Am I Insane?

Well, after today, most people would likely have to answer "yes" to the question above.  A while ago, I received an email from a group that wanted to help provide New Year's gifts for every child at an orphanae.  They could guarantee us $2500, which allowed for the purchase of an $18 gift for each child at Ulan orphanage. 

Here is where the insane part comes in (well, at least my most recent trip into insanity).  I thought "wouldn't it be fun to let each child choose a gift for themselves?"  The rest of the Kids Connection staff thought it was a great (although challenging) idea.  Today was our first of many days of shopping at a local store with the children.  Ulan Orphanage currently has 143 children.  After a bit of convincing, we were given permission to take all but the youngest children shopping. 

Our morning started out by talking to the staff at the store.  We had talked to them the week before, dropped a letter off, and called to follow-up on the letter.  Even so, it took us about 30 minutes to get things set up and figured out with the manager.  This allowed us time to prepare our volunteers for the first onslaught of children. 

During the morning, we were able to take about 35 children shopping in three groups.  We did the same in the afternoon.  It went extremely well.  One thing that we were all impressed with was how patient and helpful the staff at the store were.  Many of them seemed to enjoy helping the children pick out gifts.  They quickly figured out that the children each had a certain amount to spend and I found that when a child came near, the staff members would often ask them how much they had left and then give them all the options for items within their price range. 

We had a system where we put stickers with the names of each child on each gift that they chose and then stored them in shopping carts until the end of the day.  After the children left, we got to check out and bag each item, trying to keep items from the same child in the same bag.  This process took about an hour.  It was a great day and the children and volunteers had a great time. 

Kiikzhan described the scene at the orphanage when he went to pick up children.  Before he had a chance to say anything, kids were piling into the car until it was full.  He then had to pull children out of the car until only a safe and reasonable number were left.  They were all excited to go to the store.  The only ones that showed any sense of not really enjoying it, were some of the older boys.  We will wait a couple weeks (after Thanksgiving) and then do this again with the remaining children. 

A Chance to Give Back

Due to the changes in plans this summer with the Ulan delegation not being able to do camp at Ulan Orphanage, we felt it would be nice to hold a carnival for the children. We had one slight problem with this idea ... staff size. It was fun to see how this problem was solved.

Thanks Ember for taking this picture!

We have four people in Taraz that work with Kids Connection. We were able to convince two others from our staff in Taraz to join us (it actually didn't take much convincing). One of them brought her sister to help. There is also a woman in Taraz adopting from a different orphanage that volunteered to come help. This brought our total up to eight, not quite enough to run the six stations that we wanted and have a runner to anticipate problems.

We then asked our Kazakh speaking Youth Impact participants if any of them would be interesting in volunteering to help us. I was shocked by the turnout. We had 11 volunteers show up to help. They did such a great job. There were several stations where the adults didn't even have to do much because the youth did such a great job managing the stations. They were such a blessing to us and we couldn't have pulled off the carnival without them. What a joy to see them giving back to the kids from their orphanage. When we were done, they asked us to let them know if they could help with anything else. We look forward to thinking of ways to have them get involved in our work in the future.

During the carnival, my job was to be the runner. I was able to walk around the carnival and make sure all was going as it should be. This included directing, correcting, and enjoying the kids. One thing that stands out to me as I look back on that time, are the relationships that I have built with these children. I have reached a point where they will listen to what I say and usually obey. It is nice to finally be at a place where they recognize my authority and are able to laugh and joke with me. Our carnival ended up being really organized and not very chaotic at all. This in itself was amazing considering there were probably about 100 children making their way between six stations.

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.