The last few days

Visits with D continue to go really well. With each passing day, we see more of his happy, easy-going personality. We are still waiting for the moment when he really tries to test our boundaries, but that hasn’t happened yet. We fill the time each day playing with sand toys, books, crayons, Legos, and a few other toys we bring. He has become more talkative, and we are beginning to see just how outgoing he is. He will chatter on in Russian for a quite a long time. Sometimes I am able to catch a few key words, and figure out what he is trying to say, and sometimes I have absolutely no clue. I just say, “Ya nye paniyi-maiyu” (I don’t understand), and then he laughs at me. I’m sure he must be thinking, “Why did I get this stupid American mama?”. He learns a few new English words each day, and his English pronunciation is much better than my Russian.
Vanya spent Monday and Tuesday morning running around completing paperwork. On Tuesday afternoon, Matt and Vanya went with the orphanage director to an electronics store to help them buy an air-conditioning unit for their main meeting room. Then at 5:00 pm, Vanya took the train back to Kiev to take care of more paperwork at the SDA. He will arrive back here tomorrow (Thursday morning). In the meantime, if we need a translator, we can call Kostya (he is in another city with our Mississippi friends) or Vanya, and they will do it over the phone.
I know that you are probably having visions of a wonderful seaside resort town, but Mariupol is definitely not a resort town. The centerpiece of the city is a large metallurgic plant, which emits a stinky brown cloud that settles over the city. There are people swimming in the Sea of Azov, but Vanya says it’s polluted and we shouldn’t swim there. We actually live very close to the sea, but we haven’t ventured down there yet. I’m sure there is probably a pretty part of the city somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet. When we were in Kiev, Kostya said that the tax money from the other regions, all ends up back in Kiev and now I understand what he means. The public areas here are not nicely maintained like they are in Kiev.
We are renting a two bedroom apartment from a young, single mother. She actually moved in with the next door neighbor so that we could live here. Thid is very common here. It is very clean and charming in sort of a “grandma’s house” kind of way. She is charging us $30 a night (and no, that is not a misprint) which is about 25% of what we were paying in Kiev. We prepaid her for 10 days, and she immediately went out and bought a new sofa, because she said the old one wasn’t comfortable enough for us. She also said that cleaning, laundry, and ironing is included in the price, but when she came to do our laundry today, we paid her 100 gryvna (about $20). When we leave, we hope to be able to leave her a little extra to thank her for her generosity. The building that we are living in is a 9 story concrete blockbuilding. Vanya said that hundreds of these exact same 9 story buildings were built all over the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. They were built to alleviate the housing shortage during the 70’s. The best way to describe the outside of the buildings here is to say that they look like the “projects”. The outside of these buildings are not maintained, but inside they are clean and nicely decorated. There are several of these concrete buildings built in sort of a circle around a common “weed patch” area with benches, and a dilapidated playground. In the evening when it gets cooler, the older men gather in one area, the older women in another, and the moms (dressed up in their stiletto heels and short skirts, of course) take the kids out to play.
We have found a couple good restaurants in town, but we are mostly buying food at the market, and eating in our apartment. Tonight we bought a roasted chicken, a salad with cabbage, cucumber, dill, and a very yummy dressing, and French fries and ketchup for the girls.
We are hoping to get a tour of the orphanage soon, so I will write about the orphanage after we see it all.