A Day at School

Wednesday I spent the day at an MK(missionary kid) school here in Odessa, substitute teaching for Kim Huffman, who is in the States. This is a school run by Mission to the World and there are seven students and two classrooms. It reminds me of the old one room schoolhouses in America, except this would have to be a called a two room school-flat, since it's on the fifth floor of an apartment house in the center of the city. I taught the younger group, which is all girls, ages 7,9 & 12. The older group is four teenage boys. Every subject, with the exceptions of Russian, gymnastics and ballet, are taught be one teacher in each room, a couple who moved here to run the school for MTW. Kim comes in on Wednesdays to give the girl's teacher a break. She also teaches music and art to them that day. So that's what I was there to do: give their teacher a break. I prepared the music and art lessons(Kim had all of the art stuff ready to go), but then had to do all of their other subjects with them, as well.

Snow had been pouring from the sky since Tuesday and continued to do so the entire day. By 2pm, we could barely see the buildings next door and were beginning to get a little concerned that I might not make it home, so I left early to see if the marshrutki(buses) were still running. The temps were down to about 18 and there was about a foot of snow on the ground by the time I left school. Getting back to the bus was longer and much messier than normal and I wasn't very happy when I got there to see long lines of waiting people and no buses. I was about to begin the walk back to the school, having resigned myself to the fact that I was about to get to know the Martins much better, when the very bus that I needed pulled up. The driver got out, said that they were shutting down all of the buses for the entire city and that this was the last one. I got on, but after a while, began to wonder if I was going to be stranded somewhere with no way to get home. We started and stopped, started and stopped, over and over and over. People ran along the side of the bus banging on the windows and door, begging the driver to let them in. But we were already packed in like sardines, with me and about 20 other people standing smashed against each other.

For two hours we crept along the route that normally takes 45 minutes, with the driver getting out every few minutes to bang the ice off the windshield wipers so that he could see. We passed at least 50 cars stranded in banks of snow, because the city had no one clearing the streets, until it was too late. Tramvais(like cable cars) were stuck on their tracks, because when the city finally did try to clear the streets, all of it was pushed over onto the tramvai tracks. They would clear the roads in one direction, but not the other, leaving great humps of snow for drivers to attempt to get over at intersections. We finally made it to my neighborhood and were within four stops of where I would get off, when the traffic came to a complete stop. We sat and sat and finally I and two others asked to be let off right there. As I started the walk home, I saw cars crawling along the uncleared roads and people lining the sides of the streets with their thumbs out. In a city dominated by public transportation, where storms like this rarely happen and aren't planned for, what happens to people when all public transportation is shut down and they are left stranded on the side of the road in 18 degree weather?

I finally made it home, two and a half hours after I started, with scarves, gloves and hat completely soaked through. As I took off all of my layers, extremely grateful for the warmth of my home and my safe return, I was haunted by the image stuck in my mind, of rows of people standing in snow drifts on the side of the road, just trying to make it home.

The girl's school room

Lunch time

Recess!

How would you like for this to be where you get to have recess?

The colonnade of the Voronsovsky Palace

Heading back to find a marshrutka

You can see the yellow marshrutka that I got off of, still sitting there

Looking out my window, from the warmth of my flat