Monday, October 7, Pro Vita

After breakfast and dishes I went to play with the children.  The minute I walked in, their motherdisappeared to do her chores.  I had two two year olds and two eight year olds.  The little village school is on split shifts so K and first grade go a.m. and second and third go p.m.  The older kids go to the next village for school.  These eight year old boys are sharp.  We played the memory game and Alexandre knew many of the English names for the pictures and learned the rest by the end of the game, while beating the pants off me.  Constantine picked up many of the names of body parts from the games we played.  The little ones were pretty wild and destructive which I had found with different kids the other day.  I guess it takes the strict school discipline before they learn to behave. I regret I forgot my camera.

In the afternoon I worked a bit on curtains and was just starting a craft project with the women when Kayla kicked them out of the common room because the priest was coming to talk to us about Eastern Orthodoxy.  The guys were brought back from their various construction projects and the women from the sewing room.  Then we sat around for 40 minutes waiting for him. While I think it's nice they are giving us a little cultural enrichment, the timing was irritating.  We can only work with the residents or do our projects by daylight.  Those are supposed to be our priorities. Why couldn't he come in the evening? Anyway, it was all I could do to stay awake because he spoke no English and I could barely hear the translation. I did kind of get the gist of the differences from Roman Catholicism, but not much more.

Was getting cabin fever by the time he left, so went out for a walk in the village.  Today we awoke to frost on the ground, but the afternoon was positively balmy.  No gloves or scarf or sweater under my coat.  Saw some funny sights. A young couple with their horses and wagon, and he's talking on his cell phone.

Everyone loves to have their picture taken and many ask for it

Typical village sight

After another well-balanced dinner of chicken, cabbage, potatoes, couscous, and macaroni, Marian and his sister sang us some traditional folk songs.  Marian, at 22, is the oldest orphan here.  He works here part-time (he lights our fires and keeps them going and is kind of a jack-of-all-trades) and is studying nursing part-time.  His English is excellent thanks to a girlfriend in Boston.  These kids meet during volunteer programs and manage to continue the relationships.  Think there could be more success with the romances than the service projects, judging by how difficult it is to accomplish anything.  Charlie is out mopping the upstairs floors while I write.  He and his crew report progress on the curtain rods (hand made) and banisters in the house we're doing.  We hope to be hanging and hemming curtains tomorrow in spite of a temperamental sewing machine.

There were a couple more sick last night and today.  Don't know if it's the iffy sanitary conditions, the iffy water, or just too much cabbage, but Charlie and I are doing fine, drinking only bottled or well water, and holding our collective breath.  Mary and I started adding a little bleach to the dishwater but there are so many ways to get sick can't imagine it will matter.

6405 steps (2.7 miles)