June 18- Freda Gardening Day

June 18

Today is Sunday, and no visit for Andrew. Instead we spent the day at the orphange doing yard work. We have been trying to set it up for a couple weeks now, but they looked at us like we have 3 heads : "You want to travel around the world, pay lots of money and now do yardwork?". In the sprit of my mother, who would have dug in the dirt too, I called in Freda Gardening Day. I can now say I have gardened on 2 continents, but who's counting.

We started off the day by heading to the Tool Bazaar with our Russian speaking driver....we were experimenting life without a translator. We are able to buy 5 pairs of gloves, 2 pruners, 1 big pruner and one weed hacking tool for about $20. We tried to buy a wheel barrel and could only find 1 for about $90. Can you tell they did not really want to sell it to us?

Once we got to the orphanage the 'man' who we were told would be there was no where to be found. I pulled out my handy dandy Russian Translation book and pieced together a sentence that said "Cloakroom man vacant. Need Grass Machine" which meant "the man in the coat room is not there. We need the lawn mower". After an hour of trying my awesome Russian, we gave up and called the translator. After much negotiation we were not given the lawn mower, but instead 2 primitive dirt rakes. We made due with the rakes, shovels, a dirt mover (see picture) and the tools we bought at the bizarre bazaar.

We mainly weeded and moved a lot of dirt. Here's the before and after picture of the new playset they installed our first week here. When the director finally agreed for us to go some yardwork, which we thought meant some lawn mowing and weeding with some branch trimming, her eyes lit up and asked us to move the 'little' sand pile. It was the size of a volkswagon bug, and we did the best we could. Here are the before and after pictures of the main area we worked on. For some reason the director really likes the kids to play in the dirt, and how could I argue? The day after we moved the dirt I took Andrew out to my dirt mounds and let him play for half an hour. It took him a bit to warm up to the idea, and he ate more dirt than planned, but he is catching on. Next up is getting him to move mulch.







Look how energetic we look at the beginning of the day, and then the end of the day. We worked for about 4 hours, in the blazing sun and stopped for 2 breaks: the first for water, bread and the only suitable chocolate chip cookies we could find in the country, and the second time for water melon that we bought from the fruit stand man. Water melon never tasted so good. We only ate half and gave the rest to the orphange staff. Hopefully we scored some brownie points with everyone this day.