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Alpine Update #9 - February 2004

The Alpine Update is our almost monthly newsletter keeping you informed of the Alpine Fund's activities.

Winter has been a busy time Alpine Fund. For several orphanages we organized trips to the mountains for sledding and hiking, a winter camp in Ala Archa National Park, and a weekend with kids to the Alpine Fund Learning Center.

In addition to the mountain adventures there are continual lessons and physical training at the children's home as well as New Years Celebrations. In recent developments the climbing wall is back which brings together local and international climbers and gives our interns a view of running a small business. (it losses money so they will have to learn business skills quick)

We also welcome a new member to our office and are developing plans to raise revenue for programs through limited business activities.

In this Winter issue:

From the President: current situation at the Alpine Fund

Marga, our volunteer from Spain,  tells us all about a Christmas action and mountains trips

Kids Winter Camp in Ala Archa National Park

Thanks to Scott MacLennan who sponsored our trip to Alpine Fund Learning Centre

Ryan, our business volunteer, has been busy working on the website and also on the climbing wall. He tells us all about the latest developments from the business desk and about preparations for the summer travel.

Meet Suymonkul our new Business Assistant

Patricia's taste of REAL adventure in Southern Kyrgyzstan

From the President

As we start this new year I can say that the Alpine Fund is going strong, mostly because we have a great staff of volunteers, guides and student interns that keep the programs going day after day.

I also have to thank the individuals and foundations that have supported us recently. At times our funds runs low, but in recent months we were helped by several individuals and the Ansara Family Foundation. Located in Massachusetts this small foundations gives grants to help youth in South America, Central Asia and Boston. We are using their support to run mountains trips on a more frequent basis. For us, and for the kids, it is the mountains that make our programs important.

Next we are looking forward to Spring, when the days are longer and the mountains free of snow. We have a good schedule of hikes planned, so if you are in the area give us a call, you are welcome to join. We also meet weekly each Sunday at the climbing wall, we want to develop a community of climbers that can get together and plan expeditions.

For this summer there are a lot of program activities planned. In June we will have mountain camps for youth leaving institutions and heading out on their own. We want to give them time for reflection and guidance before they have to take their first and hardest steps toward adulthood.

In July and August we hope to use our experience to work with the increasing number of tourists that are looking for a short in the mountains near Bishkek. This will give our youth real experience, and will raise money for future mountain trips.

But honesty is important and I can say that not everything is perfect at the Fund, we had trouble in the Osh office and tried to move the office to the Uch Korgon Children's home in the Batken province. We have been working there for almost two years and we hoped the mountain program could continue using local staff. Unfortunately, as our international volunteer discovered and you can read about below, the value of mountain trips is not always understood, except of course by the children. We are learning from this and somehow will get that program started again. Nobody said it was going to be easy running a mountain program for youth in orphanages in Kyrgyzstan, but we are moving ahead 

So thanks to you all for your interest and your support, we appreciate it more than you know. 

And as always, we hope to see you in the mountains,

Garth Willis 

February 22, 2004

Marga on trips to mountains and blue Father Christmas 

So many things have happened in the last months that it would be impossible to write about everything that went on here.

In December we went to the mountains with kids from VA children’s home to make the best of the snowy conditions, sledding down the hill and starting what later on became the championship to see who was faster, or cooler or who was using the most creative ways of sledging downhill at some insane speeds. Afterwards sledging became the main activity of our time in the mountains. Trips like these are rewards for hard work in our programs, we rent a van for the day, prepare lunch and run up into the mountains. We leave the routine of the children's home far behind, and the real contest is who can have the most fun. These kids never get a chance to see the mountains, there is no possibility for the children's home to afford such a trip, so even a day sledding becomes an event they will never forget.

At the end of December, our volunteer Dasha and I organized a Christmas action for kids staying in the Redni Chock Sanatorium, this is a very poor looking place and kids from different children’s home are sent there to receive "treatment". The truth is that some spend as long as 3 months and do very little and what is better they do not receive any medical or psychological treatment. The “treatment” is just the excuse to keep places like this open despite the bad conditions they are in: windows are broken, some lights are not working, water pipes are destroyed and the paint is peeling off and the floor has holes. You cannot blame the people there; simply there is no money to fix anything!  There is a sad feeling about the place and some of the kids that used to come to my English lesson told me when I went to visit them in November that they hate it. I discovered later on that kids are send there for different reasons, sometimes yes, they do receive medical treatment for things like colds but the center has no money for medicines so most of the time when kids really need treatment they are sent to another hospital.

The main reason for their stay there, I guess, is for the children’s home to save money, if they send these children to Redni Chock there are less expenses (food, etc), and less kids to worry about. The deal is (or so I was told) if kids go there and spend 3 months they will later on be eligible to attend a summer camp in Lake Issyk-Kul. And of course, this is a great opportunity for them to do something fun in the summer.

The Christmas action was a challenge, we did not have much help or time and a few important things went wrong in the very last minute (including the Father Christmas not showing up) but finally we managed to make it there thanks to the help of a friend who helped us with just 3 minutes notice and drove us there. We managed to get a new Father Christmas, blue one, we didn’t think much about it as we were really glad to have a Father Christmas, even more to have a blue Father Christmas that matched perfectly with Dasha’s Snowguruchka (Snow princess) dress!  But later on, everyone that saw the photos laughed hard and kept on asking: “How on earth did you end up with a blue father Christmas?”  But that’s a long story… the main thing is that these kids got their presents and were very happy.

We had some presents left we went two days later to visit a private children's home and to give them the rest of the presents. Here there are only 15 kids and the conditions are much better and yes, just in case you are wondering we took the Blue Father Christmas with us again. 

Winter Camp In Ala Archa National Park

We started the New Year by taking some of the kids from Voenna Antonovka Children's Home to a Winter Camp in Ala Archa National Park. We stayed in a big, nice and warm mountain cabin. Days went by really quickly and we had the chance to climb to the alpinist cemetery and to the peak of a mountain, which afforded superb views. It was hard at the times, as kids have to walk with snow up to their waists but worth it. 

We also discovered ice hockey, playing it with over a frozen pool, we improvised “sticks” made of branches and a hand cream container (or something like that) was the ball. Every day kids were ready to play it, morning, afternoon and even at night. It was cool, especially at night, imagine us all waiting for the beautiful full moon to come up so that we could play ice hockey for a little longer.

Another memory is when we were trying to cut/saw/axe a big piece of a fallen tree that could keep us warm for a whole night, we tried and tried and almost gave up. This was the perfect opportunity to use a chain saw but such a thing is almost unheard of here. Our tools were not very sophisticated but the ones people have been using for ages saws and axes and this made our achievement even more rewarding. We had to stop for a while, go back to the dacha to get warm and then back to the fallen tree with Ilya to try again.

Finally triumph! A big piece of the trunk was our reward. It was very heavy also, we had to slide it along the narrow path, some times crossing little creeks all the way back to the dacha some 15 minutes away. All the kids involved in this “mission impossible”  were very proud of themselves and even now, a month later, still call me to talk about that big piece of tree we got in the camp, and what a beautiful fire it made!

We had a fantastic time and we felt sorry that the days went by so quickly and that the time came to get back to Bishkek. Kids were the saddest as their winter days in the children’s home are just so boring, they are not allowed outside just in case they catch a cold or get sick and they spend most of their time watching TV. They ask us when we will go again and we say soon, but we can't go every weekend. Future trips are planned so we tell them to study hard, to train hard, and another chance will come.

English Class trip to Alpine Fund Learning Center

A couple of weeks later we went to the Alpine Fund Learning Center with the kids that attend my English lesson. The learning center is our small cabin near the mountains where we can take kids for a day hike or a weekend trip. There we have supplies for writing and arts, a kitchen, and bedding for sleeping.  This trip was possible thanks to the generosity of Scott MacLennan, who donated $150 to make it possible. We all are very grateful to him and had a fantastic time. It as a bit more difficult to handle than normal because there were 17 of us and the majority of these kids are not used to go to the mountains and they are small, full of energy and not used to have so much freedom. In the Alpine Fund program we usually have kids do physical training first, but this trip was to reward the younger children from the orphanage that been studying English hard. 

Patricia's contribution:   A taste of REAL adventure – 4 months in Southern Kyrgyzstan

Note - Patricia came to the Alpine Fund as a volunteer in late summer of 2003. She is Austrian, but had just finished her undergraduate degree in the US

How it all began 

Supermarkets, Internet cafes, Discos with European and American dance music blasting into the street. When I came to Bishkek at the end of August 2003 I was amazed, and I have to admit, a little disappointed, to find it so “normal”, so European – after all I came to Kyrgyzstan for an adventure, to leave my native Europe behind. So when Garth suggested I head down to Uch-Korgon to be the first volunteer at a Children’s Home there I enthusiastically agreed. Down there it was really Central Asia Garth assured me, and I should be prepared for it. “Excellent”, I said, “just what I came for”. “Nobody there speaks any English or German.” “That’s ok…it’ll help me learn Russian faster!”

The rest of the people in the office told me it would be “extreme”. I laughed. “I’m an extreme girl.” 

A few days later I woke up at 3am, met my taxi driver (who also didn’t speak any English or German) at 4am, loaded his car up with cardboard boxes of clothes, school supplies and stuffed animals, threw my backpack and a very cute mini-bicycle for 4-6 year-olds (courtesy of Spanish humanitarian aid) on top and off I went. Off towards my grand adventure – and an adventure I sure did get, even if it wasn’t quite the one I’d bargained for. 

I wish I could gather all of you who will read this around a big campfire with a kettle of chai (tea) boiling on it, and tell you this story in person. This is a story that should be told over many cups of tea as any story is told in Kyrgyzstan. As a matter of fact – you ought to pour yourself a cup of tea before you read on because this is going to be a long, long story. 

After driving for about 14 hours through spectacular landscapes (I slept through some of it even though I tried my best to keep my eyes open) over mountain passes where we were stuck in an icy drizzle for an hour while my driver was trying to fix something under the hood with a pair of pliers and soft cursing, next to enormous lakes dammed up for hydroelectric power, through hot desert landscapes that strikingly reminded me of the American South-West. We stopped once for tea and soup. The driver had been warned that I was vegetarian, so he did his best and ordered the most vegetarian dish on the menu for me – potato and carrot soup with a huge hunk of fatty meat attached to an equally huge chunk of bone floating on top. Everybody is in amused disbelief at how I could leave the best part of the meal untouched but eat all the veggies and broth. These pale creatures sure are a strange breed… 

After another delay (a bridge had fallen into the river) and a few wrong turns we finally found a light blue metal gate with a painted sign of smiling children above it – the Uch-Korgon dyetski dom, or children’s home, my home to be for the coming months. Welcome the newest arrival…Patricia…22 years old, tall and blond (I will have to justify how short my hair is innumerable times over the next months but they won’t let any of my excuses “it’s easier to take care of”, “it’s cheaper because I use less shampoo”, or “it was too hot for long hair in California where I studied” count. What a crime to cut such beautiful hair so short they say and shake their heads.) All the way from Austria (NOT Australia… and yes, those are two very different places. At least everybody here seems to know Switzerland so I have something to compare Austria to), unmarried (can you believe it at my ripe old age??), loves mountains (and sleeping in tents and carrying a heavy backpack and all that even in the winter!!) and, of course, strangest of all, doesn’t eat meat. And the only two Russian words she knows are babushka (grandmother) and arbus (watermelon).

The simple fact that I am a foreigner and here to stay for a while is amazing to them since the area has seen few foreigners lately due to the political situation being deemed “unsafe”. There haven’t been Peace Corps volunteers in the entire Batken region for years and pretty much all other international agencies have pulled out long ago. 

Even though I am bleary-eyed and my butt is sore I decide the best way to counteract the latter it to stay up until 11pm chasing the kids (and gigantic rats) around the children’s home territory and learning some of the kid’s games. We laugh until the grown-ups tell us to come inside and go to sleep. As I lie down on my bed I am, all of a sudden, to excited to sleep. I try to remember some of the names of kids I have learned this evening and within 5 minutes I am fast asleep...but not for long. Around 3am over ambitious roosters and howling street dogs tear me out of my sleep. It sounds like the dogs have broken into the chicken house (but I will later learn that these are the normal sounds of an Uch-Korgon night or otherwise there are a whole lot of chicken houses being broken into). Shortly afterwards the morning prayers from the Mosque come floating through my window and I decide to explore this place I’ve landed in. The kids are still all fast asleep but the babushkas are up and drinking tea in the kitchen. They hustle me into the kitchen and pour me cup after cup of tea and talk to me (and each other) in languages I cannot understand though I can tell they are using several different ones. Later I will figure out that they speak Russian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tadjik and learn to distinguish them by their melody. Russian sounds a lot harsher and more European and is easy to distinguish from the other, more melodious, more Asian-sounding languages. I smile, nod, and gesture a lot – and, I confess, I still do : )

The first few weeks pass in a frenzy of people visiting from everywhere. The distance record goes to a girl who took a taxi for over 3 hours all the way from Uzbekistan to come see the “American”, “Australian”, “Swedish”, or “German” girl although not a single one ever got my nationality right. Everybody comes for English lessons and just to look at me. They talk to me in broken English mixed with Russian and tell me how pleased they are to meet a foreigner. How it’s always been their dream to meet a foreigner. I feel a little overwhelmed, don’t know what to answer…”Yes, my dream has always been to meet a real Kyrgyz person.”?

One girl in particular insists on being my “shadow” so that she can learn English from me. She will come in the morning and leave when I go to sleep, she declares enthusiastically. Is she going to follow me to the toilet for English lessons too?, I ask. I don’t think she got the joke because she looks confused and then smiles at me “Yes”. 

The first escape to the mountains

The second weekend I’m there we go on a day hike to a nearby canyon that reminds me of California with its crumbling rock walls covered in sage. I realize that the local idea of a hike is more “a walk to a nice picnic spot”. For provisions we have bought bread, butter, and watermelons. 10 of them, to be exact, for 20 people. Now it is my turn to watch with amused disbelief. At first they try stuffing them into my big backpack but then we can’t even pick up the backpack (and the watermelons won’t all fit). So they decide the kids will just carry the watermelons in their hands. Now, if you’ve ever tried to hike, let alone scramble up cliffs, while carrying a watermelon you will agree that there is simply no comfortable way to carry a watermelon. You can use both hands, or try to carry it under one arm, or even try to carry it on your head but none of these methods is ideal. No wonder, then, that we did not hike for very long but instead found a nice spot to sit and eat. A herd of sheep passing through relieves us of having to deal with the watermelon rinds although I am fairly certain we would have just left them there in anticipation of the next sheep herd to pass through. I decide that watermelons will be banned from any future Alpine Fund hike menus.

After 2 or 3 weeks I start to settle down a little – as does the dust stirred up by my arrival. Life returns to normal. The kids have accepted the newest addition to the children’s home  and found she doesn’t bite and eats (with the exception of meat) and goes to the bathroom like everybody else. But she does have exciting things like crayons and paper and books about mountains and a headlamp and karabiners and batteries that have two little white dots on them and if you squeeze them a little line lights up and shows you how much energy is left in the battery. I think every kid squeezed my batteries mostly because they wouldn’t believe it unless they did it themselves.

Feeling comfortable in the children’s home territory I want to go out and explore further and realize that I am crossing a border that I didn’t know was there. I am not supposed to leave the territory and the children aren’t supposed to either. “It’s not safe” they say. “Some guy on a horse might come and kidnap you and take you away to his felt yurt to be his bride.” More likely a drunk guy in a rusting Soviet car would take me to his run down apartment with a leaky roof I think, but I hold my tongue. This restriction of freedom is hard to swallow, since it gets so boring at the children’s home sometimes. Especially on Sundays the clock seems to move in slow motion for there is nothing to do but eat, watch a video in the morning, and then sometimes a Christian prayer group comes and has a bible reading and song circle in the afternoon. Several times I decide I just need to get out and grab one of the little boys, always happy to go for a walk. The older kids, especially the girls, are already more rule conscious and afraid of getting in trouble.

The second escape to the mountains

I manage to get another hike organized – this time to a beautiful river about 30 kilometers distant. The air is crisp and cold and smells like autumn. This time we’ve brought apples instead of watermelons. We scramble over rocks and see pretty waterfalls, collect wild berries, and eat under juniper trees. The day ends much too soon.

The illegal escape to the mountains

Afterwards, however, the children’s home territory feels even more restrictive. One glorious Sunday, the sun shining and the electricity off (like most of the time) so the regular Sunday morning video isn’t running, one of my best friends, a 15 year old girl named Rayhan, and I decide to sneak out and buy some bread, butter, and honey for a picnic in the nearby hills. Those hills, even though they are not very spectacular from a mountaineering standpoint, have become my escape place when I feel like I can’t deal with this place anymore and need to tank some calm and energy. They are about a 10 minute walk from the children’s home and you can walk past a little graveyard right into no-man’s-land – a desert between Uch-Korgon and Kyzyll-Kiya with an unobstructed view of taller snow-covered peaks beyond. We buy the food but then Rayhan chickens out on me so it’s me and my trusty group of boys in their early teens again. And Nadia, one of the few brave girls. We climb over the back gate and practically run until we reach the top of the first hill. Looking down we can see the big white toilet building, also jokingly referred to as the “White House” and the bright red flag of the children’s home far below and smile at each other.

Freedom! We head across the hills to a single tree growing beside a little spring that randomly bubbles to the surface in this location. We climb the tree, eat and drink, and make a little campfire in a mud hut nearby. I’ve brought paper and pencils and some of the kids sit down to sketch and draw, some just poke around.

We watch the sunset turn the sky and mountaintops pink and orange before we reluctantly turn our steps homeward. Later I am informed, through one of the older boys in the children’s home, that I must never-ever do something like this again.

Excuses, excuses! 

I keep pushing for a “legal” Alpine Fund hike, perhaps even an overnight trip since we have plenty of Alpine Fund sleeping bags, tents, stoves, and even hiking boots, jackets and snowpants for the kids. However the local trainer doesn’t seem very enthusiastic and has a different excuse ready every time. “It’s too cold”, “the weather will be bad” (apparently he knows more information than the weather report and is able to forecast the weekend weather on a Tuesday), “the car is not working very well” (I never saw it start without a good push from behind in all 4 months), “it’s a teacher’s holiday”, and, as a last resort, “I’m too busy”. Frustration increases and finally I find out that money problems might be part of the real reason why we aren’t going to the mountains. Frustration turns into rage as I finally manage to extract the numbers from the accountant – money spent without my knowledge on things that I don’t think are necessary and certainly not related to mountains in any way.  

The next emotion to come is helplessness. Helplessness in the face of a mentality that doesn’t allow for girls to be strong and organize mountain trips and carry their own backpacks. Helplessness in the face of a mentality that doesn’t see any value in mountain trips. I am tired of everyone just wanting English lessons from me - they can see the practical benefit of English lessons - when all I want is to go to the mountains. I have too much time to think and look at the beautiful mountains so close yet out of reach and feel sorry for myself (I even try watching TV, something I hate, but the Russian soap operas are more than I can take).

The rescue   

Enter the hero on a white steed to come and kidnap me and take me to his felt yurt high in the mountains. Well, not quite  :) , but rescue does appear in the form of a local math teacher, Ravshan, 23 years old and, can you believe it, a few centimeters taller than me . A perfect match everyone agrees. I beg him to help me go to the mountains. I just want to watch a cold mountain sunrise through a tent flap. By this time it is the very end of November and snow blankets even the low hills close by. He tells me I am crazy – it’s freezing and fierce wolves roam the mountains. His mother is convinced we’ll both get tuberculosis. But finally I manage to persuade him and another friend (Bakhtior, one of my English students) and we plan an overnight trip. I am so excited I can barely sleep! The next day Ravshan comes to pick me up at 6am and we stuff everything into our packs, including the heavy kazan (sort of like a skillet or a Chinese wok but thicker - but I don’t complain because he’ll carry it and he insists we need it) and lots of little firecrackers to scare off those fierce wolves. When Ravshan tells me he tried to organize a gun but couldn’t find the right ammunition at the bazaar so we’ll have to make do with the firecrackers I reconsider for a second but I decide to check out the place and if we find a lot of wolf tracks we can always turn back before night.  

Follow the wolves!

Our little expedition doesn’t start off too well. About 2 hours in we realize we’ve forgotten the salt. The boys say the food won’t be tasty without it. “If you’re hungry enough anything is tasty” I tell them. Then the fog moves in and it begins to snow a little. No problem except that we’re trying to follow this one trail Bakhtior went on in May and since the ground is all covered with snow he needs to see the mountains to be able to orient himself. We scramble up slippery hills till we get to a steep part with no way around it. We retrace and find wolf prints big as a human hand. For lack of an alternative we follow the wolf path (the path of least resistance) until we finally by accident stumble across the trail (Bakhtior recognizes a big clump of pine trees and then a big rock and we all feel relieved and regain faith in our adventure). After more than 7 hours (most of it through calf deep snow) we reach a ridge top with flat space to camp and flop down to rest and eat. Winter days are short and we race with the fading daylight to set up our tent, gather firewood and peel the potatoes. But by the time darkness falls we have a wonderful crackling fire going and are drinking tea and telling stories. “This is actually kind of fun” the boys admit. “if it wasn’t so damn cold” Bakhtior adds, moving his damp feet so close to the fire I’m afraid his socks will go up in flames any second. “But hiking uphill through that snow is just masochism. Patricia, you’re a masochist – I’ve never met a girl like this before.” I enjoy the respect in their voices. And even more I enjoy being in the mountains. The thick fog that had enveloped us all day lifts a little for a view of the stars and village lights far, far below. This must be Fergana, in Uzbekistan. And this cluster of lights is Kyzyll-Kiya. The boys argue over which little cluster of lights is Uch-Korgon but I am content to just soak in the sound of the wind and the wolf cries from far below in the valley. Soon an almost full moon rises and makes our flashlights unnecessary. As the fire dies down we retire, tired but I think all of us happy too, to our tent. The first light of dawn wakes me up as it always does in the mountains and I open the tent flap to one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. The fog has completely cleared over night and revealed row after row of brilliantly white mountain ranges, stretching away into the pink sky. To the other side, where we came from, undulating, barren hills dusted with snow stretch to the horizon. I fumble with frozen shoelaces and try to take a picture but my camera display has gone crazy and only shows “E” for empty, meaning no film. Of course, this has to be the time my camera dies on me – but maybe it’s better that way. No negative could ever capture the entire moment in its beauty anyways, I tell myself. Hoping that the cold is the problem I wrap my camera in my sleeping bag and walk up to the ridge top for an even better view. We stay until lunch and then, promptly as we begin our descent, the fog rolls in again and we can barely see where we’re going. But I’ve seen enough.

Aaaahh! 

Refreshed and renewed I return to the children’s home and tell stories about gigantic wolves and dinosaur bones and Yetis J while the kids listen eagerly. Together we plan about the next adventure that we will all go on and discuss strategies of escape or how I could manage to persuade the director. And then the next day I get sick. Just like everyone told me. No, not tuberculosis. Not bronchitis either. Some awful stomach bug. I have to run the “White House”, now treacherously slippery from frozen urine too many times in one night to count on all my fingers combined. Hoping it will pass on its own and too weak to do anything about it right now anyways I lie in my bed and cry at the irony of life. It’s not fair. I’m sure I didn’t get sick from going to the mountains – it must be something I caught at the children’s house (and I’ve had two bad bouts of stomach disease since my arrival) but I hate the self-satisfied “We told you so”. It makes me want to scream even more than the pain in my stomach. More than ever I want my friends. My home. A doctor. Ravshan takes me to the local hospital but they have neither doctors nor medicine there. After 3 days I feel well enough to get out of bed but I can’t eat anything and feel terribly weak. Even the slightest exertion makes me dizzy and nauseous. Desperate, I call the office. Finally I get a phone number from a Scottish doctor in Osh. Drink rehydrations fluid and give your stomach time to recover for a week she advises. So I do. I drink many Nalgenes of sugary-salty water but after a week anything I eat still gives me terrible stomach cramps and I feel weaker than ever. I need to get out of there and see a doctor. I go to Osh but they don’t have adequate laboratories there to do any tests. You need to go to Bishkek the Scottish doctor says and so I go. They don’t find anything unusual in the tests so they treat me empirically for girardia. I feel better and go back to Uch-Korgon to be there for the New Years celebration at the children’s home. I’m careful about my water boiling it for 10 paranoid minutes. But after a few days the dragon in my stomach is back. I can’t take it anymore and flee once more to Bishkek, where new tests don’t show anything either and I take all kinds of antibiotics for everything from dysentery to worms.

The circle closes

And now I’m here sitting at the computer, feeling much better after having been able to eat for more than a week now and trying to paint a complete picture without boring all of you who might read this on the other side of the world. It’s hard to do - there are so many moments I remember (and some that I would rather forget). From the monthly communal baths with all the girls, to eating “milk soup” (watered down milk with very, very soggy noodles), to telling the kids about one of their favorite topics, the mysterious ocean (I remember in particular, one little boy’s wide-eyed wonder on hearing that ocean water is salty), to choreographing a dance to a Madonna song

I remember the night I fell into a ditch with icy water because I forgot my flashlight and how I shocked all the kids when I came back to the children’s home entirely soaked and covered in mud. I remember the night one girl, Sara, and I, kept each other awake until midnight and then snuck up to the roof of the children’s home to spread out our sleeping bags and look at shooting stars.

I remember how fast the kids picked up English and how patiently they repeated Russian words for me until I got the pronunciation right. Overall, I remember how they took me in, how they taught me at least as much as I taught them – about patience, about endurance, about finding happiness in spite of depressing conditions. About life. And how they affirmed my conviction that this world would be a better place if it was ruled by children!

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