Report from Georgi Opreanu,
Director of Elderly Care -
December
2016
Thank
you Lord!
Since I start working with The Smiles Foundation in 2005 I
learned to trust God more and to understand that miracles are His
speciality. Many times I doubt about many things, not believing it
will be possible as everything was against what we are trying to do in
some of the projects. But as time passed, I started to understand
better these words from Philippians 4:6-7
"Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.
Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.
Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can
understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in
Christ Jesus."
I realise that when we are doing God’s work, He is the
One that will make sure we have everything we need, but we need to
pray and not worry.
Since we started building the first phase of
our Joint Facility of Love in Salonta until even now, I felt
many times that the whole world is against what we are trying to do. I
was worrying a lot, about many things, from the trial with the
neighbour, to not having the money to finish it, from not being able
to get all the authorisations for functioning, to not having people
wanting to come and receive the help we wanted to offer.
I still worry about many things, but every
time I am looking back I thank God for what He has done, already.
September 2015, was the month when I added to the prayer list of this
monthly report "for the future accreditation
for Doris Centre". There were times when I doubted we could
manage it, because of so many changes in the law even since we opened
until now. We submit the papers in March this year and waited for an
answer.
It was a long journey, but finally at the beginning of November, the
commission came and inspected the quality of the service, there were
tonnes of papers we needed to produce and after 4 days we receive the
full accreditation for 5 years, which is the maximum according to this
new law. We are thankful to God for helping us and being with us on
every step of this long process.
This past month the volunteers from
Oradea Lions Club 22, offered to 14 elderly from Salonta Nursing
Home, eye examinations for free. We were so pleased we had the minibus
donated by
Offington Park Methodist Church
and in this way we didn’t need to limit the numbers that we
took to Oradea, but also in this way we could transport elderly that
are depending of a wheel chair.
Thank you:
Offington Park Methodist Church
for this amazing bus, also Bianca Puscas from Lions Oradea for
wanting to help our elderly to see better and to the two lovely and
patient doctors from Pelican Hospital in Oradea, dr.
Constantinescu Corina and dr. Man – Rujan Mihaela.
Rebeca at Salonta, started a few
clubs with the elderly this past month. We now have a games club,
musical audition club (they will gather to listen to special music
from when they were young), literary club and so on. This past week
the literary club topic was about history of Romania and more
specifically about our royal family, and we were amazed how much we
learnt in an hour spent with them. Much more efficient that the
history lessons in school! I think it would be good for history
teachers to bring their pupils to learn from our elderly!
In the spring, one of the schools from
Oradea had a project and they had to bring to school different
vegetables and fruits, but after the project was finished they didn’t
know what to do with them, so one of the teachers thought it would be
good to donate the products to a nursing home, and they choose us!
After she came to see the centre and meet the residents, she was so
impressed, that this autumn she encouraged the children to donate
vegetables and fruits to the elderly, creating awareness of the need
of getting involved with others people difficulties. I was also
encouraged to see the generosity of the children and their parents,
but also to know that the new generation learns to support the elderly
and understands the importance of helping those in need.
I
will finish my report with verses of a song that is very dear to my
soul:
I come before You today,
And there's just one thing that I want to say,
Thank You Lord,
For all You've given to me,
For all the blessings I cannot see,
Thank You Lord.
With many thanks to God and all of you for
everything that you are do for the elderly of Romania
Georgi
