Perpetual Change

When it rains, it pours.

So last week we get a letter that said we will have an inspection by the health department. It has been explained to me that these meetings always end in the director paying a fine, but none the less, we worked like crazy the three days before to try to make everything as spotless as possible. As you can imagine, that lasts about 20 minutes with 20 boys running around. It has also turned very unseasonably, but very pleasantly, warm. Where last week we were playing ice hockey, now we are playing soccer, but the mud factor is incredible.

The night before the inspection, a young man of my age, just across the street from us, in a village of 800 (this is a corrected figure from an early blog), shot himself in the head. He is unmarried but employed. The director was woken up in the middle of the night to ask if he can drive the corpse to a hospital in our van. Think: no police, no hospital, no ambulance for at least 5 miles of dirt roads, and rather few cars in the area. This tragedy has the whole village buzzing. May his soul rest in peace.

The next day, the inspectors arrive – there are 7 of them! I was expecting 2 or 3, 4 at the most, in a country that loves committees, but I find out that not only will we pay a fine, but we are expected to feed them a nice lunch (better than we normally eat; but this I expected) and send them home with goody bags full of shampoo and coffee and things. This blows my mind. We get these products via humanitarian aid from Germany. No one can tell me why so many have come, but I think it is probably because we are one of their inspections most worth their while. It also flabbergasts me how much paperwork is needed and everyone is rushing around to fill in the gaps for the months that they haven’t been doing the work. The cooks are flustered on whether to number the pages on the top or the bottom. And yet we all still expect to be fined anyway.

Oh, by the way, the director had to go to Lviv (2 hours away) this day, and a police man finally shows up from somewhere to ask one of the cooks some questions. Turns out that she is a rather distant relation to the unfortunate young man. The police man probably had to question half the village.

The next day, turns out that the day worker, the school director, AND the orphanage director have to be other places all day long. These three people along with me and one of the religious order’s brothers are the principle care-takers of the boys. The brother has to go to daily mass in the morning, 5 miles away, and then he has to go to the village church for the funeral at 11 am (because the young man’s grandmother helps us out sometimes, and it would not be good if we didn’t have a presence, even though they have to call to their superior to make sure that they can attend a mass for a suicide, which the local priest has found some loophole to provide). This leaves me to get the boys up, dressed, and through their morning prayers after which the cook helps me to get them fed and to their classes (both cooks came in for the inspection; they have more than a minor role in the child rearing).

On top of all this, it turns out that a group of the Germans, that organize the humanitarian aid, are coming; and they don’t speak English (or Russian or Ukrainian)! There is another shuffling to figure out what we will feed them. They are on a tight schedule so I have to take the boys out of classes to accommodate them; which later turned out unnecessary. Because it is so warm, everyone has been burning the fields and dry wood in preparation for the spring seeding. I come out of trying to converse with the Germans (luckily an American priest that is affiliated with the order has come with them and speaks a bit of German) to find that some of the older kids have lit our soccer field on fire to clear some tall grass, and then they went back to class, and now the little kids are trying to light other things on fire with the embers. This all happened in about 20 minutes. I round them up for lunch (which is why I was with the Germans; I needed to know when they were clearing out of the kitchen), and they all run for the van that Germans are getting into. Imagine 10 boys, 10 or younger, twisting every knob, pressing every button, opening every compartment, bag or container and generally running amuck. You can’t yell at them while the Germans are engaged (and enchanted because they hadn’t seen the fire) with some of them. So I just keep taking one out of the car and sending him shuffling towards the kitchen, while another takes his spot in the car. After about 10 minutes of this, the Germans have had enough, I get a bit firmer, and off everyone goes. The school director and the other brother show up about this time, and I all but check out.

At some point in here, I struggle to translate the title of this blog to the cook. Pour is not the word that they use while referring to heavy rain. This is not a usual couple of days. Usually, my life feels more like the movie “Groundhog Day”. Did I say that before?

posted by jjs @ 3:25 AM