Day 31, 32

We wanted to buy disposable cameras for the girls. We tried to describe to Tanya what we wanted. Throw away the camera?? Nyet!! Tanya called Anya. She had never heard of such a thing. We called Olga, so we could get the point across. It turns out there are disposable cameras in Kiev but no disposable cameras in Slavyansk. But Tanya said she knew where we can get cameras for 100 Grivney, or about $12. Great, let’s go get cameras. The first place we shopped had shiny new digital cameras, but nothing less than about $100. Next place, same story. The next store had digital cameras for as little as $60. But we could not buy three cameras for that price. As we were walking toward another mall, I tried to tell Tanya that it’s ok for the camera to be cheap, because film is cheap. I could buy 3 or 5 or 10 rolls of film, for each of them. Tanya heard film, she heard cheap, she heard many, and she became very happy and very excited. At this point, I became suspicious. Why did she become so happy? We must have a case of “faux ami”, as the French say: a false friend. A word that sounds like it should mean one thing, but it means something else. A Russian example is the word “machina”, which means “car”. The only word I had been using repeatedly was “film”. And it was pretty clear that film meant movie. We make it clear that we were not going to buy a lot of movies. Eileen looked up the word for “camera film”, which is “plyonka”. The big smile fell from Tanya’s face. Now we were communicating again. We walked to another mall, which feels more like a flea market but stinkier. And there were cameras for $10. We picked out 3, and then I discovered I had left my Grivney back at the hotel. We decided to do the cameras later. Passed our bank and saw the guard outside on the landing. “California!” he said. No, “Colorado!” I said.

We dashed to the internot. We talked with the director about a multimedia projector we could get for his school. I wanted to see the room where they would use the projector. It was the library, which was about the size of a classroom. The head of teaching showed me this room. Then she took me across the hall to another room, the Ukrainian room. There was a wall mural of a Ukrainian village. There was Ukrainian furniture, other neat stuff. I should have taken pictures, dumb, dumb, dumb. I’ve already forgotten what was in the room.

Changing money at our favorite bank. The guard there now knew we were from Colorado. We are getting to be friends. Changing money at the bank still took a while. We were the only ones in line when we started. The cashier had to close her window, walk out and lock her cage, and go into the bank proper. A line started forming. Why can’t this be easy? She finally came back with the currency. As we left, the guard told us, “good luck.”

What happens when you get a camera for the first time? You take pictures of everything. And what happens the first time you get a camera that actually uses film? You need to examine it. Within a few hours, Sasha had opened the back of her camera, to look at the film. Nyet Otkrit! Don’t open! OK, OK! Sasha came back the next day, and said the film was broken. What did that mean? After miscommunication, we figured out she had used up the film, and the camera had automatically rewound the film. She heard this noise, wondered what had happened, opened the camera, and the film was gone. Only a can was left. She took out the can, broke it open, then threw it away. That was a $2 mistake. We’ll get more film.

Nastiya was imitating her sister. She too had to open the camera and expose the film. OK, I won’t do that again. The next day, Sasha told us that Nastiya’s camera was not working. This camera has a manual film rewind. Uh oh, I can see what happened here. So I rewound the film. It went on and on and on. Why wouldn’t it finish? Sasha showed me that it still takes pictures. OK, now we were double exposing the film. I locked myself in the bathroom, after explaining to the girls, Don’t turn the lights on (OK, OK). It takes a while, but I was finally able to get the film out of the camera. How many pictures were taken? How many were exposed? How many were double exposed? Another $2 adventure.

Babushka had her moment. She had been informed about the court date and other things. (Darn, we could have been on TV). She came to the school in the morning and took the girls aside. Sasha said Babushka railed on them until they were in tears. She asked them what they would do in America and that we would harvest their organs. I’m glad I wasn’t there. I would have boxed her ears, senior citizen or not. I’m thinking maybe she is finished with the kids now but I will ask the staff to keep her away from the children from now on. She has no more rights and is only hurting them.