Today we worked on our projects in the morning. Charlie , Dan, and Craig are a great team and they went out to the workshop to inventory what materials and tools were available and met with the woodworker who seems to spend his time carving wooden icons, and not doing much maintenance or repair. He's going to let them use his tools and they have scavenged a lot of the materials they need. The director, Melanie, drove them to the town 10 minutes away to scope out the hardware store. (This is one of C's favorite activities.) They got a couple of things to test out.
Meanwhile, back at the Volunteer House, three of us got started cutting and sewing curtains, two women were reorganizing the craft materials, toys, games, and general supplies, two were on K.P. and two were off doing I don't know what. 
Mid-morning, I took a break to visit the house with mothers and small children. Only two should have been there but two kindergarteners stayed home because of the rain. The conditions everywhere are beyond disorganized and shabby. The teen mothers are much more teen than mother, leaving dishes, pots, and bottles around to mold, leaving medicines, soaps, etc. within baby's reach, not sweeping or making beds, and most upsetting, not talking to or playing with their children. Even the "good" ones who keep their kids well fed and clean don't interact much with their babies. The child whose diaper I changed had a terrible rash, untreated, though there was a jar of A + D ointment sitting there.
They are terribly understaffed and can't teach a parenting skills program. But the most frustrating thing is that everyone is so well off compared to the sewers they were living in, or the abusive homes they escaped, they don't do much of anything. Pro vita strikes me as a very altruistic group, with good intentions, but no clue how to engage their clientele or motivate them toward independence. They are too busy meeting day to day needs to foster independence or provide job training and it seems once someone comes here they just stay. I really don't know why we will paint the bedrooms for teen girls instead of them doing it for themselves.
Anyway, back to lunch and back to sewing. Actually finished three curtains today that we were just re-doing from the stash of donations. Tomorrow we get access to a sewing machine and having already cut the sizes we need can make pretty quick work of it. After lunch the guys went back to the house we're working on to "sort" the materials stored (stored is a euphemism for dumped) there. This is a four story house. The ground floor is unfinished and filled with junk. The first floor is mostly finished (except the bathroom, baseboards, door frames, balconies, etc.) and filled with junk. This is where we dug out the bolts of fabric yesterday, and they separated the building materials, furniture, etc. and put things in different rooms. Of course nobody --neither volunteers nor staff -- knows which stuff belongs to the erstwhile contractor and which stuff has been donated and is therefore available to us. Then they hauled wood to feed the wood stove that heats the boiler that provides steam heat to our house.
Late afternoon we had a raunchy and riotous Romanian language lesson and we were all giddy from overload. Then Charlie and I had dinner prep chores. We made a couple of salads, sliced bread, set the table, but the cook made the chicken. If this sounds like camp, it's because the days are set into blocks of time and we change our activities every couple of hours. They build in rest opportunities, but only a couple of people take advantage of them. After dinner we played Left-Center-Right, one of the games we brought to teach the kids. Hope they have as much fun with it as we did.
While Chas had a very physical day, mine was totally sedentary. I sure hope the rain stops tomorrow. I'd love to get out, maybe go to the village and get wi-fi, and log a few steps.
1151 steps (0.4 miles) Think I get that many sick in bed
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