My fourth year in Russia was the most difficult, but in a much stranger way. At the beginning of the year, I was given the assignment of interpreting for a family. I was told that this family had been a problem in the past year and had not been expected to stay, but now it was too late to get rid of them. In the past few months, they had made life so difficult for a couple of interpreters that the interpreters had left the MTC in tears, never to return. I was told that I was being assigned to them because they did not think anyone else could handle them.

The real issue with this family was that the mother had to be in control of everything. When a new child needed his first spanking, I was called in to interpret. The mother spanked the child, then demanded an apology. The child hesitated, and the spanking continued. When I protested and asked her to give the child time to respond, she took the child and her husband into their bedroom and continued the spanking without interpretation.

Once, when a child was taking a math test on the multiplication tables, a sheet with the tables printed on it had inadvertently been left near his desk. The mother became infuriated with me, even though I had begun my shift well after the test had begun and was in no way responsible for administering it. When her daughter took up for me and explained the situation, the mother insisted that it was my responsibility.

During this fourth year, we learned about the Institute’s plans for the South Campus. I was shocked. Since the beginning of the program, we had been told we were training these children to be ministers in their own land. I had grown to know and admire several of the orphans’ guardians and could not imagine that they would allow their 6–13-year-old children to go to America for several months.

I wrote to Bill Gothard and delineated a couple of problems that I saw. First, the children were losing their Russian skills, because everything they did outside of classroom study and time on the weekends was done in English. They would not be able to relate to their native culture if they spent several months in America. Second, many of the guardians, while unable to care for the children, were positive influences. We would also lose our ability to minister to the guardians for Christ if their children were in America.

Mr. Gothard responded with his reasons for bringing a large number of the children to America for an extended period of time. His first reason was that most of the guardians were bad influences, and the benefits of our influence to the guardians was not as great as their bad influence on the children when they were at home on the weekends. His second reason was that a great number of donors had given to these children and needed to be encouraged by their presence in America.

I was flabbergasted. Several of the children brought to South Campus that first year had no family. It seemed clear that the only reason for their being in America was to show them off to Institute donors. After a performance at Knoxville, one of the children told me, “I felt like we were begging for money.” The very next year, a collection for the Russian ministry was taken after the orphans’ program. As far as I know, this was a first for the Institute, which had previously not requested donations for specific causes. I later learned that at least one orphan’s family had been threatened with expulsion from the MTC if they did not give permission for him to go to America. Other, similar boarding schools in Russia were much, much worse, and it was the only school he had ever known. They felt that they had little choice.

At the beginning of my fifth and (though I did not yet know it) final year in Russia, my entire family traveled to the MTC to serve as an orphan family. We were excited to participate together in something that had been a part of our lives for years. However, the educational methods had deteriorated in the last couple of years. While Mr. Gothard had supposedly requested that only Christian Russian teachers be hired, this was not the case. Some of the teachers even seemed anti-religious. More and more time was being taken away from the families, and the children were placed in classroom settings. For parents who had given up on traditional classrooms long ago, and had looked to ATI as the final answer, it was confusing.

My father began to question the reasoning behind many of the decisions and philosophies prevailing at the time in the fathers’ meetings at the MTC. He was criticized for questioning. When I brought my concerns to the then-leader of the MTC, I was told I was being judgmental and acting as a pawn and stooge for my father. I was amused by this assumption because my father had gotten most of his information from me.

That Christmas, Mr. Gothard came to the MTC. He and the leader of the ministry (M—) had a long conversation with my parents. They were told that the children were not their responsibility, that they were under the authority of the Institute and the Moscow Department of Education, and if we wanted to leave, we should leave.

We left the MTC in December 1999, and that ended my involvement with the Institute’s ministry. It took me several years after that to work out what I truly believed about God and His Word and our response to the less fortunate.