Saturday

It’s been an adjustment not being able to connect to the internet. We are so used to being connected all the time and that is not the case here. We are fortunate that when we are in our apartment we can sometimes connect on John and Julie’s wifi. It is a bit amusing because we have to be in the kitchen with the computer sitting on the window sill and then we have a half of a bar of connection. It is also different to not be able to access websites that you normally do. We cannot see our own blog. Blogs are censored here. We can write them but not read them. Also we struggle to get emails between the limited time to connect and the challenge of doing so we have not seen many (if you have sent us an email and have not heard from us that is why)

Saturday we started off the morning with another swimming party, this time at the river. It was a beautiful setting. Just on the other side of the river was Kazakhstan and the mountain range.





We returned home and had 30 minutes to eat lunch and pack for the day/night. We picked up a group of orphans and took them to Bishkek – about an hour and a half away. The original plan was to take them to an amusement park but the weather was threatening. So off to a movie we went instead, Rio in 3D (in Russian). Each kid received a small pop. Robert and I decided that you can’t do a movie without popcorn and bought everyone a bucket of popcorn -48 of them. The cashier thought we were nuts!! The popcorn they serve is actually a caramel corn not your typical movie theater popcorn.

After the movie we headed to dinner. For some of the kids it was their first time in a restaurant. They were allowed to order whatever they wanted to eat. The food was good. We then sent most of the kids from the orphanage back to Tokmok and we headed for Karabolta. There is an orphanage in Karabolta that 3 of the ones form Tokmok are being transferred to. They along with 4 older boys that used to live with many form Karabolta headed there. So we dropped 14 off at Karabolta orphanage and the rest of us (14) headed to a hotel for the night. Car rides are interesting… we look like we belong in the circus. We pack a lot of people into one van.



Mason has been a hit with his cell phone camera. He has an app that distorts the pictures. The kids love it and just laugh and laugh. The teenage girls keep a close eye on Bransen. It was such a big deal to them to get their picture taken with them. He was so sweet after we asked him to pay some attention to them; he picked a dandelion and gave it to the one that seemed the most interested.