were also vastly different. Vladimir had been fired as the camp director, and one of our caretakers at Number 51, Nina, was the new camp director. We were at a new camp now, one owned by one of the State’s factories. Most camps do not want the older orphans—too many problems with drinking, smoking, and drugs. But there were a lot of kids at this camp who were not orphans. Their parents paid for them to come to camp for a couple of weeks in the summer. There were new kids rotating into the camp every fourteen days, all summer long.

  Nina got permission to bring some of us from Number 51 to this camp. (In a welcome change, they no longer had one orphanage to a camp, but instead mixed up the orphanages and sent some from each orphanage to different camps.) I was fortunate to get assigned to Nina’s camp. She decided she wanted to make camp really nice for us, so she invited American missionaries to join us. With funds from the missionaries, she fixed up the camp. The first thing she did was add a banya with hot water.

  The missionaries would do Bible studies, lead singing, bring treats, and do arts and crafts with the kids, much like vacation Bible schools in the States. They also performed skits and concerts for us. It was very resourceful on Nina’s part to do this. The kids loved those summer camps. The various mission groups that came during the summer would invariably only have one translator, so I got to serve as a second translator. That’s all I did, all day, every day, and I loved it.

  One day I was talking to a librarian at the camp and she was asking me about the missionaries and “all this spiritual stuff.” I got to personally share my faith for the first time. While she didn’t respond the way I wanted her to, it was a milestone for me, not only in learning to share my faith, but also in the realization
that faith is a matter of choice. It wasn’t my place to make someone else believe.

  Though 1993 was a year of great beginnings for me, it was not so good for Melana. Our former caretaker and surrogate mother lost her beloved father. A few months after that she and her husband went to their dacha to collect their summer harvest. They were awakened in the middle of the night as their German shepherd was barking incessantly. They discovered that the dacha was on fire. In only a matter of minutes everything was destroyed. Then, worst of all, a few weeks later her husband fell from a crane at a construction site and was killed. Before the year was over, Melana herself had a stroke and was paralyzed and hospitalized for months. All of us in my class were heartbroken for our dear friend and protector.

  Despite all of the positive changes in my own life, I had not begun to experience any real inner healing. I had yet to deal with any of my past. Having spent most of my life focused on past hurts and disappointments, I was much too eager to get on with my new life to think about what lay behind. I was especially excited to discover God’s plan for my future. Dealing with the other stuff would have to wait.