Ukrainian Pastor Cycling All Over the World to Support Orphans

Victoria Uzunova/Christian Telegraph : Jun 29, 2012
ASSIST News Service

"We believe that every morning children should say 'Morning, mom,' 'Morning, dad.' And this is the cause of our tour." –Pastor Mokhnenko

(Kiev, Ukraine)—Gennadiy Mokhnenko, Pastor of the Good Changes Church in Eastern Ukraine and founder of Republic Pilgrim, a children's rehabilitation center has begun a unique pedal power project in support of orphans.

Pastor Mokhnenko and patients of the rehabilitation center plan to travel all over the world on bicycles to promote their work.

Now, earlier this month, the "World without orphans" tour began in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

A press conference was convened in Kiev before the tour began in Kiev which gathered various figures such as Gennadiy Mokhnenko, Sergey Demidovich, initiator of the adoption project "You will be found," Ruslan Maluta, President of the Ukraine without Orphans Alliance, and Nicolay Rykov, Mokhnenko's foster son and participant of the tour.

"We believe that every morning children should say 'Morning, mom,' 'Morning, dad.' And this is the cause of our tour," noted Pastor Mokhnenko.

The first part of the tour is being held in Ukraine and Russia from June 4 to 30. The participants of the project are foster children, their parents and orphans from orphanages.

The preliminary route is divided into two main branches. One includes cities such as Kiev, Kursk, Tula, Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Leninsk-Kuznetsk, Abakan, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Alaska, Canada, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.

The European section includes Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon and the ambitious trip will last for four to five years and will conclude in the USA.

Gennadiy Mokhnenko founded "Republic Pilgrim" in 1998, but the official opening of the mission was in 2001. They started with feeding homeless children and then collected them from basements to rehabilitation centers, where they have begun teaching and taking care of these children. 2,500 teenagers have gone through rehabilitation in this center.

More than 50% of them were returned to their families and orphanages or were adopted. Last summer, the adopted children cycled all across Ukraine with their parents under the motto "Ukraine without Orphans." They visited Ukrainian Churches and told them about their dream—to see Ukraine without orphans. The summer bicycle tour became the first step before the coming world tour.