Lesozavodsk Day 3

Tuesday at camp was very similar to Monday. The boys went outside and had some fun while the girls visited the Orthodox Church and the Pro-Life Center at the hospital, which is run by one of the parishioners. We tried to teach the boys American Football. Tyler really did try his best to explain it and Yury did a good job translating, but the kids couldn’t quite get it. I don’t blame them; American Football has a lot of rules. We ended up playing our Ultimate Football like Monday again.

After lunch and talks, the kids went down to the river again. It was this day that I took my turn to cook, so I’ll share a little bit about our living and community life in Lesozavodsk. Each day a couple of team members would leave the kids and work on dinner for the team. This was quite the experience each day. First, all of the water in Lesozavodsk was undrinkable. Sister Stella said it was bad enough that we could not even cook with it or use it for tea and coffee. Washing the dishes with it was all right, but they had to be completely dry before using them. We had a small kitchen to cook in with a tiny oven, a three-burner stove, and a sink. Given the size and water conditions, and considering we had to cook to feed 17, cooking became quite the challenge. I felt like I was on an episode of Dinner Impossible.

All challenges aside, I love to cook, so cooking for the team was quite a blessing for them. I think I (and all the team members that cooked) would have made my dad proud with the meals that were produced from that kitchen. Patrick volunteered to help me out in the kitchen. As a side note, Patrick did a wonderful job all week volunteering to clean up the kitchen before and after meals—which was the least favored job—and help get everything ready. He was a great help to me as we prepared . . . well I don’t really know what I prepared actually. It was some sort of rice, soup, meatball thing. Tyler bought us lots of random seasoning packets, but we couldn’t read what was in them, so each day the cook would be going around asking what everyone thought was in each packet based on the smell.

All in all the cooking for the week went great. We didn’t burn any food (I may have lit a towel on fire, but that’s another story) and everything was pretty good. The only thing I did learn was that Russia, at least where we were, does not have tomato sauce. The closest thing we could get was a weird paste that was a cross between Ketchup and sauce. It was rather sweet. Katie and I both took our turns at trying to doctor it up (she did better than I) and make it closer to sauce from home.

In the end, the team was very well fed everyday.  Dinner was also a great time to blow off the steam from the day as we, seventeen in number, gathered in the small front room to eat and share a family meal. A BIG family meal.