Christmas and New things

 

This summer a new couple joined the Hope for Each team. Oleg is Ukrainian, Lena's from Siberia and in August they moved into what was the Crawford house in the village with their two preschool aged sons and her father. They had already spent some time in the village and in September took over student affairs like scheduling, discipline and salaries.

There's a few changes like a noon time dinner for the students on weekdays, with two of the students as the main cooks, Kolya and Julia.

Soup's on

It was a great crop year this year, with enough money made for running the school, planting next year's crops, and building a second storage shed for grain and purchasing a new tractor. The chance of that much timely rain next year is about nil, and it was so dry in the fall the winter wheat barely started growing by November, but we didn't have to buy irrigation water all summer for the corn and hay crops.

Update

 It's been almost two years since I updated this, we are not so much a bird's eye as an everyday view of the project, so I just post on moo-oosings! However, there have been changes since that last post. The Crawfords returned to Canada last April due to Scott's health issues that cleared up when they got home. It was at the begining of the pandemic, they were able to return for a few weeks in July to pack up. 

We moved into the house leaving the three girls in the other house, plus Angelina, the baby Valentina had last May. Last spring we built a house that Kolya and Oksana and baby Matthew moved into, but over the winter she was able to get a house of their own in the village from a government program (there was always supposed to be free houses for orphans but we had never met one that got one). Nikolai, Alona and little Danil have moved into that house on our other side. 

We still do work study at the farm and Larissa, at left in photo above, comes from Zaporosia to teach an ethics class twice a week, and there's a weekly cooking (and eating) class too.

Many of our other long time students are living in what was the new house, married couple Julia and Dima are in the group home parent side of the house, three older guys, Sasha B, twins Misha and Vasa and one guy who arrived in the fall are there. There are three more guys in the two apartments, and one guy that came recently at the boys house, with maybe more guys on the way, although none have come yet. It seems we often hear about possible students coming to the farm, but then they find work in the city.

The farm is able to support improvements and the program now, for the last two years even milk is a good profit business, along with selling grain with don't need for feeding the cows. We grow winter wheat, corn, alfalfa and sunflowers. Corn and some alfalfa is irrigated.