Well, I said yesterday that I wouldn’t post pictures of Valerie every day, but some folks have asked to see more.
We’ll celebrate Christmas on New Year’s Day, since Valerie wasn’t with us on the 25th. We have a tree with presents under it waiting for Saturday morning!
We start with a video of Valerie meeting babushka (grandmom) Cantrell over Skype:
OK, I promise not to post pictures of Valerie every day, but folks have asked to see some more.
I’ll send out a more complete update hopefully in the next few days.
We didn’t take too many pictures today. We start with a short video from breakfast:
Some of you may not know, but Olga and I have been pursuing guardianship of a little girl named Valerie.
Valerie is the 3 year old daughter of Oksana, the orphan who lived with us a few years ago. Oksana is now in prison, and her daughter was placed in an orphanage earlier this year.
Today we finished the process of becoming guardians. We picked her up a few hours ago. I took the picture above of Olga and Valerie walking down the sidewalk to our flat in St. Pete.
I can promise that you’re going to see a lot of pictures of Valerie in the future! I’ll try to post more tomorrow.
Right now she is sleeping soundly in her new bed. It’s great to have her home.
There are my kind of people:
They are actually Swedish, and that’s a Volvo BM Victor 2-cylinder diesel tractor.
Very cool.
Merry Christmas!
Olga’s grandfather, Orest Groten, celebrated his 92nd birthday yesterday. We had a great visit. Here Orest opens his gift of gloves and a scarf. This video will give you a taste of what it’s like in a simple Russian flat. You’ll see Olga’s grandmother Ludmilla Groten, Tamara Senkina a family friend since 1957, and Olga’s mother Tanya.
This very interesting video looks at the wealth and health of nations for the past 200 years. I had no idea that in 1810 the average life expectancy was 40 years (though this is surely affected by high infant mortality rates).
A few days ago, a group of Russian orphans arrived in the US to spend Christmas holidays with host families. This is one part of our work in Russia. You can see a video about their arrival here.
MIR board member Lyle Thomas writes of the day the children departed from St. Petersburg —
I met with Andrei Gvozdovsky on Monday, (who works for MIR on the hosting program) right after he and Masha (the director, his wife) had spend most of the night traveling around the city to pick up the kids and take them to the airport. The kids aged between 2 and 15, many of whom are handicapped.
Andrei’s heart went out to these kids, and he expressed hope that they would be adopted as a result of this experience. He related a short but telling moment:
One little boy asked him, “When are we leaving?” – and the Russian word implied by car.
Andrei pointed out that they would be flying. The child didn’t understand.
“Like a bird,” Andrei explained.
“That can’t be. People can’t do that.”
The snows are falling and cars are disappearing. Here our car emerges from a snowy grave —
I never thought I would see something like this —
Vladimir Putin singing Blueberry Hill for a fundraiser in St. Petersburg on December 11 —
Mike and Olga Cantrell 