One week

 

Garry has been in the village for a week now. Here's some photos, from church Sunday morning to many of the farm and students. He says the house is rarely quiet with everyone stopping in. He has given most of the presents I sent with him away.

He has gotten a 1500 piece puzzle out for everyone to work on, although he says the pieces are falling off the table often with the kids around. Two-year-old Angelina likes to work on it and will stick ten or so pieces together in a line on the floor.

Garry has been busy preg checking cows (Tuesday all but one was pregnant of 20 or 25 he did) and has been breeding a group of heifers. He's working on trying to fix cow things while he's there, like finetuning the feed rations for the winter.

Friday evening his time he called me and it was noisy with kids and their kids, including baby Sofia. He made pancakes for the students there (a lot he said, and the two new Yulias didn't know how to cut them with a knife and fork, so the other students were showing them how. 

Apparently when they came this summer they didn't even know how to boil an egg. Oleg's wife Elena has been doing weekly cooking class at our house with the students like I used too. 

I've heard from Garry every day, even when "all of Ukraine" was supposed to be out of power for 24 hours, although the Wi-Fi wasn't working in the village during that time period. It's back up now, even video chat was working last night. He said the power wasn't out that long in the village, it was like a normal day.

Every day they do have rolling blackouts, with the power out for three hours at a time, some days (often) three times a day. There's a schedule, which is mostly followed, so they know when they will be out. Unfortunately, one to three milkings a day can be during the outages, so the generator at the barn gets used often. It's tractor powered, and Max is trying to find a backup generator to buy, they tried to order one from the company, but can't get one like that until the spring, so they are trying to find a large commercial type one, but only little home sizes are available to buy. 

So they try to get cooking (for those with electric stoves) and other chores done while it's on and go to bed early when it's going off at nine pm!

Update, just talked to Garry at Saturday suppertime for him. There was a pizza and ploff party going on with many of the students and staff, everyone said hello. He also said that the power had not been out for almost two whole days.