Changes

Last week Anton returned and got right to work... he reminds me of Maksym Boradin, he can't stop working. He says he is ready to stay and do the whole program this time. You may remember him as the boy who was interviewed when we were on the news. Two weeks later he had to go to his home village and did not return until last week Wednesday. He looks a little different with a super short haircut. He seems to have acquired the Luk Oil coveralls that Valera wore, that Max Rudei used to wear and has them on whenever he's working. I wonder how hot it will be before he takes them off.

Valera and Nikolai left on Monday, they plan to go to an auto mechanics trade school in July and are going to go to work in the greenhouse Valera worked in last summer. Garry says they hire orphans for their summer workforce. They did the final project, an inventory of all the farm equipment with serial numbers and prices in grivna with the other second year students last week. We will miss their smiling faces. They plan to return for  week in July before starting school.

Good bye Valera

The boys were busy last Saturday unloading supplies

Oksana riding down the street

The other girls are learning to ride the little  bicycle that Julia and Karina ride. I have seen Vika and Oksana riding it this week and I think they must not have rode as kids, like the other girls.

Meet the girls

Here's a video featuring the first year students in English class, we have been trying to sing in English this month. Garry wanted them to learn his favorite new praise song, This is Amazing Grace, and we have tried it for two weeks  but we have had more success with Jesus Loves Me. It has kida lost the tune and become a rap version, somehow...

Oksana and Vika

As you can see our first year students are mostly female this year! Vika and Oksana are sisters, and all of the new girls except Leila live in the new house we renovated last year.

Oksana likes to draw and has had a boyfriend since arriving here, Kolya (the oldest student). She is the youngest student, just 18 in September.

Vika is the only smoker besides Karina, and has changed quite a bit since she came in the summer. She is more open and always ready to try out new English words with everyone.

 Leila is 21 and loves to sing. She is always early for class. She grew up in the same orphanage as Karina and Julia, and has an older sister living in Russia. She had been living with her but was deported last year, so she came to us.

Oksan, Kristina, Karina (Sergey's daughter) and Ira

Oksana and Kristina, our 18 year olds, are the "cool kids" with boyfriends, although Kristina has a new one every month it seems, not many have been fellow students, boys from the village and currently, from the city. Kristina lived in a foster family before coming here, unlike our other students who came from orphanages.
They often hang out with Ira, who is very smart, but has some physical problems that means she has trouble walking at times, but she always tries to do everything everyone else does. We are told it is cerebral palsy, and her mother put her in the orphanage while keeping her brother and sister.

 She has a sarcastic wit, from what I can tell.  The other students help her out without complaint when she has difficulties. When they went to Kiev, they had to walk up a hill with lots of stairs in the snow and the boys took turns carrying her on their backs because she kept falling. The orphanage workers were worried she would end up in an "adult orphanage" for disabled people and wanted her to come here with the other girls and Andrey.

Valentina is a special girl, always ready to laugh, it seems she can't stop smiling and giggling whenever you see her. Since coming here, she has invested her money from the orphanage in dental work and braces. We think she was born with a clef palate that was repaired.  Her teeth were very crooked before and it seems since her braces went on her confidence and self-worth has gone up. 

 Leila lives at the first girls house with our second year girls, Karina and Julia. They live at the other side of the village, the farthest from the farm and school (at least a kilometer) and they got one of the bicycles when they came in the container in the fall. The smallest purple one, because Julia isn't five feet tall. None of the girls had learned to ride a bike as children, so they had to learn. Both Julia and Karina (or Kalina, her nickname since she came and Garry mixed up her name) were determined to do it and are enjoying being able get to work faster.

Leila and Julia

Karina discussing work with Max and Garry

While Julia and Karina look forward to the end of classes as they finish their two year course (especially Karina- Kalina, who while a hard worker is not an attentive student) they plan to stay in Nikoliapolia for the time being, working on the farm. Julia is a favorite with all our visitors, with her friendly ways and big smile, and pound for pound, is one of our hardest workers. She likes to act like Leila's big sister encouraging her to take part in everything.

School days/daze?

Garry and I are teaching for the second week in a row. This is unusual, the normal schedule is we teach one week and the group home parents teach classes the following week, with Maria and Victor teaching classes on that Thursday because they come for staff meeting. Maria teaches writing and last month Victor was drafted by the group home parents to teach a dating and marriage class.

First year students putting seeds in wet paper towels in bags

Garry has the first year students conducting some experiments with seeds, the second year students are working on budgeting and inventory as they near the end of their studies. Both groups are excited that this week is milk products week. On Monday they separated cream so class was at our house, and today they will make torog (cottage cheese) out of the skimmed milk which has been sitting on the window sill in my pots, since Monday, Ukrainian style.

Yesterday, the second year students met at our our again so they could use the internet, since it is not working in the classroom this week. While I was having English class, Garry opened the door and a chicken walked into the house. Someone had left the boot room door open and one of the neighbor's chickens had gone inside, so she came in with him.

Most of the students were chasing the chicken around the living room, but it turned out Sasha was the best chicken catcher, and snagged her quietly. Kolya and Julia helped put her back outside.

Sasha, Kolya and Julia with the chicken who came in the house

Photo by Valera

Then it was back to watching The Gingerbread Man, after learning all about colds in English and the guy named Pedro who went to work sick.

Back in the classroom for English  this morning

Seminar

Last week on Friday evening and Saturday all the students, group home families and Maria were off to Dnepropetrovsk for a seminar Victor found for them to attend. They went in two vans, Victor came out and they went in his van and the Mercedes which Max drove, 22 people from Hope for Each in all. I found this photo on facebook. They all had workbooks they wrote notes in, which you can see in the photo. Maria tells me that it was a good presentation.


In G. Dnipropetrovsk in church " hope " on 25-26 March, we with all the students and the entire crew had attended a seminar for young people on the theme: " what the Bible says about sexuality?". We found out who created an intimate relationship and for what; how to keep : Virginity, sanctity, loyalty; and saw that the past is the man can't change, but the future with God change is capable of!

Translated from Russian

Getting ready

The Steinbach team will be arriving in a little more than a week and the guys and girls are getting ready to pour cement for the floor of the big new reno. They plan to do it Saturday, so are busy digging trenches to put the septic lines in. Then the big push to get things done will begin.

The students will be on "spring break" the first week the team is here and can work if the they want and have lunch with the team, Getting ready for soup and sandwiches making on a mass production level.

Inseminate Corova

Valera doing his best

 The second year students are learning how to breed cows. They started learning the parts of a cow and about a cow's reproductive cycle the first year.  They got to see the real reproductive parts of a cow when a cow was killed for hamburger a week ago, and have had several classroom lessons about breeding cows, and even tried putting the metal rod that delivers the semen through the cervix and into the uterus of the detached reproductive track.

Valera showing off his dirty glove

Today they got to put on plastic sleeves (long gloves) and try it for real, on a live cow. Two of the boys, Kolya and Valera were successful on the first day.

Garry and Kolya high-fiving after sucess

Meet the boys

Vova at center

We have made a change at the boys house, when Garry came back to Ukraine at the end of January, Andrey and Ira, the group home parents moved into the house they had bought in the village with their daughter. Our new group home supervisor, Vova, moved in. He is a single man from the Lugdansk area (one of the areas of Ukraine under rebel control).

THE SECOND YEAR GUYS

Maria helped Valera get a new passport, they went to lots of government
offices for more than a year, but on Wednesday they were able to finally get it. He lost
his before coming to the school, and couldn't go on two trips to Kiev because you need
one to travel by train, among other things. Now he's an official person again.

Valera is very competitive and always wants to win. He is smart and one
of the better students in class. He wants to go to a trade school next year,
a possibility now that he has a passport.

Nikolai (in green) has changed a lot in a year and a half. He is a better student,
a better worker and a normal guy. When he arrived the director from the dorm
said he needed constant adult supervision, she told Garry and Maria that she
 can't believe how much he's changed when they met last week.

Last August there was an incident that really changed Nikolai. He got in a fight with Karina (smoking with him in this recent photo- we have a few students who smoke) and beat her up. (I should explain that she likely started it according to other students with them, and had a bad habit of kicking the boys.) 

The group home parents were horrified, even though she was not badly hurt, and wanted to send him away, perhaps to a mental hospital. Garry made the two of them work together on the unpopular 5 am milking shift for a week. They not only learned to get along, but they have both become better people since, to the amazement of all the staff.

Nikolai gets a government pension, because he is deaf in one ear. If he sleeps through his alarm, it is blamed on he didn't hear it because his good ear was down on the pillow!

We found out he once worked for a hardware type store and likes to assemble pre-built furniture, he helped put together the wardrobes and desks at the new house.

Kolya,(the short form of Nikolai) our oldest student, is a great favorite
 with the group home parents. He knows the most English.

He is the only one with a student girlfriend
 (Oksana looking over his shoulder)

Sasha is normally a cheerful fellow, he receives a monthly pension for disability
from the government. He will have problems living on his own.

Sasha recently got a new 40 grivna haircut he really likes

First year students

Andrey is our only first year guy now. We had a couple guys who came for
a week or two since September, but left for different reasons. 

He has some problems remembering in class, but is always willing to try. He had some money saved from the orphanage and recently went to the dentist and got a retainer to help straighten his teeth, which he lost for two weeks, but one of the boys found it in the house, so was back in his mouth yesterday.

This past week we had a visitor, Losha, a potential new male student from the dorm in Kiroy Rog, where many of our second year students lived. He met with Garry and Masha last week Thursday in Dnepropetroesk. He had come with the dorm director, who had needed to get Nikolai to sign some documents, since he is still registered at the dorm (they must have really thought we'd send him back from the start, I think, even though Kolya, Julia and Karina are all registered here.)

Losha had seen the news story about us and the school on television and had lived in a village and had some experience with animals and decided he'd like to come to our school.

It was decided after the interview that he'd come for a week visit and if all was well, he would go back and quit his job as a janitor and join our program. He went back to the dorm with the director that day to pick up his stuff, Nikolai went with him to help him take the buses from there to Dnepro and to the village. They were back shortly after noon Friday. Nikolai phoned and Garry went out to the highway to pick them up when they got off the bus (it's 2.1 km, almost a mile). Apparently, as they came into the village, Losha asked Nikolai if Garry knew everyone in the village because so many people were waving at them. He spent the week living with the boys, going to classes and working at the farms.

Losha and little Christina looking at drawings

So today it's Friday and Garry paid Losha because he was taking the bus back to Kiroy Rog, but I believe he will be back on Sunday, because Garry told him we could pick him up in Dnepropetroesk. He is a quiet guy, and an artist, Luda's daughter Suisha was showing him some of her work at the birthday party this week.