Perpetual Change

Notes from Ukraine

Part V of the Notes Series

From Ukraine, January -June 2008, while I was at the orphanage:
During winter one day in winter, we were playing soccer on a wet but clear field, when just two days before we had been playing ice hockey on a frozen pond. Temperatures in winter aren't as relentless in the north as I had once imagined.

Why do little kids love to jump out when they are playing "hide and go seek". It is like they can't contain the excitement of being passed by while you are seeking, so they exclaim where they are and go running off in glee.

There was a young lady that came to the orphanage one day. Nestor, a small and sickly boy of 7, came into the kitchen to tell me that a pretty girl had arrived and I "must go kiss her" with such an air of wise experience that it made me and the cook laugh.

I wanted to plant a tree for Earth Day in April, but I never got around to organizing it. Well it just so happened that we are trying to re forest a bit of the park that the orphanage is in, and one of the teachers came that day and took a few boys to relocate about 30 young trees from the forest to our land. I only realized it as they were finishing re-planting. They didn't seem to really get my excitement.

We had cooking class on Saturday afternoons. One particularly nice day in spring, after going for a walk in the wildflower fields and picking some mint, we made ice cream with the cows fresh milk and the mint. You have to put it in a jar surrounded by ice in another jar. Then you make a circle and roll and roll it back and forth.

One of the boys, the smallest I might add, is nicknamed "Godzilla." I didn't think I understood correctly when I first heard the other boys call him that. He may be the smallest and can also be the cutest, but don't feel bad for him, Godzilla isn't an irony. He definitely marches to the beat of his own drum.

While at the orphanage, I travelled rather regularly by horse and carriage, even down to the village store.

The boys developed a very great trust in me. It awes and humbles me sometimes when I think of something that evidences it. For instance, some of them would only trust me to cut their hair and this before they ever saw me cut someone's hair. I gave them a few haircuts; maybe they liked it because I would do what they asked, even bowl-cuts and mullets!

I think the church in its social wisdom created Lent to guard the people from themselves. Lent starts in early spring. Although somethings have started to bloom, this is actually the leanest time. You have eaten all your winter stores, canned goods and potatoes, and almost nothing is ready to be eaten, but it is so tempting as it starts to green. Even cows and pigs are at their leanest, and can be pregnant. I think all the restrictions on meat is to keep us away from our temptation of slaughtering these animals before they reproduce.

They light small thin candles during their church services and they last just the length of the service (a bit over an hour). When they get very low, the ember of the wick seems to retreat into itself in the semi-darkness of the little cup that holds it. No smoke or flame is visible. Then when you think it is out, it seems to exhale a small stream of smoke that wafts away as it snuffs out. It is so beautiful.

I love the sound of fresh snow as it crunches under foot.





Godzilla to the left, mullet to the right, we're making ice cream!

Labels: old notes

posted by jjs @ 1:47 PM