Carol Bontekoe

This blog has been keeping track of my adventures since 2004. The stories and the adventures have come from my college dorm room to Uganda, Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan, learning Dutch in the Netherlands to living in the wilds of Homer, Alaska. I went back to school in Amsterdam to study Theaterwetenschap (Theatre Science) at University of Amsterdam. And now my adventures as a Fruit Fly, a Sexy Unicorn, and creating a movement with Team Sparkle in Chicago.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Fall of the CCCP

I have to admit, I love Russian Babushkas. In my training village I instantly made friends with about 6 Babushkas. They became known as my Bab Squad. These women, there is no other way to put it, are tough. They survived the Soviet Union, then the fall of the Soviet Union, then being thrown into the 21st century with out decades of preparation for it. The other day I was walking behind two Babs on my way to church. I could see this giant piece of road that was broken and sticking up into the air. However, one of the Babs didn’t see it. She went flipping over it. Don’t think that it was a gentle fall either, some nice little trip. No, no, no. It was head over feet, face down into the ground kind of fall. I came running up to help her up. The whole right side of her face was gashed open and bleeding, so was the backside of her right hand. She joked with me that she is getting too old since she didn’t see that bit of road. Her friend let her know that she was bleeding. The bleeding Bab reached into her packet and got a napkin and gentle started dabbing the blood, all the while joking with me and her friend. It was a little while before she even noticed how bloody her hand was. Oh, well look at that… and she started dabbing at her hand. She and her friend did not make a big deal of this. Yeah, she fell she was bloody, that stinks, but that was about it.This is not a mirror of the Russian girls I deal with on regular basis. This new generation of Russian girls is nothing like the oldest generation left. They are whiny, moody, spoiled, and will burst into tears over the littlest things. I want them to look at their grandmas and see that these are tough women. These are women to respect and admire. They need to see that if the don’t shape up they won’t be treated with the same reverence their Babushkas are. I hope she put some iodine on those cuts.

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