Today we volunteers enjoyed a fairly peaceful time at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland. We had only about 16 kids register into the safe space over the course of the day. So with three volunteers staffed, the proportion works out to little more than five kids per staff member. So even though some of the boys were quite rambunctious and even a little bit quarrelsome among themselves some of the time, it wasn’t too hard to keep watch over them and break up any fights before they escalated into anything serious. If I could speak their language, I would probably be more inclined to let them tussle, reassured in the hope that I could use the spoken word to get them to stop fighting. I might even have let them fight unitl they break something, then followed up with a, “now, don’t you know better?” lesson. But since they can’t understand much of what I say, that would surely be like “poetry to a ox.” So I tried to break up arguments earlier rather than later.
One nice thing is, because there weren’t very many kids left by later in the afternoon, I was able to sit down with a couple of the rowdier young boys and actually work some picture puzzles with them. With direct personal “coaching” they were able to get so engrossed that they actually finished the puzzles. One boy even did two puzzles before he got worn out.