Dana L. Yeoman, DDS
Dentures and Implants
The Power of a Smile to Transcend Borders Part 27
Site last published: 10/04/10
The Power of a Smile to Transcend Borders Part 27
At first the gym at the school for visually impaired children looked like a storage room for junk. As the coach started explaining how things worked, our eyes were opened up to his creative engineering. For instance, he had found an axle with a pair of small tires at each end to use for a bench press. Another clever invention was a series of pulleys in the ceiling and in the floors connected with ropes and weighted with buckets of sand to use for pull downs and curls. One crazy device allowed the children to practice throwing a football that careened down long wires strewn from one end of the room to the other. We all got a try and discovered it was really hard to “throw”. It took a lot of strength to get the ball to travel even a little way. Enough of this kind of exercise would make little arms strong, and the beauty of it was that the football would never crash through a window or knock someone in the head. This fellow had ingenuity!
Various other concoctions of milk jugs, wires, boards, appliance parts and pieces of bicycles were demonstrated to us by a very proud coach. As strange as it looked to us Americans who took for granted our memberships to 24 Hour Fitness, I was amazed how well he could teach his children balance, strength, skills, and endurance with these whimsical machines. He was a determined coach to see his kids succeed. We all thought he was very cool.
We spent the greater part of the afternoon enjoying the performance the children had put together for us out of several traditional songs. Some wore their colorful Cossack costumes. They were accompanied by their teachers playing traditional instruments. I learned that much of their folklore involves farming wheat, and there are distinctly different songs for tilling soil, sowing seed, and harvesting.
One of my favorite songs was a duet sung by a boy and a girl about ten years old. The lyrics explained that the girl was bullying the boy to take her out dancing, but he simply didn’t want to. During the performance, the boy had no need to struggle in acting his part since the look of disgust was naturally evident in his face. Apparently I unearthed another cross-cultural certainty: ten year old boys all think that girls have cooties and smell funny too!
These children warmed our hearts with their antics and their charm. We happily distributed fleece blankets to each kid to brighten their dorm rooms and keep them comfy at night. They received toys and craft supplies to help encourage their imagination and to appeal to all the senses, including their limited sight.
In return, we made an interesting bargain. Vicki Nelson, our leader, had collected as many fabric remnants as she could find in stores, added her personal supplies, and donations from quilting friends. Hauling them to Ukraine, she presented the boxes of fabric to the teachers, making them a deal. The children could use them to learn how to work a sewing machine, developing their skills both tactilely and visually, and piece together large squares to be collected on our return. Seeing twenty little heads bowed over their fabric with faces pressed close to see the bouncing needle again humbled me to how I take my gift of sight for granted.
I, of course, was eager to learn what Vicki was going to do with these little square masterpieces.