Tamara Macari, Regional Director of Glodeni Blind
Association, Moldova, with new cassette players to
distribute to visually impaired people in the Glodeni area
[photo: UBS/Dag Smemo WR414/4 MOL07DJ-546]
MOLDOVA — Tamara Macari’s office is cold and rather dark, lit by a single light bulb, with bare floorboards and patchily painted blue walls. On the windowsill some plants in pots are struggling to find light through the cracked, dirty glass. Apart from a telephone, the only sign of technology in her office is a manual typewriter.
Tamara has worked among the blind people in Glodeni for six years. Her job consists of coordinating help for them from a range of agencies. These include government departments, the Bible Society, churches – at one time a Pentecostal church used to provide bread for the blind – businesses and individuals. The work is exhausting and she is keen to find helpers for it. Tamara herself listens to the New Testament at home every night. The Russian version is dramatised with actors and music – “but I understand the Romanian version better,” she says.
Her ministry
Her ministry to the blind people varies widely: in the case of Feodor (see preceding article) she helped him register as fully blind which increased his financial benefits and, after some training in Chisinau from the Christian Blind Mission, she taught him to walk using a cane. Without proper cooking facilities at home, he can now make his own way to a café where he can get a hot meal. She also helped Eugen and Eugenia Gernovoi (see preceding article) obtain a new bed. At holiday times she is sometimes able to gather some of the 70 blind people whom she is in contact with together for a social occasion. As the Bible Society visitors bring in some large-print Psalms and Gospels to Tamara’s office for her to distribute later, two women are waiting to see her. They need help in registering for new glasses. Zinaida Perevoztcikova looks after both her paralysed mother and her handicapped husband. With one of their sons in prison, they are struggling to take care of his little boy who has been abandoned by his mother. She gratefully accepts one of the bags of groceries that Pastor Anton Placinta has brought. She has a cassette player at home and Anton gives her a set of New Testament cassettes in Russian. Although she goes to a Baptist church, she has never been baptised. Her mother is Orthodox and is therefore against the idea. “When my mother dies, I shall get baptised,” she declares.
This story refers to project 82104.
(WR 414/4 - 08/09.07) [2 photos]