I WANTED TO STEAL LITTLE DIMA, BUT THE GOVERNMENT SAID NO.
I friggin' love babies.
We did a number of service projects today, including a stint at the baby house and Maria's Children, an art-based program for orphans in the Moscow area. Julie enlightened us on a number of topics in regards to the Russians: they still hold on to the old Soviet standard of viewing orphans as worthless pieces of trash rather than children. The majority of them suffer from some kind of disorder related to their distance from other humans as infants; at the age of four, orphans are given a test to decide where they "belong," and are given a label-classification: normal (very, very rare), imbecile, idiot, and retarded. The children we worked with mostly had down syndrome, and I spent plenty of time cuddling with an autistic boy who Heather would've loved. It was awful leaving him behind, but the women who were working in the baby house seemed to legitimately love these children. This is, apparently, very rare, and the only reason we were allowed to visit this particular orphanage was because it was considered high-end.
We met up with a pair of orphans Julie mentored about ten years ago, both of whom are about my age, and both of whom are attending college. One of them, Dshana, was labeled as "retarded" as a child, which meant she was going to be put in an institution and kept from receiving an education, but Maria and Julie apparently fought it, and now Dshana's attending Moscow University for psychology so she could do work in the same orphanage she grew up in. The other, Pasha, is in photography school, and managed to get some pretty awesome pictures of the kids, which I'll undoubtedly photodump here later.
Maria's Children was fun, but certainly not as fun as working at the baby house.
Dshana convinced us to go to her favorite restaurant, a sushi bar. Do you have any idea how hard it is to read Japanese as Russian? I have no idea what I ordered, but it was good.
It was a long, long day, because Julie didn't see fit to figure out how the Moscow Airport worked, and had us trotting around in subzero temperatures for three hours. I did a lot of sleeping between the cab rides and the airplane. I'm exhausted; we had to wake up around 6 AM to get to the baby house for the morning units. Tomorrow our van doesn't pick us up until 9. We're in Saint Petersburg, which is so different from Moscow-- everything moves much slower, the drivers are less scary, and the hotel room is awesome. We'll be touring the city tomorrow, taking a look at an old Orthodox church, and visiting the Hermitage. It'll be a full day, but I realized when getting my suitcase put together that I only have three pairs of socks left, which means that tomorrow and Thursday (which will be spent in Pushkin) are all that I have left here before we marathon back to the States on Friday.
We did a number of service projects today, including a stint at the baby house and Maria's Children, an art-based program for orphans in the Moscow area. Julie enlightened us on a number of topics in regards to the Russians: they still hold on to the old Soviet standard of viewing orphans as worthless pieces of trash rather than children. The majority of them suffer from some kind of disorder related to their distance from other humans as infants; at the age of four, orphans are given a test to decide where they "belong," and are given a label-classification: normal (very, very rare), imbecile, idiot, and retarded. The children we worked with mostly had down syndrome, and I spent plenty of time cuddling with an autistic boy who Heather would've loved. It was awful leaving him behind, but the women who were working in the baby house seemed to legitimately love these children. This is, apparently, very rare, and the only reason we were allowed to visit this particular orphanage was because it was considered high-end.
We met up with a pair of orphans Julie mentored about ten years ago, both of whom are about my age, and both of whom are attending college. One of them, Dshana, was labeled as "retarded" as a child, which meant she was going to be put in an institution and kept from receiving an education, but Maria and Julie apparently fought it, and now Dshana's attending Moscow University for psychology so she could do work in the same orphanage she grew up in. The other, Pasha, is in photography school, and managed to get some pretty awesome pictures of the kids, which I'll undoubtedly photodump here later.
Maria's Children was fun, but certainly not as fun as working at the baby house.
Dshana convinced us to go to her favorite restaurant, a sushi bar. Do you have any idea how hard it is to read Japanese as Russian? I have no idea what I ordered, but it was good.
It was a long, long day, because Julie didn't see fit to figure out how the Moscow Airport worked, and had us trotting around in subzero temperatures for three hours. I did a lot of sleeping between the cab rides and the airplane. I'm exhausted; we had to wake up around 6 AM to get to the baby house for the morning units. Tomorrow our van doesn't pick us up until 9. We're in Saint Petersburg, which is so different from Moscow-- everything moves much slower, the drivers are less scary, and the hotel room is awesome. We'll be touring the city tomorrow, taking a look at an old Orthodox church, and visiting the Hermitage. It'll be a full day, but I realized when getting my suitcase put together that I only have three pairs of socks left, which means that tomorrow and Thursday (which will be spent in Pushkin) are all that I have left here before we marathon back to the States on Friday.