Minsk winter photo

Minsk winter through the bus window.

Anya and the future

Even though we kind of already knew the facts we found out that Belarus stopped processing international adoptions in 2004. So the first question has been answered. Now we pray that she will be sent to the best orphanage that Belarus has to offer. All we can do for her seems really insignificant, but she loves it when we visit.

Anya with Anita

With Anita.

Anya with Karen

On the phone.

Anya's Photo

As promised, a few weeks late. Here she is.

Rand

Rand.
He is to say the least, extraordinary. He is 20 years old and has done a million impressive things that he could be using to make himself a millionaire. Instead he lives in a village here and takes care of orphan kids on a ridiculously small budget. You really don't understand Belarus. This place has spat out more missionaries than you can count. But he has this ability to use humor and creativity and wit to astound the harshest most unwelcoming people on the planet. It is more than charm, he has a genuine love for people. He is not easily taken advantage of but he is being taken advantage of by a system that seems to have little desire to join him in what is a priority of God, caring for those who have no love, hope, or connection to a sense of belonging. (I am talking about the system that missionaries endure and it is a system). So we spent a few hours listening to what he stored up over the past few years of work here. Nothing he said surprised us and I was reminded why I never want to come back to doing this sort of thing full time.
Still, we considered coming back to work with him.
And tomorrow night will have a slumber party in his village house (he is so thrilled about this idea although Anita and I exchange quizzical looks and ask each other how old are we?).
oh well you only live once and if that life time is spent sometimes in a post communist (still communist) atmosphere do whatever you can do to make the time less painful and less gray.

Anya

We went to visit Anya today. She is five years old, almost six. She is tiny for a five year old because she has FAS but she has grown up since we were away. When we left she was talking with difficulty and now she has improved so much in only six months time. She was extremely happy to see us and let out a big excited "yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii" when she realized it was Anita picking her up. We walked and talked outside for a long time and were followed by several other five year olds who wanted to hit us with sticks, eat Anya's bananna, and steal the chewing gum from my mouth. (The girl who tried to steal my gum told me she didnt love me anymore when she couldn't have it- I tried to explain to her it was tasteless and that I had been chewing it for a long time but her mind was made up.) There was one little boy who tried to convince me that we were all on our way home- saying "come on, I've had enough here, lets go home now". (That was hard to explain too).
Then we moved on to the small room where we play a game of taking all the toys out of the cabinet and rifling through them to find out what they do and how useful they are. Anya likes the computers/calculators best but was unimpressed by the fact that they were all broken. She ignored the Barbie doll. Good choice.
We gave her a cool new sweatshirt with a hood and wrote her name on the tag. Also some new warm pants. We are hoping they won't get stolen from her as this is an orphanage ritual. Hope that now she is bigger and can squeal, she will fight off the offenders.
I told her we used to come see her when she was tiny and little and pretended I was her when she was a baby. She bit me on the cheek. At least this time she did not pull out any hair.
Needless to say, we miss her and would adopt her if we knew how and if I had a home to house her in.
Will post her picture soon.

Construction

They've been building a lot of fancy buildings during the past six months.

First Day in Belarus

Our first day in Belarus this trip was spent taking a three hour walk to an internet cafe.

Considering...

"Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing really is very frightening..." -Gertrude Stein.

one way to put it

I loved this part of the chapter in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott. I have never heard it put quite so eloquently.

"Uncried tears syndrome left my mother hypervigilant, unable to settle down into herself, and to use the clinical term---cuckoo."
-Anne Lamott

this is a cold march day outside the orphanage. brrr. it's very quiet there when it snows...

American Australian and an interpreter

We do sandplay in orphanages with kids. What is sandplay? Good question...

Introduction to Sandplay Therapy
Dora M. Kalff
Dora Kalff, Jungian therapist, developed sandplay therapy in Switzerland in the 1950s and '60s based on her studies at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, in Tibetan Buddhism, and with Margaret Lowenfeld, in England.

Summary:The client is given the possibility, by means of figures and the arrangement of the sand in the area bounded by the sandbox, to set up a world corresponding to his or her inner state. In this manner, through free, creative play, unconscious processes are made visible in a three-dimensional form and a pictorial world comparable to the dream experience. Through a series of images that take shape in this way, the process of individuation described by C. G. Jung is stimulated and brought to fruition.

Luci, first day home.

answers

Here is my new painting: I finished it last night after a long week of adjusting to America again.

This is Anita, singing a little diddy at the first "wheelie bin cafe" in Queensland Australia. She is my fellow traveller and a damn good singer. We work together overseas in Eastern Europe.