Вчера

Yesterday was the first day of our service projects. I chose working at the orphanage; mainly because that's what I've wanted to do for my entire life. But other than that, no special reason. ;) Other options were helping with a middle school English class, helping with a college English class, or working on a church building. Rob is my compatriot in the orphange visits, which will be happening for the next weeks. This orphanage is actually not really an orphange, per se. Most of these kids still hae parents. It's more of a between house. This is where kids who have been taken away from their parents (mainly because their parents are alcoholics) are taken while the state decides whether to give them back, or transfer them to a more permanent Children's Home. Our group of kids was between the ages of 4 and 5. These kids are amazing: they are extremely friendly, come up and hold your hands, talk to you in their sweet little Russian, climb up in your lap to watch a movie . . . Just generally all around sweet. Don't be surprised if I come home with all 13 of them. The first day, as usual, was pretty confusing. The orphanage is located on the other side of the town across the river, the side of town that we don't ever go to, and are not really familiar with at all. For that reason, Harley brought us over, with the intention of teaching us how to get there so that we, by ourselves, could get back. One of the issues with getting to this place is that there are two buses that go there, after riding one of those two buses to the designated spot, we walk to the next bus stop and wait for another bus that takes us directly to the front of the orphange-- this bus only runs once every hour. So if you miss it, rain or shine, you're waiting. We missed it. By a few minutes. After waiting for about 20 minutes in the rain and cold, Harley hired a taxi (a toasty warm BMW) and we took it to the orphanage. Everything went well there, although we were pretty late. Harley introduced us to the director people, and left. Nobody there speaks English. After our time with the kids was up (we took them for a walk in the rain, played some games, and watched Monsters, Inc.), we went out to wait for our bus. Everything went well up until the time to change buses. Rob thought we should go to the other side of the road to wait for our bus, since that was the direction that we needed to go to get back home. I thought that we needed to go the the stop where we got off, since, obviously, even though it was headed the wrong direction, the bus had to turn around at some point. Plus, all we could see on the other side was a tram stop. Oops. We waited for our bus for about 20 minutes, after which we got on the bus, relivieved that we were out of the cold and finally headed home. We rode the bus for about 10 minutes, and watched as we pulled into this big bus parking lot. We looked around and realized that we the only people on the bus. The lady told us that this was the end of the line, and that we needed to get off. We looked horrified. She looked confused, but said the same thing again. Crap. We were now 10 minutes in the oppossite direction away from home than when we started. We found our way back to the main road, located a bus stop, jumped on what we thought was our bus, and headed back towards the university. Once we saw that we were crossing the bridge, we finally felt secure, and, 2 hours after leaving, jumped off the bus in front of our home sweet university. No worries, we have the kids to look forward to, and now we know what not to do next week.