The internet has not been working in the village since last Saturday night. I should have done a blogpost about the rain that fell that afternoon before I went to bed, because Sunday morning we had no internet when we woke up, and it still is not working Monday evening as I type this up to post later. It is unusual to not have internet so long in the village these days, we have gotten used to having fast, good internet.
We had a
thunderstorm with a good rain mid-afternoon Saturday, shortly after Garry told me he
thought the storm was heading elsewhere. The guys had to come in from baling
straw in the field- and they were in the farthest field from the barns, so they
were all stuffed in the cab of the tractor, Leila with them.
She was pretty wet when
she came into the house to clean up. It didn’t last long, but Garry said the
rain got down about half an inch into the soil, and it didn’t even rain three
miles away because they were still combining when he drove past around five pm
with the students to go to the Just Youth event in Zaporosia.
Garry and I
started teaching English today (Monday) in Dnepro for the EFCCM Summer English
Institute. Since we woke up early we went into the city early and caught up
with the world on the internet on the free Wi-Fi at Mc Donalds while eating
breakfast. Garry even had a snickers Mc Flurry for dessert!
Sunday we
went to church in the village. We brought the projector and Garry’s new
computer so we could play praise songs again. We have not done this since
Garry’s computer was stolen in the spring because we lost all the Russian and
Ukrainian praise songs on it. Saturday I downloaded a bunch of new ones and even
found some of the church’s favorites from before. Unfortunately we discovered
that Garry’s new computer did not have the same ports as the projector just as we
were getting ready to play the songs!
Garry was
glad it was not Monday morning that we found out that we had this problem since he
is using the projector to play videos from his computer for English class. Even
better, when we went into Zaporosia Sunday afternoon to buy groceries and
wedding rings for Nikolai and Alyona we were able to find an adapter to make it
work for class.
On our way
back into the village Garry had to stop the van. A little girl, maybe two years
old (she looked less) was running down the middle of the street. Her four or five year old sister
(the friendly little girl last year’s team will remember) was riding her bike
nearby and sprang into action, throwing her bike down and running into the rod
to carry her away, she even waved and yelled Garry’s name in greeting as she
dragged her away. Some neighbors were
watching and shook their heads, but we
soon slowly passed by another little girl who looked like she might be
three years old, all by herself, waving a stick on the edge of the road… you have to keep your eyes open
when driving through the village.
The wedding-
signing the paperwork- is tomorrow (Tuesday) in Zaporosia and since we are
teaching, Victor will take them in to get officially married. After that they
will change into their “costumes” as the girls call them and Victor will bring
them to Dnepro and we will take some photos by fountains and things and take
them for dinner. Alyona can just squeeze into Oksana’s wedding dress and I
found Nikolai an old jacket and tie, new dress shirt. I hemmed up some “new”
used jeans today for him; they were about four inches too long, and Kolya’s
suit was too big for him. Read the next post for details of how it went and photos.
I have my
classes ready to teach Tuesday morning, Garry is just finishing up working on
his. We got home around four and took a nap before he went out to see how the
baling was going. The straw was dry yesterday afternoon.
He was gone
a while and came back with a story. As we were coming into the village Monday afternoon, we were
puzzling over piles of burnt straw near the church. Some of it was on the road
and still smoldering. It looked like the big farmer was combining and
delivering wagons of loose straw. People
sometimes burn excess straw after they carry their straw into the yard and
store it, but I had never seen it burning on the road.
Garry told
me we had missed all the excitement in the village while we we teaching. When he went outside some
of our students came running up to him,
telling him all about it. Apparently, the guys had piled the straw bales a
little higher than normal on the wagon (8 rows instead of 7 high) that Anton
was driving back to the village and the bales hit the power lines as he
drove under them at the corner by the church. The bales caught fire and were
exploding as the burned and the strings would pop. Anton climbed off the
tractor and tried to throw off the burning bales. Soon the wagon and tractor
tires, surrounded by burning straw, were burning too.
Some people
in the village saw what was happening and phoned Maxim so he came back from the
corn field where he was working to help. By the time he arrived, Anton had driven
to the shop with the idea of blowing the fire out with the air gun, luckily he
did not find it Max says, so he then decided to drive the tractor into
the swampy slough land near the ponds and was almost stuck there, with
everything still burning. Max drove the tractor slowly out of the slough and
slowly about a kilometer to the irrigated corn field where he used the hose to
put the fires out.
Amazingly
the tractor tires seem OK, they are made of thick stuff and they just
re-inflated them afterwards. All’s well that ends well, and everyone who saw it
had an exciting story to tell. Apparently, someone even has some video of the
burning bales.
So we lost
one load of bales that burnt up, and Max traded a second load of bales to
someone in the village to fix a problem, because the burning wagon broke the line that
gets power to the street lights. Luckily it didn’t break the 480 high voltage)
line that it hit to set the bales on fire. From now on, wagons will only be
loaded seven high with bales, too.
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