Warmest New Year’s wishes from all of us at Sergelt Ood!
As 2025 begins, we look back with gratitude on 2024, when we had the opportunity to bring a little help and care to the lives of homeless and underprivileged citizens of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Again a year in which we were privileged and blessed with your involvement and support. Thank you so much!
LOOKING BACK
Through our drop-in bus we were able to continue reaching out to various groups of homeless people.
Almost every week it was possible to offer people personal attention, care and a listening and understanding ear. Many received assistance including first aid, wound care, hospitalization, hot meals, showers and clean clothing.
We were able to welcome several contacts into our Community House to follow a trajectory to rehabilitate from a life of homelessness and addiction, followed by a reintegration program, to ultimately take their place back in society and continue in a stable manner.
Our ger-café or coffeehouse has been expanded with an attached kitchen, allowing us to add more meals on the menu for our neighborhood and other visitors to Gachuurt. Participants in our Community House regularly work together with us in this. It is still a fairly new venture in which we are gaining experience, including the necessary trial and error and fun.
We were blessed in purchasing a new stove, which helps enormously to reduce our heating costs. This coming spring we hope to connect it to our ger-café so that this can remain open throughout the winter as well.
Many of you have made all the above possible through various contributions. It makes us humble and grateful for your participation and trust!
While beautiful things have happened, improvements and complete changes; there is also the suffering and loss that can be so painfully unfair and sudden, and in some cases irrevocable.
Both the joy and the grief keep us passionate to continue to commit ourselves. Every contribution, no matter how limited, every loving gesture or act, can make a world of difference to someone stuck in despair, need or harmful patterns. And don’t we all find ourselves more or less in such moments? May we once again care for each other with kindness and grace in this new year!
What this new year will bring we do not know, we make plans but cannot determine the outcome. And so our expectation and hope is once again in God and in His help, guidance and favor.
We also wish this for you with all our hearts, and invite you to join us again in this new year 2025!
Corrie van der Esch
and Sergelt Ood team
