Day 99 of 365 Days of Being Thankful

     Today I am thankful for Saturdays!  I love Saturdays.  No one has to rush around.  I usually take a long hot shower and then clean the bathroom! Olya asked me to proofread a paper for her.  She is a very smart girl but coming to the U.S. at age 10.5 means you have a lot of catching up to do.  Spell check and Grammar check are great tools easily available on the computer but she doesn't seem to make much use of them. Her spelling would be easy to fix but I usually need to help her format her papers.  In the Ukrainian alphabet, most letters have only one sound.

In our alphabet, many letters have multiple sounds depending on where they are placed in a word or syllable,  or by the letters that surround them. The letter e can be short(bed), long(evil), silent(make), schwa(frozen...sounds like frozin),  or controlled by the letter r(ruler). The letter c can be soft or hard depending what letters follow the c,(ceiling, color) or in a  consonant digraph like ch, take on a whole new sound.(chop, ache, chandelier).  Vowel digraphs like ea can have multiple sounds(bread, steak, meat).  A letter like y can be a consonant, or a vowel with multiple sounds(yell, baby, reply, gym).

          I know it would be very difficult for me to learn a new language and also have to learn to read and write and spell in that language. Writing a paper would be close to impossible for me! Olya does a decent job but I usually have to correct her run-on sentences. I learned a lot about the Soviet-Afghan nine year long bloody war while reading her paper.  It is often referred to as the Soviet's "Vietnam War." If only we appreciated History when we were in college! Dan watches the History Channel everyday so he is much more versed in World History than I am.  He loves watching shows about Hitler, I think because it is unbelievable that the world allowed Hitler to kill so many innocent people. He killed the Jews, the handicapped, and anyone else he didn't care for. Sick and sad.

          People seem to turn a blind eye unless something is happening directly to them or their loved ones. Hitler was pure evil and that evil was permitted to flourish. I still feel ill when I see photos of the gas chambers or the all of the items left behind when so many were massacred. I remember being in a museum in NY, maybe it was the Holocaust Museum, and seeing all the children's shoes in a huge pile behind the glass. I still have a mental photograph of that picture in my mind. I also remember seeing some of the Jewish stars that people had to wear to identify themselves.  It was heartbreaking.

  Now the same thing seems to be happening with Putin, another sick, evil bully. He took over Crimea, a part of Ukraine, because he wanted a seaport.  He just took it even though he had no right to do that.  Olivia's orphanage was in Simferopol, Ukraine in the Crimean Peninsula  so she would be Russian, not Ukrainian, if she still lived in Crimea. Olivia found a website that girls from her old orphanage put up. They posted a picture of her orphanage. I hope they are careful about what they post because there are a lot of sickos out there in the internet world.