I'm back!!

My dear family and friends,

I am sorry I kept you in suspense for so long. I received quite a number of emails asking me when the next entry was going to come, hahahaha. I had been really busy with my school work and with a bunch of other things, and that is why I had not replied... I am sorry if I scared some of you, especially after my last blog entry :P Please know I am doing great and there is nothing to worry about :D So much has happened in the last week and half that I don't even know where to begin, so prepare yourself for a long set of blog entries, hahaha.

The week I wrote my last entry was obviously a crazy one. Jen and Jessica and gone for 3 days to the Carpathian mountains with Jen's host family. Irena, the orphanage's "house matron" as I like to call her suggested that I stayed home those days, and so I did precisely that and worked on my schoolwork for 3 days straight. I was really behind, so it was a very helpful break. If you read my last post, you already read what ELSE happened during those days, so there is no need to elaborate. After a lot of thinking and talking to some friends and my family, I felt a lot better and got back on my feet, so by the end of the week I was feeling pretty good. Thursday and Friday were very normal days, and Jen and Jess began to do some planning about getting organized for talking to Irena.

Saturday started kind of uneventfully, with mostly schoolwork and preparing for a midterm for one of my courses. However, kind of by fluke something really cool happened. My friend Matt D, whom I call by his nickname of 'Chopin', started talking to me on MSN all of the sudden. It was kind of random and unexpected, as we had not talked in a long time, especially on MSN. So lo and behold, he happened to be in Poland for part of the summer, and he invited me to come and visit him!! It was awesome! So I said yes immediately and began to plando some preliminary thinking and planning for my visit. I was so excited!!

That Sunday was also awesome. As it turned out, it happened to be Corpus Christi Sunday, so when I went to church, there was actually no Mass. Instead they had a special service with a Eucharistic procession. It was very nice, but I still wanted to get to Mass, so I decided to see if I could somehow ask someone about whether there was Mass at a later time. Well, just as the celebration was over, I saw a couple of African guys walk by, and I thought to myself, "These guys surely speak English!" (Remember my meeting with Inka, the African guy I met at a store and who told me about all the English-speaking Africans in Ukraine?). So I approached them and asked them if they spoke English. We started talking, and they told me all about them. Their names were Jorge and David, and they were both from Tanzania. They are currently studying in Ukraine, like many other African people. What's more is that they introduced me to a Ukrainian guy who happens to be one of the main altar servers at the church and who speaks a bit of English, so sure enough by the end of half an hour I had made three new friends!! We exchanged emails, facebook contacts and phone numbers and we decided to get together sometime soon.

On Monday Orest came to the orphanage after work to help us talk with Irena. We had a long but very productive meeting. The purpose of our meeting was to ask her what she thought would be the best way for us to help at the internat, to get some information about the girls and about what sort of things we needed to do to take the girls on excursions, and to ask her about some of our suggestions. I suggested to have a visiting program organized with the local churches, so thata a few volunteers would come and visit the girls on a regular basis. However, Irena said that would not work because the director had forbidden any systematic sort of visiting, with the exception of two ladies who came once a week. The main isseue here was dissipline, as the girls get very excited when someone comes to visit... which is obvious because hardly anybody visits them at all!! Gahh!! This was very frustrating and kind of unfortunate, but at the same time I was very happy to hear that there was at least two people who came to visit the girls on a regular basis, even if just for a few hours a week. We just hadn't seen them because they were on vacation. Jen also suggested to form some sort of 'buddy' program with the residents of the old folk's home next door, but that idea also got shut down, mainly because they were afraid the girls would end up causing trouble at the old folk's home. Sigh. I undertand, but at the same time I feel that people are just too afraid to give anything a shot, or perhaps they do not want to go through the trouble of getting the program running.

In the end, however, a few ideas were tossed around about activities that we could organize, and that was good. Aside from our everyday playing with the girls, we are going to organize theme days with special activities and excursion days when we take a few girls at a time someplace, like to the park. Jessica had the terrific idea of organizing a sleep-over, where we stay overnight at the internat for one night. I think it will be great!

In addition, I really want to repeat or re-set up the hygiene program that one of the previous Canadian student volunteers had done last year. The girls have very poor hygiene habits, and the fact that they only get a bath once a week does not help. They all have toothbrushes and a few other toiletries that were donated to them last year by a Canadian student volunteer (I think her name is Valerie), but they never use them, unfortunately. Deodorant seems to be a foreign concept, as is the brushing of teeth. This is very very sad because all of these girls have rotting teeth. There is no need for children's teeth to be like that. Jen and Jessica think we should teach them gradually by example, and I agree, but I also think that there should be a day in which we dedicate a chuck of time to teach them how to do it and to show them why it is important. I was thinking of making a couple of posters with pictures and have a day that I just sit with a few of the girls at a time and teach them. I think that if we ingrain it on the older girls, THEY can be better examples for the little ones on the long run. Otherwise the same thing is going to happen again, that once we leave they do not continue with their self-care.

So anyway, in the end we all felt better after talking to Irena. While some ideas were shut down, other good ideas came up, and Irena offered us a huge load of resources to use. For instance, I am planning on doing a powerpoint presentation with a picture and information about each of the girls (an idea that both Jen and Jessica liked and want to contribute to, since they also had though about doing something similar), and Irena suggested that we use the profiles that already exist for each of the girls. We will need to hire a translator, but those profiles are a information mine! It is great.

Tuesday was also fantastic, as we met Gayle and Lena, the two women who come visit the girls every Tuesday. I will write more about them in my next post, since they deseve a post of their own :D. For now I will say that as the week went on, I had to work very very very hard on my schoolwork because I had a take-home midterm that was due on Wednesday. I finished that and I think I did alright. Then, I went out for pizza with Jen, Jessica, and three other Canadians who were here in Ukraine studying and who were going back to Canada. It was great.

Thursday also deserves its own post, so I will do that after I talk about Gayle... and then, after that, I will tell you about my awesome visit to Poland!! :D So stay tuned! ;) Love you all, miss you all, God bless.