Print
this page
Email
this page Newsletters - Abandoned Children
Estonia
The history of the congregation of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church Peeteli started back in 1927. The congregation worked 12 years without its own church until 1936 when the corner stone for Peeteli Church was laid. In World War 2 only the stained glass windows behind the altar were broken. Otherwise the church stayed intact and was actively used by the congregation until 1962. Then the local soviet government closed the church and gave the building to Estonian Telefilm.
From 1962 until 1993, when the church building was given back to the congregation, it was used as a movie studio. A film equipment repair shop and small sewing factory operated in the building. From 1993 to 1997 services were held in a dark and cold church with the windows blocked up. In 1996 Avo Üprus came to be our minister. Up until that time he had started programs for victims of crime, chaplaincy in prisons, and the resocialisation of prisoners. His vision of church is the Social Gospel: one that is socially active and open to all community members. A church that is not serving its fellow human beings is a dead one. The most active members of the congregation decided to answer the most painful challenge in society: the street youth without home and care.
In one spring night in March 1997 the members of our congregation met with a gang of seven or eight children in a Tallinn seaside district, Kopli. Kopli is famous for its high rates of criminality, drug addicts and violence. Many illegal and unhappy people are gathering there. The children were unwashed, in dirty clothes and shy. We tried to start a conversation but they ran away from us. We told them that we were Christians and wanted to offer them what little we had. Then we asked whether they were hungry, after a short discussion they said yes.
Luckily that night, there was a 24-hour food store in the city where we had to go twice since the food we had was eaten up fast. When leaving we had a haunting awareness of their hungry stomachs tomorrow and the days to follow. So we went back again and again, and slowly trust and friendship appeared. The children were aged 5-15.They didn’t go to school and lived in derelict houses without electricity, water and bathrooms. Some of their parents had come from the countryside. Some lived nearby but separately from the children.
Soon children asked us: ‘You are Christians, Why aren’t you taking us to your church?” Take them to the cold and dark Peeteli where water was dripping from the only tap, and where water from the sewers was running into the cellar? We needed to accept that our home church was not able to offer these children a safe and nurturing environment. Instead we had to give them trips to the countryside and make regular visits to Kopli with food and clothes.
In September 1997, our minister, Revd. Üprus, made the suggestion that we repair some rooms on the second floor of the church where the minister’s flat had been and use these for the children.
We had five or six unemployed men, two of whom had just been released from prison. With their help, a kitchen and three rooms were repaired and the new rooms were blessed on December the 23rd, 1997 as a Day Centre for the street children. The children now got proper meals four or five times a week and were in a warm room for the day and evening but then at night we went back to our own homes, and the children went back onto the street. The beginning wasn’t an easy time since we lacked food, showers and a washing machine. The Peeteli congregation is one of the smallest in Tallinn with only 50-60 active members. But good angels sent us friends who came to the door and asked if we needed help. The first Christian friends were Norwegians and after them came others from Sweden and Finland.
In July 1998 we organised a month-long camp in Saaremaa for the children. Coming back from the camp, many children said that they didn’t want to return to the streets, and asked us if they could sleep in the church cellar. We thought: In the cellar without windows and heating, with burned electrical wires and water on the floor! We tried to agree some rules and gave them the church key. The food and a modest living came from us, and the children promised to clean and help in church restoration. Throughout 1998-2001, five to six boys were living full time in the church cellar. With their friends, they broke open the sealed church windows (5 metres high and 1 metre thick), cleaned the Soviet-era oil paint from the corridors and hall (using small spatulas and removing half a metre a day) and removed over 230 metres of building rubbish. As Avo Üprus said, these boys are building the church as a house and also building the church within themselves. Actually they were building a home for themselves, but they didn’t know that and we didn’t know that either.
In the end of 1998, the congregation board and the child care workers decided that the Day Centre was not enough (since the children went back onto the street and we went to our own homes every evening). So we offered the children who wanted to go to school the opportunity to live in the church. In January 1999, two of the girls who had been in our group since March 1997 came to us, and said “Yes”. This was the beginning of the Children’s Home. The numbers of those who wanted to live in the church grew more and more in the autumn, but the rooms were too small and the only place to build new sleeping places was in the space for the church choir. So in October 1999, two more bedrooms and showers were built there. By the end of 1999 there were 12 children living in Peeteli Church.
The work of the Day Centre was expanding to the church hall, corridors and cellar. We had 20-25 children who came regularly plus the same number of casual drop-ins. All wanted food. We prepared the food upstairs in the Children’s Home and then shared it in the church hall, corridors and cellar. Because we couldn’t have the older street kids in the Children’s Home, we built a new shower for them in the corridor near the front door of the church. Our dream was to build an entirely new church cellar (400 sq. metres) so we could establish a Day Centre and Shelter for the children without parental care. In the end of 1999 the bigger boys who were living in the cellar started to demolish the storage rooms left over from Soviet times and to deepen the floor. In the end of June the last of the rubbish was carried out and in July we signed the building contract for the sum of 1.8 million EEK. But we only had a congregation bank account with slightly over 250,000 EEK. At first, the Congregation Board didn’t agree to sign, but Revd. Avo Üprus told us “Don’t be afraid, have Faith”. After signing we quickly informed all our friends who had supported us in the past, and the money started coming in from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, England, Canada, New Zealand, US and even a little from Estonia. The Blessing of the new Day Centre and Shelter took place on April the 1st 2001, and on that day the Bible was read in eight languages at Peeteli Church.
Today there are 28 children who are living in Peeteli Church building and going to school or kindergarten from there. 18 of them are living on the second floor and ten in the cellar. Another 15-20 children are coming regularly to the Day Centre. Today we have 12 showers, washing machines, dryers and a proper kitchen in Peeteli Church. We have just written down many numbers. It would be better if we could write about our feelings such as one evening, when an 11-year-old girl came to the Children Home’s door and told us: “I agree to go to school if you will take me in”. And that she had thought about this for four months, and then she had to start from the first class.
What else? Of an 11-years-old girl who we found living in an underground heating tunnel with a wooden block for a bed and metal lid for a roof. She thought for many months before she decided that she wanted to live in a church.
What about our friends who made it all possible? These were Baptists, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Adventists, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and many good people and organisations without any church connections.
I thank God for all his love and mercy, for our friends and the children who have now found a home in Peeteli Church.
Top
