Seeing charity’s results up close

Ask Sammy Mah why he left a 27-year management career at General Motors to head a nonprofit humanitarian organization and he’ll tell you it was “a God thing.”

The 46-year-old former engineering manager for V-6 engines had planned on working six or seven more years for GM Powertrain and retiring before making any drastic changes in his life.

“But one morning, I woke up and got the call,” Mah said. “I slept better after that.”

For the past two years, Mah has been president and CEO of World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, with offices in 21 countries.

On Tuesday, Mah and his wife, Lorelei, saw first-hand the work of World Relief’s Spokane office, which has helped find a home in the Inland Northwest for more than 5,000 refugees, more than 80 percent of them from Russian-speaking countries.

Since Linda Unseth, Northwest regional director for World Relief, placed her first Russian-speaking family in Spokane in 1989, the number of Slavic immigrants in the Spokane area has grown to an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people. Many of them are Evangelical Christians, granted special refugee status by the federal government in 1989.

Mah saw some of the results of World Relief’s work at the Spokane Slavic Baptist Church, which runs the north campus of Valley Christian School, serving about 18 Russian-speaking children in grades one through eight. The children belong to three Slavic Baptist churches in the Spokane area, including Spokane Slavic Baptist, founded by senior pastor Aleksandr Sipko. Since the church was built by the hands of Sipko’s congregants in 1998, its membership has grown from 400 people to about 900 today.

The students, all recent immigrants, learn their core curriculum in English, while also studying Russian one hour a day, school administrator Elena Solodyankin said. They are at varying levels of English proficiency and so must learn through an individualized program of study, she said.

Mah, whose mother fled China in the 1950s, knows just how the students feel, having spoken only a Chinese dialect until entering school at age 5.

The CEO, on a tour of World Relief’s 21 offices nationwide, met Tuesday with the pastors of several area churches who sponsor refugees, as well as business leaders who hire them. Mah said he was impressed with Spokane’s willingness to welcome persecuted people.

“It’s everything America stands for,” he said.