SAN ANTONIO (ABP) — Five weeks in North Carolina undid a lifetime of atheism for Tatiana Ceban. Nearly 14 years later, she is helping a Baptist agency craft a transitional living program for youth who have aged out of government-run orphanages in Moldova.
Such a concept was unthinkable for her before 1994. But three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Christian non-profit aid agency, Little Samaritan Mission, invited Ceban and 11 other Moldovan teachers to its Smokey Mountain headquarters, paired them with American school teachers, and exposed them to Christianity.
The only one of the teaching group to become a Christian, Ceban was also the first member of her family to profess faith in Christ, although her mother, sister and both of her children have recently become Christians.
Ceban's decision was the first of many that took her out of the public school system after 20 years and into her own successful youth mentoring program. She then went through an unexpected severing of her working relationship with government schools and took on a role with Children's Emergency Relief International, an overseas arm of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
When BGCT's Baptist Child and Family Services decided to work more in Moldova, Ceban's name came up first, said Kevin Dinnin, president of Baptist Child and Family Services.
“The introduction of a program to provide life skills to 16-year-olds suddenly on their own in a safe environment needed someone with a special set of skills as an educator, a passionate advocate for children, an administrator, a motivator and a person of deep faith,” he said. “We were blessed when Tatiana agreed to join us in this important effort.”
Ceban spent six weeks training with the agency — sitting in support groups, shadowing case workers, studying mentor programs, and even participating in a “lock-in” at the agency's Kerrville Transition Center.
She will have to develop the entire CERI program in Moldova from scratch, so she needed ideas that would work despite the cultural differences between Texas and Moldova, she said.
“There are some major differences,” she said. “We have to teach about the dangers of human trafficking, and money management instruction will be different because our financial system is different. Drug abuse is not a major problem. Alcohol is.”
But as in Texas, “the most important need of kids is life skills,” she said. “They get a general education, but when they graduate from an orphanage at age 16, they are pretty much helpless: no money, no family support, for many no place to stay, living on the streets, vulnerable to human trafficking and crime.”
She plans to begin with a mentoring program, concentrating on graduates from the orphanages CERI already works with, to “give them tools for life and support them.” She plans to look for Baptist churches to host support groups and to recruit “young Christians who want to be involved in helping these kids,” she said. “I can train them as mentors.”
On the national stage, Ceban said, she hopes to develop relationships with Moldovan universities and collaborate with them to train social workers.
“Perhaps in time, the universities will be asking us to offer internships for their students,” she said.
She has earned the right to be heard. Five years after becoming a Christian, Ceban resigned her job as a high school principal and established the Aletheia (Greek for “truth”) Foundation.
The mentoring program was based in public schools and targeted students in grades seven through nine: “Not orphans, but from the poorest districts of the city and dysfunctional homes,” she explained.
“We provided food, medicine, school supplies, camps, retreats and Bible study,” she said. “Our end goal was to introduce them to church and lead them to Christianity. Our immediate educational aim was to graduate them from middle school, let them know they could go to college, and provide scholarships.”
But in September, Moldovan officials notified her that the program could no longer be based in public schools.
Now, Ceban's “biggest hope” is to be able to blend that program into CERI's transitional living program. On her last day of training in San Antonio, she looked at a photo of the dedication of the Kerrville Transition Center.
“I dream of that day for us, a big modern building, a home for the kids to come to, centrally located so they can get to it,” she said. “The presence of CERI will be unbelievable. My dream is to help all the kids of Moldova. This is the small first step, but God wants us to dream big.”
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