I wrote this letter just after I went to Siberia for a summer.  August 19, 1999 
Dear Friends,  Thank you for your prayers and support of my trip to Siberia.  I am safely home now.  Without you as part of my team I would never have been able to go.  The trip was a wonderful experience, and hopefully this letter will give you a few details of how my summer went. I’ll start with an overview of the summer schedule.  Each week was pretty much a totally different ministry.  We spent the first week renovating the apartment which was our home base in the city of Ulan-Ude.  From there we moved out to Lake Baikal for a week of English camp.  After Baikal we went out to a village where we ran a children’s day camp.  Our next week was spent at “home” in Ulan-Ude for another children’s camp.  Then we headed out to a mountainous area for a week of backpacking.  Our last ministry week was at Pike Lake with many of the people we had met during the summer. One of the main parts of our ministry was friendship evangelism to our translators.  There were eight Americans on the team, and each of us was assigned a student from the local university as a translator.  My translator for most of the summer was Lena.  She and I became really close friends.  Even though there may have been two teams at the beginning of the summer, the translators and the Americans, by the end of the summer we were one solid team of sixteen people.  The jobs of the translators went way beyond helping us with the language.  They had to be with us all the time, and whatever we did, they did, too. 
   After a few days of orientation we started our “work week,” a really a fun week.  It was during this time that we started to really get to know our translators.  They worked right along next to us.  We were renovating the apartment that was our home for the summer.  This apartment is also the church building and mission office.  Another work project was at the dacha, a small house and piece of property that the church owns outside of Ulan-Ude.  The guys worked hard every day out there.  I was able to spend one day out there, hoeing a potato field.  All through the week we worked on our physical projects, but the main project was building friendships. The next week was on Baikal.  Lake Baikal is about the size of any of the Great Lakes, but much deeper.  It holds about one quarter of all the world’s fresh water.  The scenery at this camp was beautiful.  Our camp there was for anyone interested in learning English, from high school age on up.  Most of the week was spent in conversation.  That sounds simple, but in reality it was quite hard.  Conversations took all of my energy just to understand and communicate.  A discussion of philosophy between the father of one of our campers and I started at the beginning of the week and continued until the end of camp.  Talking with that man was the hardest and best part of my week.  He started out very antagonistically Buddhist and I cringed whenever I saw him coming.  I started praying for him and for my attitude.  By the end of the week I was genuinely enjoying our conversations and he wasn’t antagonistic at all.  He even asked me about my beliefs and listened while I shared the gospel.  The other thing that I did at English camp was teach about the geography of the southern United States.  That was a good, easy way to start teaching for the summer.  We really came to treasure weekends because they were our time to refuel and repack.  So, after Baikal we repacked for the village camp.  We arrived at the building where we would be staying in the village and found it swarming with enthusiastic kids.  During that camp I taught English four hours each day.  Those were pretty hard classes, because we had so many levels of fluency in one classroom.  The kids were really smart, and I had to scramble to keep up with them.  At the end of the week each class performed something they had learned in class, which made for a really fun evening.  For me visiting the families of some of the campers was a highlight of the week.  It was during the visits that we really got to know and better understand the people.  And the worst part of our time in the village, which you have probably already heard about, was getting sick.  Even though that was hard, we could really see how God was gracious to us in it.  Most of us got sick during the last night of camp.  There were just enough people left to run all the programs of the last morning.  And then we had the weekend to recover!  During the next camp English classes were my favorite part.  And that camp, city camp, was my favorite camp.  It seems strange that I would like it so much, since we didn’t travel anywhere, there was no beautiful scenery, and I don’t like cities in general.  But, I loved the kids.  This camp was very much like a VBS program in the States.  It was for younger children (That’s a big plus for me.), and we were very blatant about sharing the gospel.  Each day started out with a morning meeting, then Bible time, crafts and English, with sports in the afternoons.  I had so much fun with English, because most of the kids were just beginners.  We played games, learned songs, and just had a good time.  I also had a group of little girls that I really got close to and really grew to love. The next week was a total change in focus.  We left the kids and drove to the mountains.  The scenery was incredible.  Our hike started in a resort and mineral spring area, and from there we hiked into a base camp.  For a week we hiked and climbed from that base camp.  Again, our ministry was to our translators and the few other unbelievers that were invited.  I loved this time.  The situation drew all of us closer together as a team, and it was a really good week just for being with our translators.  One of them said that the week in the mountains was the best in his life.  He had never felt love like what he felt that week, and he acknowledged that it was because of God’s love in us.  After the hike I could tell that our summer was winding down.  The next week was a retreat at Pike Lake.  All the missionary families, translators, local believers, and various other people that we had met were there.  The time at Pike Lake was pretty much unscheduled.  That felt really weird after such a busy summer.  During our last full week together we spent a lot of time just talking.  After living with a group of Christians for so long our translators had quite a few questions.  It was during this time that we really saw friendships between the local believers and the translators growing.  That is such an encouragement because it is our sisters and brothers there who can continue to minister to the friends we left behind.  The last night there we had a banquet and sharing time that lasted for hours.  What a wonderful way to finish out the summer!  Then we came back to the city with only a few days left.  Those last few days were spent mainly with our translators and our friends from the church.  When we left by train they (the believers and the translators) came with us as far as Irkutsk.  The time in the train, and then in Irkutsk, was wonderful.  We just got to be with our closest friends from the summer.  Leaving them and flying out the next morning was the hardest part of the summer.  Please, please pray for the salvation of our translators.  Their names are Lena, Ira, Tuyana, Dariko, Sasha, Sayan, Sergei and Timur. As I write this, I am just finishing up a very nice week at home and getting ready to head back up to Michigan for school.  Because I was in Florida for such a short time, I didn’t even have a chance to tell people at church much about my trip.  Hopefully this letter will fill in what I couldn’t personally tell you.  I’d love to answer any questions you have, so I put my address and email at the bottom of this page.  It would be great to hear from you! In Him, Phyllis Robertson 
  
  
  
  
  Photos (in order from top): our team, Russians and Americans; Lena and I during the work week; some of the kids and I at city camp; lunchtime at village camp; Maya, one of the believers, and Dariko, a translator. 
  
  (A year after I wrote this letter Lena and Ira came to the Lord!  Please pray for them to grow spiritually and for the continuing ministry in Ulan-Ude.  Please keep praying for the rest of our translators to be saved.)