This has been a great and successful weekend.  In two days we have managed to deliver all of the family parcels.  These are packages that are sent from Canadian families to families in Belarus that they have a connection to.  Usually through hosting a child in the summer, but also through the Guardian Angel Program or the Orphan Education Program.   Tomorrow we will start to deliver the food boxes through Social Services to impoverished families.  These can be very difficult deliveries due to the situations these families find themselves in.

Today started with the group loading up the truck with a load of parcels for the Minsk Region.  Harry Preston was taking this load with the driver to personally make these deliveries.

While the rest of the team was loading up vehicles and delivering parcels to outlying villages in the Mogilev Region a few of us went over to the Orphanage to remove the forms from the cement pour at the Poultry Barn.

It was a little challenging, but in the end the result looks great!  And to top it off the sun came out and the temperature went up to about 12 degrees!  Everywhere you looked people were out on the street, or cleaning their yards or having picnics and barbecues.

A couple of the boys at the orphanage who were eager to help were put in charge of keeping the cement pad wet in order to slow the curing process and help the cement harden.  With no outside taps or hoses available, the boys had to carry the water a bucket at a time from the residence building a couple of hundred feet away.  Here Vlad empties his bucket during one of his many trips!

Around 11 o’clock we loaded the boxes for the families in Babruysk, which is approximately 160 kilometers away, and Dan & I headed out with our interpreter Nina and our driver Sergei.  Although it is the second largest city in the Mogilev Region (pop approx 200,000), finding addresses is still a real challenge and often times down right frustrating!  Here is our driver trying to find a street, which in the end, does not appear on the map!

Nina was making phone calls trying to find out where this family lived.

Although it is a big city, there are still many sections with streets and houses that look like this:

Of course there are very few street signs so we stopped often to ask the locals for directions:

And often got conflicting results!

But, as always, every cloud has it’s silver lining and ours was patiently waiting for us at the end of the search!

Sasha is one of our best success stories!  He grew up in the Chausy Orphanage, came to Brockville as part of our summer respite program, graduated from our orphan education program and is now married and working in Babruysk.  When we arrived they were having a Birthday Party for his neice and many family members were around.  You can read Sasha’s story by clicking here.

Tomorrow most of the team will start delivering the food boxes while a small group of us head to the orphanage to put up the walls on the Poultry Barn.

Eric McKenzie