Class photo: This of course is not my entire class. Many simply did not show up for the photo. In the back row, that’s me, Edik, Marina, and Oleg. In the front row are Sveta, Nelly Viktorovan (our caretaker at the time), Marina, and Zhenya. This was taken after Melana was no longer our caretaker. Unfortunately there is no date on the photo, but I believe I was about fourteen or fifteen at the time
Chapter 10
In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.
—Proverbs 16:9
The Navigators, in many respects, became my family. At one point, through Doug Jester, my original Navigator contact, I met Mel and Mary Lou Duke. They headed up the St. Petersburg team. Whereas regular team members were in Russia for one year, the Dukes were there for five. While Mary Lou spoke some Russian and I was learning English, mostly we relied on a translator to communicate with one another. In the early nineties we were really just acquaintances; they were very kind people, like so many others that the Lord brought into my life at that time. Later they would come to play a more significant role.
The same could be said for Sue Gregg. One Sunday when the pastor invited folks to stand and greet those around them, Mary Lou Duke introduced me to her friend of more than twenty years, Sue Gregg. Sue was not on The Navigators staff, she was a volunteer with an unusual job. Many of the missionary teams had experienced health problems related to diet issues while they were in Russia. Before the fast food/grocery store influence of the West hit my country, our food was very different. We didn’t use cookbooks or recipes or even measurements.
We ate a lot of grains that would have been foreign to Americans, in particular millet (what Americans think of as birdseed) and buckwheat (associated in America with pancake flour). Cooked buckwheat in a bowl with butter and sugar is served for a breakfast dish like oatmeal is in the States—I still prepare it sometimes, even when I am in America. That same buckwheat grain would be cooked, then fried in a skillet with onions and spices for dinner. There was no lettuce or broccoli in Russia at that time. A green salad was considered an exotic American dish, foreign food to us. (A culinary side note: We had never heard of peanut butter in the Soviet Union. Every time a new mission team came they brought jars and jars of the stuff with them in their suitcases.)
Probably ninety-five percent of our spices had never been heard of by the Westerners. We had only instant coffee, no slow-roasted coffee beans like the Americans wanted. We Russians drank a lot of tea, and we ate bread with every meal. We also ate a lot of cabbage and potatoes. What we called potato salad was not like American potato salad at all, it was just potatoes and sausage served cold.
The dachas were more than just vacation homes. They were places people escaped the city to grow their own food. Folks would grow their own fruits and vegetables and can them. If folks didn’t have a dacha they would buy canned goods from those who did.
Sue Gregg is an expert in nutritious cooking, and she and her husband have a nutritional cookbook business. Mary Lou Duke invited her longtime friend to join the Navigators group in St. Petersburg and her mission was to help teach the missionary families how to cook and eat in Russia, using foods readily available, and still stay healthy. This particular visit when I met Sue was her first time to the former Soviet Union. Though we only met briefly on that trip, it was a seed that God planted in my life that would come to fruition in the coming years.
Many people have asked me if it was a cultural shock for me when I finally came to the United States. It wasn’t. I had spent so much time with the Americans in Russia those last few years in the orphanage that I had gotten to know the American personality and culture in many respects.
Most Russians think all Americans are very wealthy. Even the missionaries living in Russia lived a much better life than most of the people they were ministering to. (Little did I know how much they had sacrificed to be there!) When I compared their lives to mine in Russia, I knew one thing: I wanted to go to America. I had no idea how that could ever come about or what I would do once I got there, but I knew in my heart that my future was somehow in the United States, not Russia.
I also knew that my future was looming. In Russia when an orphan graduates he is put out of the orphanage. I was seeing what was happening to older orphans who had graduated and it was disturbing. Most of them ended up on the street, into drugs, alcohol, prostitution, or crime.
Normal Russian education consists of eleven grades. In the orphanages we only got nine grades of what was considered basic education. Because we did not have the full eleven years, orphan graduates could not attend universities for higher education. There was an option for us called PTUs that we could go to: three- or four-year programs that consisted of finishing the high school diploma plus a year or two of trade school. The State provided these without charge. There were a few hundred PTUs in St. Petersburg alone. Public school students could select what trade school they wanted to attend. Orphans were assigned by the government to whatever PTUs had availability; not surprisingly, these were often the ones that no one wanted. These PTUs included dormitory housing. While in concept this might sound pretty good, and certainly sounds like a good next step for orphans, the dormitories there were even worse than those at the orphanages. Most orphans in the Russian system have no self-discipline, study skills, life skills, or motivation. Very few of them go on to the trade schools.
While Russian orphans leave the orphanage system at age seventeen or eighteen they remain legal wards of the State until age twenty-three. For true orphans who opt not to go to school at a PTU, the government is supposed to offer them a room in a communal apartment. The social orphans, while also still legally wards of the State until age twenty-three, are required to go back to their parent or parents—the same ones who were deemed unqualified to be parents in the first place. Generally, the parents are still alcoholics, still abusive; nothing has changed. So, most orphans don’t go back. They would rather live on the streets. Sometimes they bunk with a true orphan who got a flat, which means you often see six or seven kids in a one-room apartment.
Jobs were very scarce back then. It was only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the jobs were state jobs, which you could not get without having had military service.
St. Petersburg has more communal apartments than anywhere else in Russia and they were not just for orphans. A communal flat is just that—communal. Residents share a common kitchen and a common bathroom. Many Russians pay the government to live in them because it is all they can afford. In the early 1990s over one million of my countrymen lived in communal flats in St. Petersburg—a city of five million. While the government is supposed to supply a communal flat to orphans, the reality is that an orphan might be on a waiting list for six or seven years to get one.
So, as my days in the orphanage system were counting down, I began to take stock of my life. If my past was frightening, my future was even scarier to me. I began, jokingly at first, to ask my American friends to sneak me home with them in their suitcase. The closer I got to graduation, the more I started to seriously pray for the Lord to make a way for me to go to the United States. I could no longer envision my life in Russia. I had no plans of how to do it, and I could not even imagine how I might get to America, but I knew somehow I would. I didn’t even put myself on a waiting list for a PTU or a communal flat.
Instead, I prayed for a miracle.
Chapter 11
Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”
—Mark 10:27
As I look back on my years in the orphanage, for as bad as they were, I can now see where the Lord placed special people in my life at just the right time. People like Melana, my original protector, Doug Jester and the Navigators, and Valentina at the police station. Some people’s role was less dramatic, but equally appreciated. There was a woman named Lisa at Orphanage 51 who was a chef. We really connected. At times she almost felt
like family to me. She would sneak me extra food from the kitchen. Her apartment was only five minutes from the orphanage and she sometimes invited me to her place for a meal with her son and daughter.
I didn’t really see it at the time, but now I can see how much the Lord provided for me, even before I knew Him. It is amazing that in eighteen years in the orphanage I was never molested. And for all the abuse I took from older orphans and caretakers and teachers, I never even had a single broken bone.
Another one of the special people God put in my life was a woman named Joyce Bourcier. She was in Russia for two years with The Navigators. In many respects Joyce was like a mother to me for a short time. She showered me with love and care, help and patience. She gave me lots of encouragement and attention, not to mention all the hospitality she shared, opening her apartment often to me and my friends. She also played a significant role in the next turning point of my life.
There was a couple in Tucson, Arizona, in America, who had been strong supporters of The Navigators for many years. The Hugheses came to Russia in 1993 for a Navigators conference. About a year later they contacted the Navigators office inquiring if they knew of anyone from overseas who would like to come to America as a foreign exchange student. Joyce heard about their request and immediately thought of me, as I would be graduating from the orphanage soon. A lot of work had to be done, but the timing could be perfect.
My orphan status was challenging enough, but to make things more difficult, I was only seventeen at the time, a minor. Therefore I was not permitted to fly on a foreign flight without a legal guardian. Joyce began to pray about the situation. Her first thought was to act as my guardian herself but she soon realized that, as a foreigner, she could not legally take me out of the country, nor for that matter could any of the caretakers in the state system. Melana and Joyce came up with the idea that Melana would become my legal guardian. In that role, Melana could then give Joyce permission to escort me to the States. The Hugheses hired an attorney to work with the orphanage on the logistics.
I knew nothing about these plans or even the idea of me going to America as a foreign exchange student. All of this was done without a word being said to me. Joyce was rightly afraid that if things did not work out it would be a crushing blow to me.
Because she had necessarily been involved in the process, the director at Orphanage Number 51 knew long before I did that I would be going to the United States to live for a year. She also knew that I would come back to Russia, since the program was only for twelve months, and therefore she should have started the lengthy process of securing a communal flat for my return, but she did not. Instead, she closed the file on me and washed her hands of me once she learned I was going to America.
In February of 1995 I came to Joyce’s apartment, the same as I had on so many other days. This time, though, Joyce greeted me with a big hug and the exclamation, “I have great news for you, Alex: You are coming to the United States of America!”
I could not contain my excitement. With tears of joy, I shouted, jumped up and down, and ran around the apartment, literally leaping for joy.
Joyce brought me down to earth with the directive, “Now you have to really study English!”
The Hugheses (the American couple who were to be my host family) paid for Joyce to arrange for a tutor, and my studies began. The next two or three weeks were extremely hard for me. I was a major pain as a student. In fact, though Christ was in my life, I still struggled with a host of sins: vanity, selfishness, stubbornness, and pride, to name but a few. I had a know-it-all attitude, and very little discipline when it came to studying. I was not used to giving my best effort on anything, much less school work. That had never been required of me.
I was an average student and that had been good enough for me to get by. The value of education and hard work had never been instilled in me. There were days when the English lessons were so difficult I just wanted to give up. I would wail, “I don’t care, I can’t do this!” Joyce would respond, “You should care! This nice gentleman who is inviting you into his home in America is paying his money for you to learn English!”
Did I want to come to America? More than anything else in my life. Did I want to work this hard to get there? I wasn’t so sure.
In the orphanage system the orphans graduate after the ninth grade, having received what is considered a basic high school education. On May 25, 1995, I had my last class of the ninth grade and heard my last school bell in Orphanage Number 51. By this time there were only sixteen of us left in our class, about to graduate from both school and life in the orphanage. Our official graduation would not be until June 8.
In the meantime, there was a lot I had to get done. In order to leave the country I had to show I had been accepted into an American school. Working with the Hugheses, we completed the paperwork for me to be enrolled in the Green Fields Country Day School where the Hugheses’ own two boys had attended high school. Once successfully enrolled, I had to go to the American consulate in St. Petersburg with Joyce to file the application for my visa. We waited in line for four hours outside and two more hours once we got into the building. Joyce paid the application fee and I settled in for my interview.
Joyce had coached me on the interview. The American State Department is generally very concerned when they see someone with no ties back in their home country applying to come into the United States, and that certainly described me: no parents, no siblings, no aunts, no uncles, nor any other relatives. I was a red flag if ever there was one. Someone like me would be a prime candidate for illegal immigration—taking a one-year student visa to get into the country, and then disappearing.
It was important, Joyce had explained, that when I was asked if I wanted to stay in the United States, to say no, that I had no plans to stay for more than a year. All of everyone’s hard work thus far could completely evaporate if I was unable to get a visa. I am sure that Joyce was praying overtime as I sat down with my questioner.
The consul who interviewed me spoke both Russian and English. Between the two languages, I completed the series of questions. She asked me things like, “Do you speak English? Why are you coming to the United States? What are you going to do with your education from America?” Sure enough, she also asked, “If given an opportunity, would you consider staying in the United States?” I assured her of my intentions to return to Russia in a year’s time. She approved me for a student visa, and Joyce and I breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked the Lord for this exciting opportunity before me.
Several days later, when I received my visa, Joyce gave me a little duffle bag. I went back to Orphanage 51 and packed up all of my earthly belongings. Never mind that I wasn’t going to leave for another month—I was packed and ready to go!
On June 8, 1995, there was a graduation ceremony in the big dining room of Orphanage Number 51 for me and my fifteen classmates. All the younger orphans were at summer camp by then, so it was just us graduates, our teachers, and a few guests in attendance. Melana, our original caretaker and protector was there, of course, as was Irina, our longtime teacher. All of us dressed up for our big day. Zena, one of our teachers, and the principal presented each of us with a diploma for finishing “basic high school.” We were each given a little two-page photo booklet. On one side was the student’s own picture, and on the other side was a picture of the whole class. Zena also presented each of us with a little porcelain tea set.
We went around the room and each of the teachers would say something about the class. Luda, the English teacher who didn’t like me (she often remonstrated me, “You don’t speak English, I speak English!”) gave a little speech in English which most of the kids couldn’t understand; ironic, since she was the one who had supposedly taught us the language.
We had a meal together, the best meal we had ever had at Orphanage Number 51—they even served champagne. After the meal, they moved the tables out of the dining room and had “disco time,” the closest thing to a “prom night” w
e could have.
June in Russia is called “the White Nights.” Just like in Alaska and other places as far north as St. Petersburg, there are times of the year when it is dark most of the day and times when the sun never really sets. June is when the sun never really goes down; it is like dusk all night. It is a tradition during the White Nights to go boating in the middle of the night on the River Neva. For graduates it is symbolic of riding down the river to your future. The State provided boats for us orphans, and my classmates and I boated until two in the morning.
For most orphans, graduation day is the worst day of their lives because their futures are so uncertain.
But I remember graduation day very fondly. It was a wonderful day for me, and I was full of hope for the future. I was going to America. I had no idea what I would do after that, but it was exciting, and my faith in Christ was growing stronger by the day. I knew that the Lord had plans for me, I just didn’t know what they were yet—and I couldn’t wait to find out.
Chapter 12
The fear of the Lord teaches a man wisdom, and humility comes before honor.
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