Member Spotlight: Viktoria Fulop of Canaan Land Ministries

In the past 20-plus years, God has led Viktoria Fulop from Hungary to the U.S., back to Hungary, and then to southern Brazil, where she has served Him for the past 18 years at a children’s home.

Now she’s waiting to see where He’ll send her next.

Viktoria, a Samaritan Ministries member since 1999, grew up in communist Hungary during a time of change for the East European nation. Socialism was waning and freedom was waxing, although Hungary had always been one of the more open nations that was under the domination of the Soviet Union.

The ninth of 11 children, Viktoria’s family always had the basics, she says, despite consistent shortages of goods in other Eastern bloc countries. And while Christians weren’t actively persecuted after the 1956 revolution in Hungary, they still kept to themselves. The Christianity she experienced while growing up didn’t reach out, it stayed safely in the churches. Yet, she even rebelled against that, eager to show her family that “I knew better.”

That’s why she traces her walk with the Lord not back to her childhood, but to 1989, the year she came to the United States to live with her aunt and uncle in Florida as freedom was blossoming in Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall. While learning English at night school and working as a housekeeper, she studied Scripture, and the end of the seventh chapter of Romans knocked down the wall she had built up between herself and the Lord.

“It talks about the battle of the human heart and the Holy Spirit Who lives in us, and that I can’t live righteously myself. I know what is right, but I can’t do it because of what is in my heart,” she says. “That is really the moment that I said, ‘Wow, God knows me so well. This is exactly what I’m living. And He says there is a hope in Jesus Christ. There is no other foundation. There is love, there is hope.’

“I said, ‘I want it.’”

That, Viktoria says, was when she gave her heart to the Lord.

After her year in America was over, she headed back to Hungary, teaching art and English in a middle school there for three years. But she felt that the Lord had more for her to do, she just wasn’t sure where. She wrote a letter to her church’s denomination introducing herself and explaining her skills, training and experiences.

“I believed that through them, God would show me and confirm in my heart what His will was,” Viktoria says.

The North American church body wrote back that she would be a perfect fit for Canaan Land Ministries, an orphanage in Brazil that needed single missionaries. Viktoria contacted the mission, located about 20 miles away from Guarapuava in the south Brazilian highlands. They accepted her, later telling her that they were shocked by a contact from Hungary, deciding this woman who wanted to work at their South American mission was either crazy or had a “really big faith.” Or maybe both.

“It was four years of preparation,” she says. “I had such a peace and confirmation in my heart about going to Brazil. I go where God wants me to go, and I knew that He was going before me.”

Viktoria arrived to find a children’s home situated on 50 acres with a lake, farmland, woods, garden, and facilities for as many as 35 children at a time. She learned Portuguese quickly and found her niche organizing meals, cleaning, overseeing field production, hiring local farmers to help out at harvest time, maintaining contact between churches and the children they sponsor, and performing several other tasks. She also developed a program for short-term missionaries and volunteer work teams to visit and help out.

Eventually, Viktoria moved up to the position of vice administrator, meaning she has to be able to step in for the administrator at any time.

“I have to know everything there is about leadership, whether it’s to be a mother to a child or answer a judge,” Viktoria says.

The focus of Viktoria and CLM, though, is on the children. Most of them are abandoned or found by police or social workers in the streets. CLM takes them in up to 10 years old and gives them not only a structured environment, but lots of love and the opportunity to be who they are—children. Many come to CLM after practicing survival skills on the streets.

“Some of them took care of their younger siblings, or they had to steal to feed themselves,” Viktoria says.

At CLM, the young people learn different skills as they grow.

“We raise up children like any family,” Viktoria says. “We don’t send them away. We teach them the skills to enter society at a different level than they came from so they don’t return to the same sewer hole they lived in.”

The most important gift CLM gives to the children is the Gospel, with daily devotions, group counseling sessions, and regular church attendance.

“One of the verses we emphasize is Jeremiah 29:11, ‘For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.’ We teach them that there is hope, there is life.”

Several children a year are adopted out of CLM, ending up in homes in the U.S. and Canada, but most stay at the home until they’ve learned the skills to live on their own or are able to move in with relatives.

CLM’s ministry to children reached a new level in 1999 with a program called CLM Plus. Young people ready for college move into their own apartment and start classes. CLM Plus pays their tuition, but they are expected to get a job to pay for their own living expenses. At least a dozen young people have earned college degrees through the program.

They’re always able, though, to visit “home” at CLM. When they do so, they’re likely to be treated to Viktoria’s famous hospitality, a trait she picked up from living in a big family, she says.

“Everybody was always welcome in our house, so CLM for me was the same.”

Short-term missionaries and visitors alike can be treated to tea, coffee, cookies, and conversation, if not a hot meal as well and a lesson in Portuguese.

“This is my heart, this is my home, and I want you to feel good here,” Viktoria says. “The guest room is always open, the kitchen is always ready. I have, like, 25 cups and glasses, just to make sure when I say, ‘Hey, come in,’ that I have enough.”

But Viktoria, like CLM itself, is now in a transition phase, although she doesn’t yet know to where or what. She says she feels she is being called to do something new.

“I was so settled into the daily little things that I believe I have the vision and capacity to do something more,” she says.

Kevin King, son of Samaritan Ministries Vice President for Communication Ray King, and also a member, has been named administrator of CLM home. Viktoria isn’t sure whether this time of reorganization means it’s time for her to engage in a new mission or to stay with CLM.

“My heart is there, really,” she says, but adds, “I am a teacher, I could be a counselor or a tutor. I really enjoy meeting people and writing. I love to stand up in front of people and talk.”

She will be in the U.S. until the end of the year, meeting with supporters and delivering the CLM message to churches while, at the same time, discerning where the Lord wants her to go and what He wants her to do. That may mean getting an English as a Second Language diploma that would open doors to practically any nation.

No matter where she ends up, though, it’s likely that Viktoria Fulop will make herself, and others, at home.