воскресенье - Day eleven

Okay - blogity blog time... Because we are waiting for an afternoon visit this Monday - duu kids have school on work days!  So yesterday we started our visit with our boys playing some drawing games.  We had a pile of colored pencils and some notebooks from the local supermarket.  We then did some basic shape drawing with various colors - writing down and saying the English and Russian words for the colors and the shapes.  Max wasn't so into it but Sergei played along.  The few words that I am learning have little funny images attached to them but there isn't a way yet for us to communicate that potential tool.  One example on the image thing - fish in Russian (рыба) sounds to me like reba so I just remember Reba McIntyre singing in an aquarium and the word pops right up.

We spent the second half of our visit playing basketball on the orphanage half court.  Yes that is the basketball court.  Back in the room for some circus audition flips and wrestling which Max really seemed to have fun with – the poor kid is ticklish.

Before going back to the apartment we had Sasha Driver take us across town and past one of the main steel mills to the one Catholic Church in town (Mother of God – Our Lady of Czestochowa).  Crazy roads – in the US no one really buys a SUV thinking they need to lock the hubs and go digging but in Ukraine an SUV is a real advantage as the roads are something that would make even UDOT blush – when they are even paved.  Anyway no one knew where this little church was until we found two babushkas under a shade tree – pointed us there no problem.  The door was closed and locked but thankfully brave Becky was there to do something I would never dare and that was to ring the doorbell.  We met Father Leonard (Pauline Brother from Belarus) and he was nice enough to let me receive the sacraments and fix us lunch.  So much for telling Sash we’d be just five minutes.

 The wind switched on us today which meant we got our first full taste (and I do mean taste) of the pollution in Mariupol.  Mariupol adoption – where one way or another your eyes will water.  I made Becky keep the windows closed until later in the night when we went out for ice cream and a little rain helped to clear things up.