Post By James

I, Wendy, make no claim to the below post, this is the thoughts of my husband James and you cannot hold me responsible or liable for any of it's content! :)

My part of this post was the part where Wendy was not present. I went into the yard with the children to play whatever they wanted. The hour on the field consisted of American and Ukrainian football, 100 yard dash over and over, balance beam, throw child up in the air, flip child over doing a back flip, feeling my biceps, holding one hand and one foot airplane spins and kick the soccer ball high in the air and see who catches it or retrieves it from the neighbor’s yard.
They have invented two very interesting games. We caught Tolek (a boy we meet during the hosting program) carrying a stack of broken glass. We told him that the glass was dangerous and he quickly defended the idea of holding broken glass by putting it down on the ground, drawing a line across the sidewalk with a rock, stepping off eleven feet, drawing a circle at the end of eleven feet and putting the pile of glass in the middle of the circle. Then he took a tennis ball and threw it at the pile of stacked glass to try knocking it over. We all took turns and a few knocked the glass stack over. When someone would knock it over, everyone would clap.
The second game was set up by digging four small holes into the dirt in a line and surrounding on three sides with bricks or rocks. The person with the tennis ball would roll the ball into the opening of the bricks and if the ball rested in one of the holes, everyone around the holes would scatter; the person who rolled the ball would pick the ball up out of the hole and throw it at anyone. If the ball hit the person, the same person would roll again. If the ball missed the person, the target person would get to roll the ball next. (When I explained this to Wendy she said it sounded like Skeet Ball and Dodge Ball combined!)
Then they wanted to know how old I was. I told them and they didn’t understand. So I had to hold all ten digits up four times and then two more. They then understood that I was forty-two.
They then wanted to know what my name was. I told them. Then they started saying my name is….some Russian word that I didn’t understand. They wanted me to say it so I did a few times until I realized they were probably try to get me to say that my name is something funny like toilet head or dragon breath. I stopped playing that one pretty quickly.
They would get excited every time they saw a jet airplane flying toward Kiev. They would say Kiev and then America.
They would ask me if America was good. I would say yes. I would tell them that Ukraine was good and they would say that it was bad.
We had a few times when they would laugh so hard! I had such fun with these kids and they didn’t even care that my jokes were dry.

There were a couple reasons why I needed to go cut up so much with the children today. One was that my hip has been hurting me for some time and I needed to loosen it up. It seemed to help.

The second reason was to loosen up another place where I have been feeling a substantial amount of tension. This tension was in my chest and it got there because I am getting irritated with having to wear certain dark clothes, wonder if I was going to be noticed because I was wearing running shoes and speaking English, being worried that the security in the grocery stores watched me extra close because I forget to get my produce weighed and priced before taking it to the cashier; wondering if I would be recognized as a non-Ukraine if I smiled at an adult and because I was looking around in awe taking in everything around me, wondering if my driver would slap me because I offended him by putting on my seat belt (drivers would say to me, your life is in my hands and I will keep you alive), I call bull crap! Drivers can’t predict if someone will swerve into our lane like they swerve into other’s lanes to miss the chuck holes. So you see, especially those who know me a little know that I haven’t yet to develop a taste for following all the rules; that is why I had to cut up a little today with the children. Tomorrow I will cut up just for fun!