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Nursing Home Diary – Flu Season Day 5
So the good news is, the residents’ conditions all seem to have stabilized or improved since yesterday. Gennadiy is distributing the antibiotics the doctor prescribed 3 times per day – maybe that’s an important factor.So the biggest challenge today was simply that we were short-staffed again today because Ludmila, the woman whose job is to…
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Nursing Home Diary – Flu Season Day 4
Today has been much better than I expected – and certainly better than yesterday. The residents’ conditions seem to have stabilized, and some even seem to be improving. For example, Evon, the man who lost his wife yesterday, is getting out of bed and walking by himself into the residential activity hall for meals again.…
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Nursing Home Diary – Flu Season Day 3
Well, good news is Grandma Nina did enjoy eating the thickened apple juice this morning. In addition to thickening her fluids to a gelatinous consistency, we also moved her to an inclining bed, which makes it easier for her to eat. She was in a flat bed before, so she had to sit straight up…
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Nursing Home Diary – Flu Season Day 2
It was pretty tough at the nursing home again today. Several of the residents are already running fevers. Three residents also had slip-and-fall accidents today. Luckily, nobody was seriously injured. But falls haven’t been a common occurrence since I’ve been here, so to have three in one day is quite alarming. I guess maybe it’s…
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Nursing Home Diary – Flu Season Coming?
I was pretty busy helping out at the nursing home today. We are short-staffed because the director Gennadiy is away for the weekend and two of the regular staff are sick. So today nurse Evhenia and I did all of the “downstairs” work together. “Downstairs work” means everything except food preparation. Downstairs work includes sanitation…
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What a Wonderful World this Would Be
If purely naive good intentions could resolve human conflicts . . . what a wonderful world this would be! Today I helped the August Mission team unload a NuDay container filled chock-a-block with humanitarian aid materiel. Everything was donated by American families, and shipped across the ocean to Poland, shipping also paid for with donated…
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Flag Friendship
I’m spending this weekend in Khmelnytskyi, waiting to go to the Ukraine consulate in Lublin Poland early next week to get a volunteer service visa that will allow to continue working in Ukraine. Today, the August Mission team was planning to make a delivery to the Catholic church in Starocostantyanyiv. I didn’t have any important…
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Should We Never Meet Again
This week, from January 2 through January 9, I am volunteering again in the children’s safe activity space at the reception center for Ukrainian refugees in Przemysl, Poland. This week has been remarkably quiet; it seems very few Ukrainian refugees are on the move right now. So each day, we are only hosting a handful…
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International Volunteers’ Day
December 5 of each year has been formally designated as “International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development” by resolution of the United Nations General Assembly. It is a special day to celebrate the spirit of volunteerism and the important contributions volunteers are making around the world. This year in observation of International Volunteer Day,…
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Chasiv Yar Diary, Dec. 5, 2022
A couple of days ago August Mission‘s Ukraine team went to the Polish port city of Gdansk to take delivery of a shipping container of humanitarian aid goods donated by NuDay. Since the August Mission team were going to be gone for several days, I had nothing much to do in Khmelnytskyi, so I traveled…