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While many people look forward to a Florida retirement, 62-year-old Yvonne Robinson had a different retirement plan. She left her Florida home's sunny climes for someplace much colder and with fewer comforts. Her destination? The other side of the world, where she brings the warmth of Jesus to the people of Mongolia.

It started in 1993, during a missions conference at Yvonne's church, Countryside Christian Center. A Youth With a Mission (YWAM) leader emphasized the need for missionaries in Mongolia, a nation whose government had officially renounced Communism the previous year. Though she had become a Christian only three years earlier, Robinson felt compelled to respond.

She began corresponding with Ron and Evelyn Moyer, missionaries preparing to move to this isolated country sandwiched between northern China and Siberia, home to approximately 2 million people, many of whom adhere to tribal religions or Buddhism. Yvonne also enrolled in YWAM's church planting school in Tyler, Texas.

After completing her classroom training, Yvonne did inner-city ministry in several locations from Texas to Chicago with different ethnic groups—always hoping she'd find people of Mongolian ancestry.

Her passion finally led her, in May 1994, to accompany the Moyers and four other YWAMers to the People's Republic of Mongolia. The Moyers had a long-term visa waiting for them, but Yvonne went on faith hoping to secure a visa while in the country. She carried a round-trip ticket, just in case.

Unusual doors open
In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, Yvonne diligently began the process to secure a working visa, despite the country's 40 percent unemployment rate. Amazingly, her efforts and prayers paid off. By what Ron Moyer describes as a "divine appointment," Yvonne met a young Mongolian girl who led her to the Mongolian Federation of the Disabled, where she found work.

Although she had no teaching qualifications when she left the U.S., Robinson's new job was teaching English to disabled children. The more she worked with these children, the larger Yvonne's vision grew: to start a school that would provide therapy—and a good education—for the children. Their lessons would include the entire Mongolian curriculum, English, as well as hearing about God's love for them.

But there was a basic problem. The Mongolian government didn't permit disabled children to go to school; most Mongolians believe a disabled body equals a disabled mind. Though education had been available for some blind and deaf children, those with other physical limitations had no place to go after age ten.

Determined to change this, Robinson and local doctors working with the disabled proposed a law in 1996 to the newly-elected Mongolian parliament. They wanted physically-disabled children to attend public school after a four-year integration program.

The proposal couldn't have been more timely since the United Nations had been pressuring Mongolia to provide education for the physically disabled. Robinson's initiative was enthusiastically approved.

With this affirmation, Robinson immediately started making plans for the first Mongolian school for the disabled. She made her needs known to her home church in Clearwater, and they shipped her school supplies, wheelchairs, and computers. Relentless in her efforts, she asked several foreign embassies for help, too. Volunteers from the Australian Embassy refurbished the inside of an old, three-story Russian army barracks that the Mongolian government provided.

In January 1997, Robinson's dream became a reality. School began for fifteen Mongolian children, ages six to ten, who had never set foot in a school before. She describes her students, most of whom have cerebral palsy or spina bifida, as "poor but very happy children" whose parents are ecstatic to have them in school.

Robinson's work has brought an unexpected extra blessing. Her original visa restricted "proselytizing," but as her boss witnessed how the school was supported, he agreed to remove the restriction at her request.

Robinson will now be able to share the Good News, in word and deed, with the people she has come to love.

"The people are very special," she says. "Mongolia is a country looking for a future, and I want to help them find it in God."

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