Visitors and students and sunflowers and...

We continue to work on getting ready to teach English starting Monday and continuing for three weeks (we will leave the house at 7 am and return around 4 pm), actually tomorrow is staff meeting, set up and class choosing evening, so we'll be gone from noon until after nine pm this Friday. The girls will be on their own for lunches. That's one of the English words that they have mastered and they like it when I cook whether its vegetable soup or a big meal with massa (meat).


Of course, life on the farm with the staff and students goes on... the wheat harvest continues they have been filling big semis to sell it graded better than feed wheat this year and 15% moisture so not bad.  Starting on Tuesday they have been baling straw with two balers (They planted someone's sunflowers this spring in exchange for baling now). One baler is taking care of the commitments for  traditional rental agreements
(they get 150 or so bales of straw, among other things, unless they chose cash rent) the other is making bales that are being stacked under the straw shed. 

Interestingly the guy combining the wheat, told Max that the sunflower field near the barn is the best he's ever seen. Garry thinks it could be taller. but that field got lots of manure on it, so that might be why it looks so good. 
Here's a picture of Milka the cow next to that field yesterday evening. Milka was the pet heifer/cow at the "new House" but last year when Garry tried putting her in with the herd she did not do well with others (she got beat up) so Yana bought her for herself and stakes her out everyday.

Leila is excited because she is working with the guys stacking bales and so she gets paid extra like them, so she is going to pay off her used smart phone she bought from Garry fast. That means she is not cleaning house as much as usual. Normally she's washing the kitchen floor at least once a day and insists putting dishes in the dishwasher as soon as you set your cup down. Garry keeps having to get a new mug for his coffee in the morning.

Garry made snacks in the sandwich maker to go with cherry pie

We are getting used to having girls in the house, being group home parents  supervisors (our new term). Its been about a year since three moved in, for a while it was just Alona and then the grad girls moved in back in February and stayed because Garry likes having them here so much. Leila and Valentina are always helpful when it comes to cleaning, and Vika has learned more English. All the girls helped pit cherries for the freezer.

 Even though we are occasionally hunting for something that has been "put away," or having to buy a new liquid soap bottle for the bathroom (I have not figured out who tosses them, I'd had one and refilled it for six years before this March) it certainly makes for lots of contact with the students. I've even learned some new words. However, we also use way more water for showering, and the girls still don't lock the door when they are in the only bathroom in the house, even though Garry thought he solved that problem by install a hook and eye fastener. That must be why the real group homes have two bathrooms, or because its hard to get in when you need to sometimes. We do have the outhouse anyway, as the visiting Canadian teams know!

Alona will be moving out next week, after the wedding, they can get married Tuesday at the government wedding palace, and then it should be quieter too. She tends to disagree with the other girls and it can get loud at times. She and Nikolai have been fixing up the apartment that they will live in.



Yesterday Garry and Max had visitors from Odessa who had someone give them ten cows (I did not get if this was a Christian project or not) and they were pasturing them on half and acre this summer and had bought 20 round bales for the winter. I don't know if they convinced them that this was not going to work well.

Today we had some Americans out who were visiting Kirvoy Rog along with some people from the project that sometimes sends us students. Misha Mazhara (Kolya and Vasa's brother) was one of those students and he was along for ride- he left us last summer to go to trade school. Garry toured them around the farm and then took off for Dnepro to try to get a broken hydraulic hose fixed. He should be home before we need to leave for small group in Zaporosia where we'll meet the three guys who have come to help Steve and Jo with their outreach this summer.

I will wait to publish this post, as I have a few photos to add from my phone and Garry has it. Yesterday he took his phone in the morning when he made feed (often he leaves it here)  and it must have fallen out off his shorts pocket. He bought a new phone about a month ago while I was gone, it's bigger and better than his old smart phone (he sold it to Leila) that he had for a whole year without losing or breaking it.

Unfortunately he only saw his phone lying on the pavement after he had driven over it with the skid-steer. Victor is taking it to  a repair place today to see if they can revive it.