Other Excitement

Remember the beaten woman a few posts back? One office had promised us that they would get the business started to remove the child that was still in that home. Since we were in Kyiv, we checked in with them. Yes, they had gone to the home themselves and were horrified at what they had found. They tried to get the woman to leave the home at least long enough for medical attention. She refused. They went to the person responsible to start the action to remove the child from the home, the village head. He refused. "We took him from the home last summer. You returned him. Why should we do anything now?" The social workers were upset. We were upset. The fellow responsible for all the previous injuries is threatening to kill the woman and child. We made various calls to see if there was anything we could do about the situation. The director of the social workers said that she wouldn't let it rest. We had already talked to the village head.
Not long after we started home, we began to get phone calls from a young man who attends our services. "I have some important and bad news for you!!." The young man can quickly get to shouting in any mildly tense situation. We expected to find that his mother, who had surgery a couple of months ago, had some sort of complication and they needed money. We met them in Nova Odessa, took them to our home where he told us that someone had come up to him in the twilight, the evening before, asked him if he went to our church and gave him an envelope of cash. His mother showed us the envelope and asked if it was ours. To our astonishment they held an American bank envelope with Dave's writing on it, holding cash that had been hidden in our home when we left for Kyiv. We thanked them and took them home.
Then we began to look around the house to see what was missing. Someone had come in and taken things from most of the rooms of the house, food from the kitchen, a mobile phone, a tape recorder and money from a piggy bank. Other money was missing. We didn't see where we had any choice but to call the police. A crew of police investigators came, no less than six people. They found the culprit and most, but not all, the goods were returned. They took footprints and fingerprints from many places.
The culprit was a regular attender, has spent hours in our home and in our van with us. We have to go to court where a judge will decide what to do with him. The police report in the local papers didn't leave out very many details. Pray that God will give us wisdom and protection.