December 30, 2022
Photo: foma.ru
Every day, there are new reports about acts of kindness and love by Orthodox Churches, parishes, monasteries, and individuals. Here are several of the latest inspiring acts of humanitarian assistance from throughout the Orthodox world.
On December 27, as part of the “’Love is Merciful” charity event in the Zaporozhye Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, two dermatoscopes, used to detect skin diseases, were donated to a local children’s hospital.
The same day, two parishes of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Târgoviște offered gifts of shoes, jackets, toys, and candy to students and needy families worth more than 16,000 lei ($3,455).
In just two days, the Church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos in the Olšany Cemetery in Prague, whose parishioners are largely Ukrainian, collected enough funds to purchase a 13-ton diesel fuel tanker for the much-suffering Holy Dormition-Svyatogorsk Lavra in Ukraine. This will be enough to supply the monastery, which houses hundreds of monastics and refugees, with electricity through its generators for more than a month, the Lavra reports.
The Lavra is also asking for prayers for the Prague parish, as the city has decided not to renew the lease for its church building.
On December 28, the Social Education School of the Archdiocese of Athens of the Church of Greece offered food and other essentials to the children of a local orphanage. And refugee children of the Church of Greece’s Syniparxis non-profit recently gathered food and snacks to distribute to the less fortunate living on the streets of Thessaloniki.
Earlier this week, the Russian Church’s St. Alexei Hospital in Moscow sent a mobile hospital to Mariupol, where residents can get advice from a general practitioner and specialists, and undergo diagnostics. The hospital has already established several branches and sent several teams of volunteers to help those who are suffering from the war in eastern Ukraine.
And at its session yesterday, the Russian Holy Synod summed up the Church’s assistance to those suffering from the war throughout 2022.
Humanitarian aid worth more than 232.3 million rubles ($3,182,192) was purchased and sent by the end of this year. By Decemebr 11, more than 2,830 tons of humanitarian aid had been collected, purchased, and handed over to refugees and injured civilians in dioceses in Russia. 99 dioceses have independently sent humanitarian aid.
In total, Russian dioceses have provided assistance to about 390,000 refugees and thousands of civilians in conflict zones.
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