Free Days

Man, just when you're thinking you may be beating the old clock with some errands and such... Ukraine pulls a holiday out of the blue and everyone shuts down! Crazy. I guess God can use the weird quirks of the culture here to guide us in what He wants us to be busying ourselves with. I mean it is Constitution Day. :)

In fact with just the knowledge that tomorrow is essentially a "free" day, we've already worked on several back burner projects. Matt even has the program "Logic" finally working on the midi keyboard! (long story).
I've been reading some Russian materials and grammar, man we've come a long way, and just taking it easy.

Today I went out to Camp 'Friendship' with Shelby to visit Nina and the kids from the Orphanage. Nina just turned 70 years old and is the oldest, longest lasting caretaker around. She's a tough, no nonsense kind of woman and we highly appreciate all her hard work in the last 40 years of her service to orphans. Her salary is around $150-200 a month for long hard hours with our kids. Thanks Nina!

When we got to the camp, we learned that our kids were sharing room space with another Orphanage in Crimea. I was amazed to learn about some of the kids from 'John Xoi' (name of other Orphanage). They have many serious behavioral problems with the boys. They smoke, stay up late, wait on the beach when someone goes swimming and steal their towels and bags, they break the glass dishes, cups and windows and use the glass to cut themselves, and they drink each other's blood. It just gets worse and worse. There are no consequences to their actions, no police help, and their caretakers are afraid to do anything out of fear that of one of the boys will jump off the balcony and kill himself (too many threats have been given by the boys gang leader to the caretakers already).

So camp takes on a whole new meaning in my book from the last impression from our Boiling Springs Christian Camp experience in 2000 in Oklahoma when my husband and I were support raising. This "Frienship" camp in Crimea was frightening and very sad. I saw one kid, whom the teachers called the main punk leader, wearing a cast on his arm, bandana on his head and a cigarette in his fingers. He must have been only 11 or 12 years old, but he looked as mean and tough as they come. These 'John Xoi' kids were badly influencing our very moldable and impressionable kids. All the boys from our Orphanage classes 3-6 were sharing rooms with all the 'John Xoi' kids. There were no locks on any of the doors and all the girls were in rooms right across the hall. Let's not even go there this time.

We thought that maybe just having some strong masculine influence would set them straight. But as we looked around, we noticed that the police were either drunk or not interested and the only other male available was the sports teacher from our Orphanage. Unfortunately he has been seen with one too many 8th and 9th grade girls in compromising positions, so he was of no help.

Lord be with Nina. Give her the strength to be tough.

And God, sometimes I feel like these kids don't have a chance. I beg you, give them a chance.