Anecdotes from our interactions

Rachel: The kids in my class didn’t know what “enthusiastic” meant, so I decided to kind of act it out for them. So I waved my arms and said “woo hoo!” Well, when it came time for saying the answers (it was multiple choice), all of them had chosen B) Strange, unusual. …Yeah…




Sara-Elizabeth: My story is about our Fort Bayard game, which was kind of like Amazing Race, only without the traveling. We had to complete a task at each of ten stations. The judge at each station gave us a score, up to a perfect 10. Jackie and I were part of a team of 9, with 7 awesome Russian kids. We had so much fun, cheering together and trying to communicate. One task involved two teams of four balancing on a low stone wall and trying to pass each other on the wall. We almost completed it, but not quite. Our team, for some reason, ended up singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm. The judge thought it was so funny he had us do it again, and he liked it so much he gave us a 10!




Sarah: Lol…um I haven’t been able to communicate with my kids like at all. The first day I was sooooo upset because there was nothing I could do. Today, however was a lot better. And they really opened up to us more. They also started talking in some English so it is getting better. Please prepare their hearts for our message.




Sara-Elizabeth (again): Today (Saturday) our theme was Values. We had a “Values” auction and we auctioned off things that reveal what people’s values are. I had purchased some cheap fake coins at the Dollar Tree in Louisville and we used those as “rubles.” The things we auctioned were, for example, ‘peace in your family,’ ‘a trip anywhere you want to go,’ ‘good health,’ ‘know the future,’ and ‘forget bad things in the past.’ That last one was the last one to be auctioned. We had three teams of two people: two girls, two girls, two boys. At the end, the boys still had most of their money. The two teams of girls pooled their money because they wanted the ‘forget bad things in the past’ so badly. I told them that was against the rules and they couldn’t do it. Mari said, “But we all want to forget bad things in the past.” I said, “The problem is, I can sell you this paper for fake money, but all the money in the world won’t help you forget bad things in the past.”

Pray that something we say will help them realize that they’re looking for answers in all the wrong places.