Eighty-three-year-old Lois Fonda has spent the last 20 years doing missionary work with Eastern European Outreach (EEO), a Christian organization that provides food, medicine and money to children in impoverished areas including Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Kosovo and Poland.

Until she was in her 60s, Lois helped run a rare book and military archival business with her husband, Douglass, and lived in several areas of the country including Ohio, Connecticut, New York, Nantucket and even Ireland. She and Douglass relocated to the Seacoast 20 years ago, but he died shortly thereafter and Lois had to make a decision about her next move.

“My husband was a very fine gentleman and brilliant in many areas, whether it was military history or whaling, in which he was a top-notch expert,” Lois says. “He was well educated and such a fine person. I miss him every day but he’s been gone now for 18 years with the Lord. It was after he died that I prayed and asked the Lord Jesus what I should do with the rest of my life. That was how I came to be involved with Eastern European Outreach, a Christian charity fund based in Murrieta, Calif., and Kiev, Ukraine. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling with them for the last 16 years.

“We started off in China smuggling Bibles from Hong Kong into China in 1990. It was challenging and very risky. For someone like myself who loves small places, being in a big place with so many people was hard. We were always watched and checked. The first year I got stopped and searched because I was dressed like a missionary. I noticed a woman from Holland who was dressed nicely, so the next year I dressed up like a well-to-do business woman and I was able to get through.

“That same year we also worked smuggling into Eastern Germany and Romania, western Ukraine and Poland. We started in Russia and the KGB shadowed us and followed us everywhere. There were listening devices in the hotel. We couldn’t talk and had to go into the bathroom if we wanted to talk at all. You never knew what was going to happen.

“It seemed so cold and gray, very dismal. The people were afraid to talk to you. They didn’t know where you stood on things. You had to be careful. It’s the difference between life and death. Now, people are open, talking and smiling. Back then in Kiev and Moscow at the airport you would see just a few old cars. Now there are loads of cars, all brand new. It’s been quite a change from the Cold War to today.

“There’s much more food now, too. When we were there, we had to eat the same thing for breakfast that we had for dinner. In Moscow, when you went in to buy food, there was very little, and you’d go to the meat counter, and you’d say ‘I want a pound of this or a half pound,’ and they’d give you a slip that you’d take to the cashier and pay for it. Then you had to take it back and pick up the order. You had to do the same thing for vegetables and fruit. It took forever. Now that’s all changed.

“Moscow went from being a drab, rundown place to being a first class, world-class city. It’s all painted now and there aren’t beggars on the street. There’s a mall in Red Square that goes down three flights and the outside is marbleized with statues and fountains. It’s really dressed up. The prices are world-class now, too. It’s a great big city. Kiev is more livable and more beautiful, and much smaller. There are trees and parks everywhere.”

A few years later, Lois’s work took her to Kosovo.

“I was near the city of Pristina, and I’ll never forget the devastation. I was there soon after the fighting stopped in 1999. I remember going up a hillside in the snow, and we got stuck. A United Nations vehicle pulled us up and I saw a woman standing there. I’ll never forget the look on this young girl’s face, holding a baby. Her husband’s body had been found in the snow, with its—I won’t describe it to you, but you could see it in her expression, the dazed, shocked look on her face.

“We had to be careful because of bombs in the fields, and driving is really a challenge. There’s big craters in the road that we’d have to try to get around. It’s unimaginable. There’s a lot of walking to see these people, living in awful conditions. Some were living in tents because everything was bombed out. If there were houses they were all stone with almost no heat or running water, and toilets were just a hole in the floor, as is the norm in Eastern Europe. Over there I slept on a mat on the floor. You have to learn to be adjustable, flexible and adaptable. You can’t worry if you don’t have this or that.

Lois Fonda lives on a quiet road in Rye. She loves symphonies and singing, and continues to travel with both EEO and the Portsmouth-Severodvinsk Connection, an exchange organization that establishes working relationships in environmentalism, journalism, science, government and military downsizing between the two nuclear shipbuilding communities whose existence was linked by the Cold War. She returned from Ukraine just a few weeks ago and plans to return there in December to work at EEO’s winter camp for children.