Perpetual Change

A day at the Orphanage

[Sorry, I ran out of time to proofread]
7:30 I am woken up by the day worker, Nadia Romanivna, or the school director, Vasil Ivanovich, when they wake up the older boys (3 days a week I try to get up at 7 am and do some exercises and then shower). They are very nice middle aged folks, both with kids about the same age, and they work a lot with the boys. I sleep in the room with the older boys. There are 6 of them and the director. 7 boys in the 2nd and 3rd grade sleep in the middle room, and the other staff member sleeps in the last room with 6 boys, 3 of which still wet the bed (they are known kindly as the fishermen; there really isn’t much teasing about it; probably because most of the boys did to some point; many still rock a severely from side to side while they sleep, even up to the age 16; I have been told that this comes from being rocked in the state orphanages as children. I think it is a subconscious substitute for a lack of touch.

8:00 morning prayers – this is a private orphanage run by a Lay Institute of Consecrated Life, of the Catholic Church. The organization is called Miles Jesu, and you can find them and us (Boys’ Town at Bortnyky) on the web. Basically, they are a modern monastery. The brothers are celibate but are expected to work regular jobs. There should be at least 5 of them here to maintain community; there are currently 2. They go to mass once a day; this means that together with the boys, I usually conduct morning or evening prayers alone. We have a chapel in the building, where we have mass on Sunday.

8:15 ish – depending on how fast they got dressed, and how orderly the morning prayers went, we walk about 20 meters across the grounds to the small school, where is the cafeteria. There the cook has prepared us a hot milk and porridge breakfast. The milk comes from our cow.

9 ish – this one is an ish because the teachers are not always right on time, and there isn’t quite the same focus on time as in America. The different classes take turns ringing an actual bell in the hallway. I say bell, but it has no clapper; they put a stone in it and ring it upside down. The boys wear coat and dress shirt to prayers and school. They used to go to the village school, but the orphanage got its license to teach them separately. Although I am usually not for taking kids out of normal learning environments, I think these boys really need more attention than they could get in the regular school. Some of them seem literally starved for attention. There are 8 in 2nd grade, 6 in 3rd, 4 in 7th grade and 1 in 9th. There were two at the beginning of the year, but one has left; he was preparing to become a brother but has since changed his mind. Can you imagine deciding to join a monastery at 16?

From this time until 2, I may teach a few classes, though the director speaks very good English and he is their normal English teacher, but if he is busy or a teacher is sick, or misses the bus to our village (we are where the asphalt ends and the dirt begins), then I fill in. If I am not in school, I prepare afternoon activities, help clean the house, do laundry, organize things like materials that have been donated, make small repairs, type documents for different individuals, or a myriad of other small tasks. I also try to take some time off every day. I have been working a good bit on my piano playing, and sometimes I study Ukrainian grammar or write. I have gotten to far in my book in the last few months.
14:00 – Grace and Lunch; The younger boys have finished classes and come back to the house to change clothes, we then have lunch. Lunch is always a soup and then a starch and sauce with meat and usually a salad of some sort (not what you are probably thinking of as salad, remember it is winter, and we grow most of our own food). If the older boys haven’t finished classes yet, they have a 20 minute break when they eat. In school here, they have about 20 different subjects and a weekly schedule. So you may have English, for example, 3 times a week, 2nd period Monday, 4th period Thursday, and 1st on Friday. Some days they finish after 5 lessons, some days after 8. To the 4th grade they always finish by the 5th lesson.

15:00 – Quiet hour; I have just started this, there are still some kinks to work out. They can sleep, read, draw, or sometimes we listen to music. I am reading the Chronicles of Narnia (in Ukrainian) out loud to a few of them.

15:30 – two 45 minute lessons on the computer; they sign up for what day they want and we work on different skills. Each lesson has a list of tasks that they must complete and save. When they complete them, they have a new game that they can play and we move on to a new lesson. They have times in the evening that they can sign up to complete their tasks and play the games. We have two computers, a laptop that I brought, and an old desktop from England. The programs are in Russian and English with a plethora of different programs and versions. I hope they are getting something out of it. The new Microsoft Office 2007 I bought for the equivalent of $4. It works great, but they have changed a lot of the format. They want to play Grand Theft Auto and shoot ‘em up games, but I am a mean dad and have said that I won’t buy them. (stayed tuned next week for an interesting article alluding to “the Oregon Trail”. Remember that game?)

After lunch, three days a week there are also music lessons on accordion or piano if they are interested, and there is a toy room (though it is not as well equipped as I would like, but part of that is because they LOVE to take things apart). The building is in a territory with a wooded park, an orchard, a basketball hoop, volleyball court, and a football field; the school has table tennis and the toy room has foosball, so there is always plenty to do; there is also plenty to do with the cows, horse, pigs, chickens, garden, and fields, though they are always saying there is nothing to do or getting into things that they shouldn’t. Kids are the same everywhere. I try to organize some game when I am not busy with the other activities above.

17:00 – Nadia Romanivna goes home. She helps things run smoothly, get them cleaned or changed, cleans, does laundry, checks homework, reads to them, plays games, and prepares the superfluity of documents that must be prepared for orphans. Most of them are not true orphans, they have at least one parent or a grandparent, but often from drug/alcohol abuse or old age, these guardians have lost their parental rights. Some come to visit, some we never see again. And then there are a few who have no one; a couple who were found on the streets and documents, even names and birthplaces, had to be made up for them. Adoption is very rare, most people don’t have the means to do it, and there is not yet a foster care system, so the kids will be here until 18. This orphanage (not being state run) does a great job of making it feel like a family (though besides the cooks, some teachers, and Nadia Romanivna, they have almost no contact with women; there is a girls orphanage run by the female branch of the monastery in Lviv). My goal in being here, as a youth development volunteer is to create programs that will get the kids ready for life after the orphanage. We are trying to put together something like a dance, or maybe cotillion, for the older boys to invite young ladies.

In the evening, we have started a newspaper, and the editors might meet, or I have also started scouts, and am trying to get a member from a local unit to come once a week, and there is another Peace Corps volunteer that will be starting an English club with them once a week. We also want to invite professionals to speak to the boys once in a while, but it is hard because we are so remote. I have to walk or take an occasional bus 8 km just to get to a town that has one internet point where I can write this. The remoteness helps the boys to stay on site and out of other temptations though; almost all men in Ukraine smoke for example.

19:00 Change for dinner and prayer; go over to the cafeteria; grace and dinner.
19:45 ish – evening prayers and religious formation (reading from a children’s bible and discussion)
20:30 get cleaned up and ready for bed; finish homework; play the piano or on the computer if ready for bed. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I open a “bank.” They can open a savings account and they get a 13% interest rate! Some of them have chores that they get direct deposited into their bank accounts and they have bank books. They can check interest, withdraw or deposit during the bank hours and it is a good chance for me to talk to them one on one. They can watch TV only on the weekends or sometimes the older boys will stay up to watch a football game during the week if their grades are good for that week.

21:30 they should be in bed. They can read another half hour or less, but the lights should be off by 10. One from each room takes a turn cleaning the house. They clean the stairs, corridors, bathrooms and showers, sweeping and mopping. I mop the last corridor and see that they are all in bed. Then I go to sleep usually by 10:30 or 11. I tried reading to them before bedtime, but that didn’t work so well for a few different reasons. And then we start all over the next day.

Labels: average day

posted by jjs @ 5:02 AM