Yesterday, Friday, was my eigth day volunteering at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland. I feel it was the first really tough day. I suppose the feeling is mostly psychological, because only about a dozen kids registered in, and a most of them were actually very nice. But there was one pair of brothers, about 5-6 years old I guess, who seemed to wreak havoc on the day. They were fascinated by picture puzzles and board games and anything else in a cardboard box. Of course, they are too young to understand how to work the puzzle or play the game, but they love to see all of those little pieces, and their modus operandi was to strew the contents of each box across the floor. So we volunteers spent quite a bit of the day just picking up. These boys also didn’t follow rules well. We let the kids ride bicycles in one half of the day-care area; there is plenty of space for the kids to ride in circles. But these boys wanted to ride out through the large bay doors into the wide arcade hallway outside. We told them several times that the bicycles needed to stay inside the safe space play arean, not out in the hallway, but they would wait until our backs were turned then ride out into the hallway anyway. We would have to chase them down and bring them back, over and over again. At one point it even turned into a race to see if the volunteer could run faster than the child could pedal — rather embarrassing for the adult volunteer. I finally started confiscating bikes from kids who ventured out into the hallway, basically depriving the kid of riding privileges for a little while. That seemed to work, but I felt a bit at risk of being called out by a parent for physically abusing their kid — an especially scary prospect where there is an absolute language barrier, so no way to communicate verbally with the kid or explain the circumstances to the parents. All I can say is, I hope that family moves on tonight and we don’t have to deal with those little brothers tomorrow. It’s unfortunate, because they are really smart and cute little kids, they just h aven’t been taught to follow rules.
Today, Saturday, was my ninth day in the children’s safe space. We hosted almost the same group of kids today that we saw yesterday, including the two little brothers. However, today was a much different day. The brothers did not pay any attention to the picture puzzles today, and I only had to confiscate a bicycle one time.
It was really nice to realize that these little terrors could actually be fun kids to play with. I think it helped that their mother dropped by several times during the day, so she was kind of watching over things a bit more than she did yesterday. I suppose yesterday they had just arrived so she was busy making arrangements for their onward travels, but today she had a bit more free time. Also, maybe the boys got a good night of sleep so they weren’t so edgy today. And yesterday we only had three volunteers working, , whereas today we had four, and we were all at the “tops of our games.” Especially our newest volunteer — she only arrived in Przemyśl on Thursday evening and was in training yesterday; today she led a face-painting studio for the the kids.
So today, the energy was good. In addition to getting faces painted, kids rode bicycles, played catch-ball, watched cartoons on television, did arts and crafts, rough-housed and play-acted. When there was an argument about whose turn it was to ride one of the bicycles, they came proactively came to one of the adult volunteers for help to settle the dispute. For our part, I think we volunteers figured out that the best way to resolve these disputes was to ask the bicycle-less child to wait patiently for a little while longer (when things are not too hectic, sometimes we can use the language translation apps on our phones to “send messages” to the kids), and in the meantime offer up some interesting alternative activity as a diversion (for instance playing catch-ball with them) while waiting. Usually it wouldn’t be more than 5 minutes or so before the child riding the bicycle would get tired of it and move on to some other activity.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if disputes between adults could be settled so successfully? Well, as a matter of fact, if adults received the same degree of attention and care as these children are receiving, I believe many more adult disputes would also be forgiven and forgotten much more quickly and easily.