News for the week of Wednesday, Dec 1, 2004
Tennessean founds ‘Sweet Sleep’ to help Moldovan orphans
By Craig Bird
12/1/2004
For Baptist and Reflector
NASHVILLE — Jennifer Gash wondered if God had sent her halfway around the world from here on a mission trip with Houston-based Christian Emergency Relief, International, just to break her heart in the summer of 2003.
Reeling from the stench of the unwashed children and their tattered and soiled mattresses weeping over the empty, young eyes pleading for affection, and staggered by the vast needs in the government orphanage in Chisinau, Moldova, she fell asleep each night asking God what He wanted her to do. And woke up each morning making the same plea.
Every day she sat on the beds with the children, telling them Bible stories, sharing her hugs and smiles. One afternoon, “I felt another piece of my heart break when I saw a boy named Mihai put a piece of pizza we had bought him under his pillow,” she remembers. “I finally began to hear and understand more of my calling in Moldova and really in the world.”
Thus was the idea of Sweet Sleep (www.sweetsleep.org) born, a grass-roots effort to provide “clean, warm beds to sleep in and feel loved and protected in” to, first, the orphans of Moldova and eventually “for all the orphans in the world.” The effort partners with Christian Emergency Relief, International, (CERI), the overseas outreach of Baptist Child & Family Services (http://bcfs.net), a BGCT agency.
But first some background. It wasn’t just any old and torn mattress and dirty pillow Mihai put his pizza between. In Moldovan orphanages, the beds are WWII remnants, the exhausted metal warped and the sagging bed springs, sometimes held together by rope, sagging beneath the weight of the two children who usually share it. Many beds don’t have a mattress and the children use 15-year-old blankets to protect them from the harshness of the springs.
The two-inch thick mattresses are up to 47 years old and soiled from the hundreds of children who have slept on them — children, many of whom are bed wetters, who are only allowed to bathe once a week. When the weather allows the mattresses are hung outside to dry, but never washed. There are no sheets or pillow cases.
That night as the mission team, led by Steve Davis, executive director of CERI, had its devotional, a woman prayed that God would give the children “sweet sleep.” Gash began to cry — but this time not in frustration and pain but because she felt the clear answer to her prayers. That night, in her private devotions, God brought the phrase back to her, affirming that He wanted Jen to play a part in providing safe, clean places for His children in Moldova to sleep.
Soon after returning to Nashville, Gash, a member of Brentwood Baptist Church, Brentwood, founded Sweet Sleep and began working to answer God’s call. Her first day home someone gave her a check for $30. Two women in her office said their husbands wanted to go to Moldova next trip but weren’t sure there would be anything they could do. One was a carpenter, the other a very experienced handyman. With encouragement like that Gash spread the word: Sweet Sleep wanted to provide 700 beds at a cost of $100 each. She is about halfway to her initial goal of $70,000 to buy the needed beds.
Initially she tried to set up contracts with Moldovan companies to produce the beds. “But God had bigger plans,” she says. CERI expanded the partnership with Sweet Sleep to set up a vocational training program so that some of the older boys could be trained in carpentry while building the beds and be mentored by Moldovan Christians at the same time. CERI provides the tools and Sweet Sleep provides the materials, mattresses, mattress covers, blankets, and pillows.
This past August she returned to Moldova. And despite her own misgivings about being able to put together a team to start the project (“I can’t even get anybody to go to Gatlinburg to look at the leaves in Fall,” she claims), 19 people had signed up. And not just from Tennessee — people she had never met, recruited through CERI or through the Sweet Sleep web site went to the tiny Eastern Europe country from Kansas City and San Antonio — and from Rome, Italy and Burma. All left vowing to return as soon as possible.
As you might imagine this is about more than a vastly improved place to sleep.
“Most of us take for granted the refuge and comfort we feel when we are safe in our own bed,” Gash points out. “Yet for most of these children a bed is the closest thing they have to a hug. It is when they are their most vulnerable and when they are the most alone with their thoughts.
“God let me sense the need to make certain these children understand they are loved. I do not believe most of them know how beautiful and cared about and loved they are. They have never considered the love of a heavenly Father who will always provide, always love, always be there for them.
“A safe, clean bed is a reminder of this amazing truth for those children who have accepted Christ as Savior (as 12 did from her first group of 16 she worked with) and who will grow in their faith as well as for those who will come to know Jesus later as CERI continues to work in Moldova.”
The children need all the reminders of God’s love they can get.
Moldova, the size of the state of Maryland, has 27 government orphanages. The one in Chisinau where Jen worked has 700 residents. But the facility is poorly heated in the bitterly cold winters. Food is limited and children get two shirts, one pair of pants, and one pair of socks each year and one pair of shoes every other year. No winter hats, coats, or gloves are provided.
At age 18 they are discharged with no provision for assistance or a job. Ten percent of those discharged commit suicide within a year. Of the boys, 70 percent will wind up in jail or join a gang or the Mafia. Of the girls 70 percent are reportedly sold or forced into prostitution — half of them by their own family, friends, or acquaintances.
During this holiday season Gash cleared her calendar so she could return to Moldova for seven weeks. She left Nov. 29.
“Moldova and Sweet Sleep is pretty much all God has been doing in my life for the past year and a half.
“I have many prayers for these children and for the work God is doing and will continue to do through all of the hands and feet He has activated for Moldova. I have prayers for the girls to learn how to sew the bedding, giving them the same opportunities and hope as the bed building gives the boys. As the New Testament says, ‘‘nothing is impossible.”
— Bird is director of communications for Baptist Child & Family Services in San Antonio, Texas.
