Samara, Russia's third largest city after Moscow and St Petersburg, used to be home to the Soviet rocket industry. Past priorities are chillingly reflected in the fact that a city its size (1.1 million) could be built for the cost of 5 nuclear submarines, and yet Russia still has a fleet of 300! During the nineties Russia cut defence spending from 65% to 5% of GNP so you can imagine what that and the resulting collapse of the economy did to Samara's infrastructure.
Russia was hugely damaged much earlier by the loss of 30 million of its best and brightest citizens in WW2 and Stalin's purges - equivalent to Britain losing 10 million. However the economy is now growing at about 7% per year and most people are substantially better off than under communism. There are still massive challenges, especially in healthcare delivery, but a new generation of Christian doctors is rising to them.
Since 2000 Samara has played host to summer camps for medical students and palliative care conferences for doctors in which CMF members have been very much involved. This summer it staged a remarkable conference for medical students and juniors - attended by 130 people from 22 cities in seven former Soviet Union countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan.
The conference was the dream of Dasha Boguslavsky, a Russian junior doctor, who with a team of four other young professional women organised and ran the event. CMF, ICMDA and IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) were invited to participate and contributed a scholarship fund and a teaching team consisting of John Lennox and Tim Rudge (IFES), Victor Agbeibor and Jonathan Hood (CMDA US) and Olive Frost, Huw Morgan, James Tomlinson, Rob Palmer, Peter Pattisson, and Peter Saunders (CMF UK). John Lennox gave the Bible readings and the rest of us shared four plenaries and sixteen seminars. The result was a wonderful week of teaching, worship and international fellowship - a real foretaste of heaven.
Most delegates had been Christians for less than three years; stunning evidence that Christian medical student groups are springing up all over the Russianspeaking world. CMF has been privileged to partner our overseas colleagues through this, and about thirty student leaders from former Soviet Union countries have been sponsored to attend conferences and do electives in the UK over the past 4 years. Many of these have later hosted evangelism/discipleship summer camps for medical students in their own countries in partnership with visiting CMF teams. In the last three years such camps have been held in Kyrgystan, Kazakstan, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and in six cities in Russia. This summer alone CMF teams helped run camps in Tver, Kursk, Yerevan, Simferopol and Osh - cities that most of us had never even heard of ten years ago (and many of us might not have even now!). The Samara conference was built on a strong foundation.
Much of this issue of CMF News is devoted to what God is doing in and through Christian medics worldwide. There is news of the Missionary Refresher Course, our merger with MMA Healthserve, a new partnership with Iraq, the upcoming ICMDA 2004 European Conference and translations of CMF publications into Russian, Chinese and Albanian - all small steps along the way as we seek in God's strength to extend his Kingdom 'to the ends of the earth'. Let's keep going for it!
