In November there were 55 counseling sessions, 11 of them were free of charge. The clients were children, men and women from 13 to 68 years old. In most cases those were family, social adaptation, loneliness and lack of self-confidence problems.
We continue to intensively cooperate with the organizations that need help, those being: “Hope to the World” that deal with street children and orphans, orphan girls that left the orphanage and the “Dawn” Christian school. Vova and Angela Aleksandrovich, Svetlana Fedorenko, Victoria Varvarina and I (Lena Kolker) work with these children. Vova teaches the boys sex education and communication skills. Angela started working with the orphan girls. They were very much excited about this communication and want Angela to visit them regularly (see pictures).
Svetlana continues teaching the homeless children: the girls come to see her willingly, some children asked Svetlana for individual counseling. Younger kids are also glad to see Svetlana: a boy (called Cyril, 6 years old) put together a game mosaic for the first time and was pleased with his work. Before that he had refused for several months saying, “I will fail”. His sister Carina (14 years old) has not been smoking for two months thanks to Svetlana’s talks with her.
Victoria also deals with these children. Her goal is to facilitate the children’s cooperation with adults, correcting social maladjustment, helping them learn classifying objects of this world, broadening the worldview, developing attention and memory, improving fine motor skills.
Please pray for all those children. They have a lot of needs: the majority of them either have no parents or their parents are not reliable. These children feel isolated in the society. They cannot communicate to one another and they are angry with the whole world.
Also, Victoria wants to develop at our Center the work with women who have suffered from abortion. Victoria initiated a discussion on this subject on the Internet Odessa forum and made a survey about the need of counseling before or after the abortion. The majority of the people consider it helpful. Also, Victoria gave the first individual counseling session for the woman (24 years old) who had suffered from abortion.
I continue to conduct the classes for the women’s group of our church. Also, I counsel the children of the Odessa Christian school, talk to the teachers and parents.
Pastor Valery Babynin and I continue conducting the drawing/painting lessons. This year we have a group of 5 to 6 adults.
Every Saturday Svetlana and Angela conduct a training session for two groups of psychology students and young specialists. They share with them the materials that Dr Langston and the other visiting lecturers shared with us.
Alyona Semiohina conducts classes with parents every two weeks, speaking about parenting their children.
We thank our God for the fact that the number of our clients has increased. I thank everybody who prayed and is still praying for our Center. Please keep on praying for our ongoing work and for God to give us wisdom in our work with the clients. Also, please pray for me getting the visa to the USA. I will be very glad to meet you and talk to you.
May God bless all of you.
Love in Christ,
Lena Kolker,
Coordinator,
The Odessa Springs Psychological Counseling Center
