and the whole world

so, i'm back. yael and i arrived in philly about midnight sunday night... she had to travel on to toronto on monday. i nestled firmly into home sweet narberth with a thought never to leave ever again, but of course that didn't last long. so this morning i woke up in the havertown house to a note from erin advising me to have coffee and a beautiful day. golly, how us girls need our sisters! so... i had the whiz-bang version of a belarus trip this year. i arrived in minsk july 23rd, spent one night at marina's place (my usual home in minsk) with aviva, and then the next morning we headed to the Middle of Nowhere, Vitebsk region, to the "Lake of the Woods" sanitorium (in belarus that's a retreat / vacation / center, not a place for crazy people, though i think we were crazy enough). we had two days of intensely disgustingly rainy training (cold! mold! damp bedding! soaked socks! solid hours of sneezing!), followed by ten days of incredible (and rare, in that region) sun for summer camp with 40 or 45 teenagers. one shower for the 85 people in the camp. squatty toilets that were usually nowhere near clean. bad food, by everyone's standards. so there were challenges. but it was still wonderful. i ran the "news club," which reported on the day's events every evening, and which contained two of the three worst behaved kids in the camp. and of course those were the two that i utterly adored the most, and tried to encourage the most, and groaned about the most. it was a victory when one of them decided to clean up her act and not get herself kicked out of camp after two days. it was a victory when the other started laughing and being his creative self instead of sulking or running away all the time. these kids come from awful backgrounds. my heart wept for them... and rejoiced in all the amazing stuff G-d has put inside of them, just starting to come out... most of my belarus friends were involved in the camp in some way, so at least i got to see them in passing while we all ran around. i had some good quality time with a few of them (i would have liked more) and with some of the "foreigners" -- a few who came to help and a few who came as campers. a wonderful woman whom i met in ukraine four years ago was there. it has been way too long since i've been to ukraine. i have wanted to go every summer and it never works out... next year in odessa... there were some friends who weren't at the camp. one was too busy having a baby (we saw little aaron from the street through the hospital room's window the day we flew out). others had other things going on. it was incredibly hard to be in belarus but not really have much time to walk around in minsk, have tea with friends, and so on. i did get to spend the saturday between camp and flying out with one especially dear friend who is going through a severely rough time. i can't believe how much we need our sisters. thank you to everyone who prayed for this time. i think most of the fruit is going to show up in the next few months, for the kids as well as for me. i learned a lot about myself. seems to be the summer for that, which is most certainly a very necessary thing. and it's very good to be back. america is so nice... everything is so nice... toilets... toilet paper... food... showers... my porch... english... take a breath and the whole world changes. delight yourself in the L-rd, and he will give you the desires of your heart. it's frighteningly true.