November 8, 2007

Dear Friends,

On Tuesday, October 23, Laurie and I boarded a train in Moscow for the two-day ride to Labitnange, the town just two miles across the River Ob from our destination of Salekhard. I am thrilled that after ten years living in Moscow Laurie was able to join me on a trip to Siberia. Jeremiah stayed with friends from school here in Moscow.

Peter Khudi, a leader of the Nenets ministry in Salekhard, and Matt Honig, an American who recently arrived here with his family to work on the translation of the Bible into the Khant language, met us Thursday night, October 25, at the train station in Kharp, a small town in the Ural mountains just a half hour’s drive from Labitnange. After driving to Labitnange in Peter’s Toyota pickup truck, we floated on a barge across the river to Salekhard because there is no bridge across the Ob. 

Laurie and I stayed with Matt, his wife Shelby, and their three children, Micah (8), Keegan (5), and Cora (3). This very energetic family lives in a compact three-room apartment, and they are in the process of adopting two boys from Ukraine, but they gave one of their rooms to Laurie and me. They are the only Americans living in Salekhard.

A wedding

Laurie stayed four days in Salekhard. We arrived in time to witness the wedding of Lyudmila Rusmilenko, a Christian from the Khant people, and her bridegroom Zhenya, an Estonian Christian of Russian-Jewish background. What a beautiful event! The first part of the wedding took place on Saturday afternoon at the municipal building called by the Russians “ZAKS” (read “Justice of the Peace”). The civil ceremony was followed a few hours later by a Christian wedding service at the Good News Church, which is still under construction.

Lyudmila Rusmilenko, a Christian from the Khant people, and her bridegroom Zhenya, an Estonian she met while studying theology in Estonia.

After the ceremony the sanctuary was transformed into a banquet hall. We shared a meal, sang songs, and played tricks on the bride and groom (including one in which three disguised men were offered to the bride as potential husbands). To our shock, the wedding cake was auctioned off piece by piece at very high prices. We later learned it is a tradition at Russian weddings to play some game in which money is given to the bride and groom. At the close of the wedding a group of us were invited to pray, each in his native language. The languages represented at the wedding included Russian, English, Finnish, Khant, Nenets, Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Korean. The wedding celebration continued Sunday afternoon at 4:00 with another, smaller group-fellowship meal and singing.

Lyuda helped us back in the summer of 2006 when I traveled with the New Wilmington Missionary Conference summer service team to the village of Shurishkari to conduct a vacation Bible school program. That fall she wrote me to say she was going to Estonia to study theology. I feared that she, like so many young people who leave Russia to study abroad, would be lost and gone forever. But she is not. Not only did she return for her wedding, but she brought with her a wonderful groom, now her husband, who is just thrilled about beginning missionary work among Lyuda’s native Khant people. Lyuda and Zhenya had their honeymoon in the pastor’s office at the church in Salekhard, which is almost finished now. They planned to fly by helicopter last Sunday to Lyuda’s native village of Lapkhari, which has about 700 residents, but the flight was delayed till Monday because of a blizzard (we still don’t know if they’ve gotten out there yet). They will be starting a church among Khant people and working on translating the Bible into the Khant language.

Learning Nenets

My Nenets language teacher Rosa Yar, with Harold Kurtz in 2005.

On Monday morning Laurie flew back to Moscow. Since I had not been there for a year and a half, I stayed on in Salekhard for another week to renew contacts and to plan for future work. My desire is to help the church in Salekhard in their work of preaching the gospel among the native peoples of the region. Toward that end, I spent a few hours each day last week working on learning the basics of the Nenets language. I had five days of conversational language learning with Rosa Yar. She let me set my own learning goals, choosing the things I would like to learn to say, and we created a small dialogue in which I talked about my family, where I live, how I am learning to speak Nenets, etc. At the very least I have mastered the Nenets phrase “I don't understand.” I am pleased that I have started and that at 50 years of age I still have the capacity to begin learning a new language. It is not much, but at least the precedent has been set and I have found a person who is willing to sit with me and let me repeat the phrases I need to learn so that I can get a basic conversational handle on the language before I go out and spend time with Nenets people outside the city on the tundra. Peter Khudi has invited me to go out and spend a month or two on the tundra where I will hear nothing but Nenets. That is not realistic any time soon, but a week might be possible even this winter. My plan is to continue learning Nenets in the future.

Laurie Marsden with Anatoli, who is dressed as a "reindeer herder" at the museum of native culture in the village of Gornoknyavsk.

In addition to the language lessons, I spent a quite a bit of time talking with Anatoli Marechev, the pastor of the Good News Church in Salekhard, catching up on the work they are doing with the native peoples here. One of the biggest limiting factors is their ability to get a missionary to live out in the villages. They have sent teams to visit and preach in the villages and to conduct camps like the one we did in the summer of 2006, but they can’t keep anything going after the camps unless there is a missionary in the village permanently. At this time they have permanent missionaries in only two or three villages. The problem is both finding financial support as well as actually getting people to stay there, because few people can hold out long up here in the rude conditions of the villages in the extreme north.

The Salekhard congregation is now meeting in the building they have been constructing. It is almost complete, and as I understand it, the building work has drained their energy, but not taken away their vision to reach out to the native peoples. It is a good home base, and they have a wonderful warm-hearted congregation. Anatoli tells me he is tired of building the church, but as senior pastor he cannot get away from it. He needs to see it through. Still, I am amazed at how much he put himself out to help us and help anyone.

A Nenets Bible translator

The Bible translation team in Salekhard working to put the Bible into Nenets. Eun Sub Song (far right), a South Korean missionary, is the team leader. Second from the left is Peter Khudi.

On Thursday night I stayed at the church to meet with the small Nenets group to read the Gospel of Mark, which has now been translated and gone through several stages of the editing process. Work on the translation of the Bible in the Nenets language continues. Eun Sub Song is a South Korean missionary who is leading the work of translating the Bible. She gives of herself very sacrificially in every way. Frequently Nenets people, clothes strongly smelling of reindeer, coming out of the tundra to take care of some business in Salekhard, call asking to stay in her apartment for days or even weeks. She will not turn them away. Every morning except Sunday, from 5:00 till 7:00 a.m., a small group of Nenets women gather at her apartment for prayer. Bible translation work begins by 8:00 a.m.

Boris in front of his birth home, which was isolated from other houses in the village because the shaman's family had to live separately from others.

The work with the Khant people has taken a turn for the better and rather rapidly. As I mentioned above, Matt Honig has arrived to work on the Bible translation through Pioneer Bible Translators. Small Khant churches or groups have been started in one or two villages. Boris Ruskalamov, a native Khant whose ancestors were shamans, leads a Khant home church in the village of Vilposel. Lyuda and Zhenya, also mentioned above will start work in Lapkhari. We also met a Finnish Pentecostal woman named Tina who has been living in the Khant village of Abgort in the region where she has been gathering people and preaching the word.

Larisa Zhukova from Narnia Center in Moscow joined me on Thursday night. She helped me conduct a seminar on children’s and youth ministry and to plan for a summer camp next summer in which a group from First Presbyterian Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia, plans to participate.

Our departure from Salekhard was threatened by a blizzard that began Sunday morning. Because of high winds, snow, and lack of visibility, all flights were cancelled, and the ferry barges across the Ob River were shut down all day. Our friends in Salekhard told us they would be delighted to have us be stranded with them for a while longer. But by Monday morning the ferry was running again in spite of the high winds and snow, and we floated back across the turbid Ob to make it to our train a full 15 minutes before departure.

I am hoping to make another trip to Salekhard in the winter, when the rivers and swamps are frozen, and we can travel out to the tundra and the villages. We need to get out to the villages to follow up with visits to the people we worked with in the summer of 2006 and to invite children to the summer camp we are planning.

Laurie and I have been encouraged by the gifts and pledges many of you have made to support us in our future work through Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. If you have been considering making a pledge, but have not done so, now would be a great time to do so. This will help me to a better degree predict how much support I still need to raise. You can do this by sending your pledge to Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship at 7132 Portland Ave, Suite 136, Richfield, MN  55423, attn. Shelley Sheunke or by calling at 1 (800) 720-4733 or writing to info@pff.net. If you have been wondering about when to start sending support, we ask you to do so any time after January 1, 2008 but at least by the beginning of April. My work with PFF will begin officially on June 1, 2008.

In the grace and peace of the Lord,

Donald Marsden

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 186