Hello! My name is John.

I was an electronics engineer until I was made redundant in March 2007. This was quite sad but it gave me the opportunity to re-consider something I had felt God had been already been asking me to do., and that was investigate serving in Eastern Europe. Redundancy money plus down size-ing my house has funded this quest till now, but I have now built the following website to help hopefully fund this quest in future: http://www.johnchampion.org.uk/

So far I have managed to help - a little - a small Church near Riga in Latvia with their work with very poor children and families. But I feel God has much more for me: I feel drawn at present towards Russia, Moscow and perhaps even further east...

This is Part 1 of my story.

My interest in eastern Europe started about 10 years ago. My wife then was knitting clothes for Latvia. My church had sent a team of people to help in Latvia at that time. Sadly, my wife died of cancer, in September, year 2000. About 2 years later, I had a friend who was in the team to Latvia. She wanted to go back to Latvia. I decided to email the pastor there in Latvia. (I still had the email address from my late wife's contact.) The pastor, Michael, there emailed me back saying basically, come and visit me! From this contact, I decided to visit Latvia.

End of Part 1