It is important to hope for God's help. But this hope must not replace active love. The employees of the "Miss Stone Center" in Strumica (North Macedonia) have been living this for more than two decades.
In her latest newsletter, which was published just in time for the new year and the Macedonian Christmas on January 7, Christina Cekov quotes the great Russian writer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy: "If you can feel pain, you are alive. If you can feel the pain of others, you are human."
Whether it's individual social assistance, one of the 260 meals that are cooked and distributed five times a week or a visit from a member of the home care project staff, the people in Strumica and the surrounding area who receive help from the "Miss Stone Center" not only benefit from an anonymous service, but also feel a great deal of compassion from the dedicated staff at the center.
This changes things, as the example of 22-year-old Ava shows. She lives with her three small children aged 1 to 5 and her husband in a small, poor hut, together with her husband's parents. They are ill and unable to work. Ava's husband has an injury but still goes into the mountains to cut firewood. He is often away for days and weeks at a time. Ava can't leave the children alone, which is why she can only work as a cleaner and earn some extra money when her husband is at home. The family occasionally receives a food parcel, medication, clothes and shoes from the "Miss Stone Center". The empathy and charity she experiences in this way helps to make Ava a friendly, cheerful woman despite the daily struggle to survive. She laughs a lot and says: "God will help."
Ava lives in Radoviš, where the "Miss Stone Center" provides 50 people in need with hot meals every day. Some of these people also expressed their gratitude for the help they received by helping to make ajvar, a typical specialty of Balkan cuisine.
And sometimes hope becomes reality in a very surprising way, with help and compassion coming from unexpected quarters. For example, families from The United Methodist Church in the Albanian mountain village of Buzaishtë, who themselves have very little to live on, donated 200 kg of potatoes that they had harvested last year to the "Miss Stone Center" and, through this institution, to needy people in the neighboring country, expressing in a touching way: love and hope overcome borders and make life possible.
Source: "Miss Stone News" by Christina Cekov, Strumica / Urs Schweizer, Zurich
Photo: Donation of potatoes from Buzaishtë (Albania) to the «Miss Stone Center»