POLAND - DAY 5 - PLAYING WITH THE KIDS

April 1, 2014

I woke up at 6:30am in order to shower then go see the donkey and pony with Jamie. As I'm blow drying my hair, I say "I just get so tired blow drying my hair. My arm gets so tired that I have to take breaks." Jamie says, "First world problems" and we both laugh. Haha

Jamie and I went to see the pony and the donkey. I was afraid of the donkey because of Daniel telling us that he likes to nibble. As I was petting the pony, I said “Aw, you have crimped hair like Jamie’s” and Jamie says, “I don’t know what to say to you when you say stuff like that” and we both just laugh. Jamie slept with braids in her hair so her hair was crimpy that morning and it matched the pony’s.

Jamie and the donkey though we really should have gotten a picture with her and the pony so you could see how their hair matched.

They were wrestling.

This where we spent A LOT of our time. 

The van that took us everywhere and our wonderful driver, Piotr.

We arrived to the building around 10am and six of us went to play with the kids while the others worked on the building. The plan was to rotate but we ended up walking to a park and being there nearly three hours! I’m pretty sure that we were the ones wearing the kids around and not the other way around.

This is one of the little girls I was walking with in my earlier pics on this blog and she's 3 or 4 and she was laughing so hard when she would go up. 

It was cute.

We all played tag with the kids then someone had the idea of letting them go on our backs and boy, were we sorry after they kept wanting to stay on our backs.

On Monday, our first day at the building, all of us from Verve were in the kitchen sitting and Emil walks in, introduces himself to me and then walks out. HAHA Now it’s an on going thing that he’s got a crush on me.
There was an open cement area and Emil had a semi inflated basketball so we were dribbling, playing monkey in the middle and then a little soccer with it. I taught Emil how to dribble behind his back and between his legs. His named is pronounced like “Emy”. Or at least that’s what it sounds like when he says it. While we were playing, a Polish lady started speaking to me and sometimes the they speak it sounds like yelling  (which I’m used to in my Greek culture) so I polity interrupted saying that I speak English and she said, “It’s a problem” so here I’m thinking that I just got in trouble and she’s telling me that it’s a problem. So I leave the area and walk over to one of the ladies that can translate and told her to ask Emil what that lady said to me and they said that the lady was saying I should play basketball and we realized that she meant, me only speaking English was the problem not playing with the kids HAHA. See what happens when you don't speak the language!

This little boy was sitting on my lap and started taking selfies of us, haha.

He liked to break dance and throw up the peace sign.

Poland was representing Wisconsin

When we returned from playing, we walked into the building with dark brown walls!

Emy was serving me my soup, what a gentleman.

We wore them all out!

We went back to the building around 1:30pm and ate lunch with the kids. They were practically sleeping whilst attempting to eat. HAHA

This dog is at the building we renovate and the SWEETEST.
I love him.

We then went back to the mall for 3 hours. That wasn’t the most fun. I personally am not much of a purchaser so I bought my two souvenirs and then searched for internet the rest of the time. We went to go to P-109 in Lodz and Conrad told his story about coming to Christ to a group of young adults. It was pretty amazing.

The name of the mall was Manufaktura. Taryn just made sure to get "man" in the pictures - LOL

BESTIES

 I definitely couldn't buy anything with this amount of change.

We practically got coffee and wifi any time that we could.

Now this is what we should have instead of escalators.

This is how I shop when I'm tired. Orrr when Jamie is looking for shoes.

This was also in the shoe store. This is what happens when there aren't shoes I like.

 When we walked back to the van, everyone was doing hand stands.

So I got in on that.

Felt like a kid again.

Rafal explaining to us about what's going on tonight and how after Conrad speaks is when we'll head out.

Awesome testimony, Conrad

In short, he was agnostic and then his wife (Valerie) found Christ which made me more of an atheist but they always promise each other to try something that the other person would like and she wanted him to go to this church just once and he did and in short, he came to Christ over time. That void that he typically filled with money, was slowly being filled by God that he no longer had that void.

AMAZING to listen to people tell their testimonies.
(I hope I didn't mess up the quick recap of Conrad's story.)

We left right after that and got back to the camp grounds around 9:30pm.

Today was yet another successful day. A GREAT day with the kids. The kids are so sweet and light up when we play with them and give them attention. Even with the language barrier, I’ve discovered that “high fives” and “smiles” are universal as well. I’ve actually discovered that quite a few things are universal which is awesome. It’s great to see God in all parts of the world. We have a lot to our disposal in the states and often forget until we visit anywhere else.

These kids left footprints on our hearts and I hope that we did the same in the small amount of time that we spent together.

(SIDENOTE: My computer died in the midst of me uploading/typing this post and it lost most of what I typed SO I'm not RETYPING this post and I'm not pleased. That made me feel better to share. And I'm also no longer posting each day. The rest of the days from Poland will be posted when I'm back in Vegas)

(Today is April 12th and I'm back in the states so I'll be uploading the rest of the days 1 by 1!)