I see her at night when I try to sleep. His face comes unbidden into my mind as I drive down Moline's 23rd Avenue. Her face hovers in front of me while I wash dishes.

Sarah Larson helps Yevgeny,7, put on new boots provided by the Quad-Citians who visited the orphanage at which he lives.

I met Nadja, Yevgeny and Anya while reporting on ChildLife International's efforts to help Russian children. Their memories came home with me, and their faces will not leave me alone.

They are sometimes smiling and sometimes sad and solemn. Their eyes are always older than their years.

My goal in ``To Russia with Love'' was to document problems facing Russian children and parents and local efforts to help them. I wanted to show why your neighbors paid $1,750 to go to Russia and what good it did. I wanted to make it human.

For some readers, I did. The first message on my voice mail last Monday was a tearful woman asking where to send money to help Russian children.

The second was a woman asking when I was going to stop writing about Russian children, because ``there's other news, you know.''

Some people do not think Quad-Citians should help other countries' citizens when there are people here who need help. One of my own colleagues commented, ``Couldn't they find some orphans here to help?'' Maybe you're asking the same question. To me, that is shortsighted.

First, each person who volunteered in Russia already volunteers here. Joyce Haskins' first quilts went to AIDS and drug-addicted Midwestern babies. Jean Mueller tutors elementary-school students and delinquent teenage boys. Eric Misfeldt visits patients at Genesis Medical Center. Ann Marx and Pat Herath run youth groups. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Second, the social-service net in the United States is well-established. There are support groups and associations for every kind of affliction, real or imagined. Local groups always need more money and volunteers, but at least they exist.

Not so in Russia.

More than 100,000 homeless people lived on Moscow's streets in 1992. There was only one homeless shelter. It had 12 beds.

Troubled teens are more likely to be arrested than to receive counseling. The government's reaction to struggling parents is to terminate custody of their children. The rate of alcoholism among children is skyrocketing, and there are no ``Just Say No'' programs.

Then there's the economy. ``Crisis'' doesn't begin to describe how the latest mess affects average Russian people. Hospitals reuse surgical gloves and syringes, parents cannot buy medicine for their disabled children, teachers have gone for months without paychecks and grandparents beg in the streets for food money.

But poverty afflicts much of the globe. What about Columbia, Bangladesh, Zaire? Why Russia?

Because you have to start somewhere. Connie Siefken chose to start in Russia, and others chose to join her.

Some say it is not our problem. I disagree. We live in a global society, and what happens on the other side of the world absolutely affects us. There's the abstract thought that these children are Russia's future, and there's the concrete thought that chaotic Russia still has 22,000 nuclear weapons. One slick arms sale very quickly would become our problem.

Many question the good groups like ChildLife can do. What good is $45,000 in cash and donations if the country needs billions of dollars worth?

That is true, but you don't give up just because the problem is big.

Should Raoul Wallenberg not have sheltered 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust because the problem was too big? Should Mother Teresa not have traded her cozy convent school for the slums of Calcutta because the problem was too big? Should Martin Luther King, Jr., not have championed civil rights because the problem was too big? I don't think so.

Children in Russia face many problems and they need all the help they can get. As wards of the state, their fate is bound to that of the Russian nation -- not a comforting thought.

Late one night toward the end of our trip, Argus/Dispatch photographer Terry Herbig asked a translator how long it would take Russia to turn around. Levan Galustov, 28-year-old translator, fixer and film-school student, answered, ``70 years.''

Russian dissident writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said the same thing in 1994.

``If it took Russia seventy-five years to fall so far, then it is obvious that it will take more than seventy-five years to rise back up,'' said the author of The Gulag Archipeligo. ``A hundred or a hundred and fifty, we can guess.''

But anyone who believes the Russian people are forever doomed need only look at history to be proven wrong. Russians have survived two world wars, a Cold War, unfounded arrests, labor camps, torture, starvation and economic crisis.

Simply existing day to day requires small and large miracles at every turn, and yet they do it. They do it and still manage to laugh and love and live.

We visited a small chapel on our last day in Oryol. I lit a candle and wondered what was ahead for the people we had met that week.

I was making my way back down the stone steps outside when a disco remixed beat drifted through the cold air. From a coffee bar across the busy street, I heard these words:

``I will survive. As long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive.''

I took it as a good omen. Russians are strong people. I believe they will survive, and I will do my best to help them. One person cannot save the world, but can improve a little part of it.

Sarah Larson is a staff writer for The Dispatch and the Rock Island Argus.