Seventy-four-year-old Ioana slowly climbed the steps to her attic. It was raining, and she needed to put a tub under a leak in her roof. On her slow descent back down the stairs, she slipped and fell, breaking her arm. It wasn’t until two or three days later that someone told her she needed to go to the hospital to get it treated.
The injury added another difficulty for Ioana, who lives alone at the edge of a Romanian village. A solar panel powers one little lightbulb in the room where she stays. Ioana has no family to support her; she depends on a small monthly pension.
When our staff visited Ioana, she said the small amount of wood she had stored in the hallway of her house was not nearly enough for the winter. CAM was able to give her $265 to purchase firewood. Despite Ioana’s hardships, she thanks God that she is healthy and can work and go to the house of God.
Ioana is one of many struggling people who face additional challenges as winter sets in. Families, widows, and the elderly in cold-climate countries find it difficult to put money aside to buy wood for the cold season and supply food and other necessities. Elderly people who survive on small pensions and families who depend on meager incomes already struggle to make ends meet without the additional cost of heat.
Through the Warm-A-Family program, CAM provides firewood, coal, stoves, and funds to pay heating bills for people in countries like Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. We pray that through the work of providing physical warmth, we can also share the warmth of Jesus’ love.
Simion and Estera, firewood fund recipients from Romania, said, “Thank you so much for the great joy you brought to us by sending money for winter heating. . . . We purchased ten cubic meters of firewood. We are very happy, and this is a great value for our family.”
The next time you sit around a cozy fire, help stack wood in your basement, or turn up the heat on a cold, wintery day, remember to thank God for the blessing of warmth.
CAM receives a large number of requests from our field staff and contacts for funds to provide firewood and other heating supplies. If you wish to help needy families warm their houses, click the donate button to give a gift.
