"Genevieve": not so easy for Armenians or Indian Sisters or children to pronounce

Most importantly: Thank you for your prayers and encouraging emails and comments. Although I cannot always respond, please know it means so much to hear from you- and it really helps.

My blog yesterday was terribly scattered and rushed- and fortunately, today is my day off, and an American family picked me up and took me to their home, so I am able to use the internet again!

I am going to break this up into a couple of headings, because if you're anything like me, you might have trouble making it through a long, drawn-out blog.

DONATIONS
In order to purify the water that we drink, we take some water from the faucet, boil it, and then keep it in a (clean) trash bin in the kitchen. We scoop water from the bin whenever we want to drink it. In Yerevan, the dirty water pipe runs next to the clean water pipe, and sometimes the water from one pipe contaminates the other. We are still trying to convince the Sisters of the necessity of a purifier. (We being the American family who helps out here). If you would like to donate money to get the purifier (we're thinking of getting 2- one for the kitchen sink and one for a sink upstairs) please email me as soom as you can. Each purifier runs somewhere around $200. The Sisters might not go for it, but we need to somehow get the message across that boiling the water and letting it sit stagnant for a couple days is not really, err, effective.

"IT'S COMMUNIST"
So Armenia was part of the USSR, and gained its independence in the early 90s (I think that's right). Everyone here speaks Armenian and Russian- and there are remnants of communism throughout Yerevan. We went to a park (which seemed more like a fair) with some of the children last week. One of the rides was decorated with what I am pretty sure was a soviet flag. And, the side of the train that took the children for rides was stamped with a "USSR" (in Armenian). Sr. Jose Ann (an Older INdian Sister) has told me on several occassions that different features of the house are communist. In the bathrooms, the cabinet above the sink folds into the wall so that you cannot see it. When I tried to figure out how to turn off the light in this weird cabinet Sr. Jose Ann goes, "COMMUNIST. It's COMMUNIST". She said the same thing abt a switch in a cabinet outdoor that seemed to have no purpose.

ARMENIAN LITURGY
Every chapel that the Sisters have throughout the world has big bold letters, "I THIRST" next to the crucifix. The Sisters have mass in this little chapel every day. An Armenian priest comes and does liturgy in the Catholic Armenian rite a couple of days a week. The mass is in Ancient Armenian- and the words and the order of liturgy are very different from our standard Latin rite. The priest has his back turned towards us, and wears a very ornate costume. Yesterday after mass, Sr. Rosana Maria (Polish) told me that when she first saw the priest's costume (I realize that is not the right word) she thought he was going to fly away, and proceeded to ask him if his dress was for flying. The priest told her that the heavy collar and big cape is to represent the lost sheep that Jesus carries on his back.

Armenia is a Christian country, but very few Armenians are Catholic. THere is one priest who comes during the week who has special permission to say mass in the Armenian and Latin rite. Crossing over and beign able to preside for both types of liturgy is very unusual and there was some friction in this particular priest's attempt to do so. Sr. Rosana Maria reflected the interior divisiveness within the Church and the isolation of the few priests in this country from each other because they celebrate the different rites.

(Thank you so much to Brett Perkins, who helped me familiarize myself with the Eastern Liturgy before I got here- it was really nice to have some sense of the differences in the mass!)

WATER FRISBEE
That's right. So there is a "pool" in the back of this house. It looks like a giant bathtub and is about 10ft by 7ft and maybe 7ft deep. Until two days ago, it was waterless, and now it is filled abt a foot. Imagining a giant bathtub is really the best way to understand this thing- it has a faucet (though it would take days to fill) and a plug/drain. The Sisters thought the faucet was broken, so Sr. Faustina Mercy (African) and I worked on connecting a hose to a little sink upstairs, and trying to fill the pool that way. The problem is that the hose does not have any kind of metal connector piece etc., so we cut off the top of a water bottle and used some cloth and forced it to connect to the sink. I would say abt 70% of the already small trickle of water made it into the hose and down to the pool. I can't explain how hilarious or difficult or ridiculous it was to try to attach this hose- and then watch it drip into the pool. By yesterday it filled upto about a foot and my project for the afternoon was to take kids "swimming". I spent time with some of the Down Syndrome kids, and then the older group of disabled kids: IT WAS FANTASTIC. I had a blast (and so did they). We figured out how to turn on the faucet in the pool abt halfway through our swimming (figures) so the water continues to fill up. I think it would be really awesome and very possible to teach some of the kids who cannot use their legs how to swim!

I would like to extend a special thank you to Adam Frisch for the frisbee- because though the kids are not necessarily coordinated enough to throw it, they loved filling it with water and playing with it. Little Ignace kept saying "your friend gave this to you?...this is a picture of your friend?" It was great.

Ok, that is enough for now. I apologize for the rambling and emotional blog I put up yesterday. It was honest. Yesterday was a better day and today is a nice break. I am looking forward to going to learning Armenian, talking more with the Sisters, reading stories to the older kids, and adventuring onto Spitak in a couple of days.

Thanks again for your prayers and your emails and words etc. You guys are awesome and are such a rock for me!