Smoother than Butter

Saturday was a day that surprised me. Thankfully, that surprise was a good one. We had what seemed like an impossible plan for two hours at Ulan. The plan was to go to the orphanage for one hour, both in the morning and the afternoon, hand out gifts to all the children and take pictures. IMPOSSIBLE!!!

In order to try to do the impossible, we had planned things very specifically. Two weeks ago, we started the process of preparation by asking the orphanage for a list of the children that are at the orphanage. We then compared this list with the list we had from last year. We noted any group changes, children that had graduated, and those that had come to the orphanage for the first time this fall. We also made a list of children who were on our list, but we couldn't account for. We had to go through the lists several times in order to make them match up.

On Saturday as we went from group to group we apologized for not having done a camp with them over the summer, took pictures, and gave gifts to each child. These gifts were shirts and bags that had been brought to them from the Ulan work group. Although the work group was unable to work with the children from Ulan, they had brought gifts for each child. The kids loved their new bags and shirts. When we visited in the afternoon, some of the children that had received shirts in the morning already had them on.

Thanks Ember for taking the picture!

The staff at the orphanage were extremely helpful. They made it easy for us to go from group to group. I think we were able to give out gifts to about 90% of the children. That's pretty impressive considering it ended up that we were visiting on both a school day and Taraz City day (many of the kids were at the park celebrating in the morning). It was such an encouraging day for me to see how smoothly things operated and it was so fun to be back in the orphanages again!

Note: Some children here go to school in the morning, while others go in the afternoon. As a result, it is difficult to find a time of day when all the children are at the orphanage (except in the middle of the night which is not a good time to give gifts). This only added to the impossibility of the task we were trying to accomplish.