Polina

YWAM had a DTS running in Latvia but it was only held on the weekends, four hours away in the countryside on the Baltic Sea. It was their last weekend and they asked us to go. Us boys didn’t really want to but we gave in. Transportation was on a private bus and right from the start, there were people standing in the aisle. Then we then picked up people all along the way until there was a crush.

The Sea was close by the property so one of the other guys and I decided to go find it. It was about 9 p.m. when we left to explore but as Latvia is very north, it stays light very late in the summer. We found the water and the scenery was nice but the water was cold and polluted. On the way back it was drizzling and we thought we could find a short cut through the forest because we were getting soaked. Instead we got lost and by this time, it was getting darker.

We were following a grass road, thinking we were going in the right direction when all of a sudden we heard the sea again. We discovered we had been walking parallel to it the whole time. We jumped back over to the beach and started running back down to the path and stuck with it this time, finally getting back about 10:45 p.m., soaking through and through. The sun was out the next day and most of the group went back down to the beach again, which was a much more pleasant experience.

Since we had arrived in Poland at the beginning of our trip, I had noticed that the Eastern European kids were quite cute. On the bus ride out to the DTS location, I noticed one sweet-looking, seven-year-old blond girl in particular who seemed rather shy – a winning combination for me. As the weekend went on, I noticed that she wasn’t hanging out with the other kids, just with her mom.

I finally talked to her mom who spoke some English. I found out that she was a single mom and they were from Russia. The girl’s name was Polina and since she didn’t speak Latvian, she couldn’t communicate with the other kids. I had been taking pictures of Polina so her mom asked if I could send her some.

Through her mom, I asked Polina if there was anything I could send her from the U.S. She asked about a Barbie doll but her mom told me that she already had a plan to get her one for her birthday. Her mom asked about sending her a pencil case. I asked about a watch and her mom said that that was one of her dreams. They had so little. Once I got back home, I did send them pictures and a watch. One of the guys on our team said I liked Polina so much because she looked exactly like Laura.

It was so European-looking out at the DTS location. Of course, it is part of Europe but I had to keep reminding myself that we were in Latvia rather Switzerland or Austria. I also got to play a lot of ping-pong out there. Altogether, I ended up really enjoying the week-end.

I had bought and brought a lot of film for the trip and I was under constant pressure to use it, to constantly keep taking pictures. I felt like I was always on and could never just relax. But the day after we got back to Riga I did a scandalous thing. I went out and left my cameras behind.

While everyone else on the team had been buying souvenirs along the way, I hadn’t bought any yet. I didn’t want to have to start carrying extra stuff before I had to. People had given me money to go on the trip and I wanted to get something for each one. I thought it was now time to start before it was too late.

After that day, I didn’t think Riga was boring anymore. I found so many things and discovered that the town was very quaint and cheap. When we packed up to move on I had a hard time closing my suitcase with all the stuff I had bought .

A few of us went to what they called a sanatorium for kids affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant in Ukraine that had exploded just 6 years before which exposed hundreds of thousands of people to serious amounts of radioactive fallout. The sanatorium was actually a summer camp for Latvian kids but kids from Chernobyl had permission to go there where they got special treatments. 

One of our team members who was a journalist interviewed them one by one. They looked fine and healthy on the outside but some had problems with stomach pains and heart problems from the radiation. One teenage girl began crying because her father was very ill and they didn’t have the treatments that they needed available to them. They were beautiful kids but very sad.

It was time to move on to Vilnius, Lithuania. Polina and her mom, Tanya came to see us off. I had some postcards from Hawaii that I had been using to write home but I had a few left which I gave to them. Polina was still so very shy but she finally let out a little wave as we pulled away.

Polina


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