Happy International Women's Day!

I can't believe Mike and I were in Russia on this day last year.

Here's what we wrote about Women's Day in Kostroma(photo above is of Lena on her way to a birthday party earlier this year. She's wearing grandma's tierra):





We celebrated Women’s Day – sort of like Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, Grandmother’s Day, Sister’s Day, Secretaries Day, etc. all rolled into one – with the kids at the Ministry Center in Kostroma run by Children’s Hope Chest.

What is a Ministry Center? Before we got there our leader described it as like a YMCA. And he was right. Basically, it’s a place where orphan graduates and their friends can hang out, get support, learn stuff and go in an emergency. Walk in and almost the first thing you see is the ping-pong table. There’s a TV room, a media room (outfitted with computers, a DVD player, a projector, sewing machine, etc.), a weight room, a music room, as well as emergency bedrooms that kids can call home for up to six months if they don’t have any other place to live.

When we got there the center wasn’t yet opened. But at 3 p.m. the kids started trickling in. One of the first was a girl who took to playing ping-pong with Mike. She was pretty good too. We only found out later that at 17, she’s 3 weeks pregnant. And while she is living with the 29-year-old father of her child, he threw a Women’s Day party but she wasn’t invited. And he kept calling her at the center, but she didn’t want to talk to him and she eventually turned her cell phone off.

The guys of the center put on a show for the girls to celebrate Women’s Day. Their program was a contest, Russian boys vs. American men, to see which could be the better ladies. The Russian’s won. It was very funny.

But more important, it was beautiful to see the boys give the girls such a beautiful gift for Women’s Day, one that is better than any flowers or candy. The gift of laughter. And it was laughter at the expense of the boys.

Mike became the star of the ping-pong table. The boy pictured above wouldn’t let him The boy pictured above wouldn’t let Mike stop playing. At the end of each game he would hold up one finger and then point and Mike and his own chest. He’d keep doing it until Mike agreed to play again.

It’s just so rare that an orphan boy has a good experience with a grown man. There are just so few male role models in their lives.

These kids are lucky. They have Children's Hope Chest (www.hopechest.org) and a place to go. Typically when an orphan graduates from the system, usually between the ages of 16 and 18 (although we later heard about a boy who graduated at 14), they are on their own. Even if they are lucky enough to get into tech school or university, they have no support. And the odds for them aren't good. The average life expectancy for a former orphan is Russia is just 30 years. One in 10 kill themselves. 40 percent turn to crime or prostitution. And since those are the official statistics from the Russian Ministry of Education, I have to assume the odds are actually much worse.