The "M" Word

The Coldest Winter in 25 Years

Our little corner of the world has been hit by a stretch of cold and severe weather. They say (the experts that is) that this is the coldest winter in 25 years. Now, many places experience cold weather, the difference is in how prepared they are for that cold. Throughout the United States, homes in cold weather climates are equipped with functioning furnaces, wood stoves, and fire places. Central Asia is another story.

When the Soviet Union controlled Central Asia, they made many "improvements" to the quality of life for the people. One such improvement was the central furnace plant. In each city was a plant that piped hot water to every home and apartment. These systems kept homes warm during the long cold Central Asian winter. In our country, the civil war during the 90's destroyed much of the infrastructure, including the ability to pump heat to the homes of our city.

Today, much of the country depends on electric forms of heat or coal for small stoves. The problem with electricity is that it is not dependable and in most places only on for one hour a day. Now take the problem with heating and multiply that with the coldest winter in 25 years and you have a natural disaster.

Here is one story of the disaster of the Winter 2008. There was a small village in the Dust Valley that was hit by an earthquake last summer. The school of this village was heavily damaged. The good news is that the local government and international organizations rebuilt the school, giving the community a quality center for the education of their children. There was just problem. They government has promised that there would be electricity for everyone all year long. It didn't happen. Yesterday, we stood in this school and saw parents and teachers scrambling to try to bring heat to their children who were trying to study in 20° F classrooms.

The joy of our job is getting to help in time and disaster, so we stepped in and offered some aid. We bought six coal burning stoves and two tons of coal to help them through a stretch of extreme weather. We also had a chance to pray with many of the teachers and the director of the school for the 50 sick students from the school.

Sometimes our job is just fun to do.

Fire

This is an excerpt from an email sent out after a fire at our children’s school.

“God in his great mercy preserved us from a potentially great tragedy today. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to “Steve” for his selfless efforts to extinguish the fire and remove the fuel tanks stored in the garage. Many thanks also the the "G" boys for their repeated trips into the building to retrieve items for the other children. Praise God for our teachers also, who got all the children out of the building safely. The garage suffered a great deal of smoke and burn damage and we lost several items that were stored there. The guard room also suffered badly. The entryway has a lot of smoke damage that will need to be cleaned and repainted. The rest of the building has some smoke and soot damage. The fire was the result of a short in an electrical wire in the garage, not because of anything we had done. The landlord had an electrician fix this wiring problem this afternoon. Thank God for our landlord, who intervened with the authorities on our behalf to save us from potential significant problems.”

As you can see, the Lord’s hand was upon our family the other day. I would also like to commend my daughter and quick thinking to alert the teachers that the guard was putting out a fire and to get the kids out of the building.