Jon and I headed to Mogilev today to deliver the third and final load of family parcels there.  Although it is a large city of 360,000 people (third largest in Belarus) it is a real blend of new buildings and many sections of houses that were part of outlying villages and still have dirt roads!  This can make it very difficult to find addresses, but we managed to get all of the deliveries completed.

I don’t have a lot of delivery photos but I took a few that will give you a look into some of the sights we saw today.  This first one is a strange looking tractor that was spraying a field.  It was going really fast and looked very maneuverable for its size.

This is one of the streets that I mentioned above.  Many times today we found ourselves on flooded streets and several times detoured around whole blocks to avoid them.  In this case we drove through as our driver, Sasha, was able to watch the vehicle ahead of us make it and knew that we wouldn’t disappear into what appeared to be a small lake!

We found these little guys playing hard in a park behind an apartment that we delivered to.  The boy on the left was stripping bark from a stick and his friend was very busy carefully applying a fresh coat of “paint” to their little play house.

Although this is Easter in Canada, Orthodox Easter is celebrated next weekend here, so today was palm Sunday.  Every market as well as street vendors were selling these brightly coloured plastic flowers.  The celebration of Radonitsa (day of rejoicing) is coming up very soon, this is when families go to the cemeteries to visit the graves of their ancestors.  They will clean the grave-site, maybe have a picnic and leave the plastic flowers to decorate the site for the coming year.  Although rainy and overcast, the flowers everywhere really brightened up the city.

A very common sight here is a horse and wagon.  I always love to see them as it really gives an old world feel and reminds me that there are still some people who are living life at a calmer pace and being propelled by “one” horse power!

Last, but not least, a picture of us delivering a family parcel to a girl who was working today at one of the markets.  Here is Jon with the box while our interpreter, Tanya gets the paperwork filled out.

Tomorrow is my last day in Belarus and it is pretty jam packed with wrap up items, hopefully we can finalize everything before we leave.

Eric McKenzie