Russian to make a difference: Cultural program connects island youth with foster families, orphans

Published 10:41 am Monday, February 1, 2016

Every time Janie Ekberg visited Russia, she would pick up art. Her first was a watercolor: Dosteovsky sitting on a cow in a middle of a pasture. Next came a whole bunch of winter scenes. And then there was that one time, when she ran out of time and, instead, bought property.

The fiber artist, who began traveling to the-then Soviet Union in 1990 as a chaperone for a BPA theater exchange program, had her heart broken by the orphans she saw everywhere after the fall of communism.

“Children were being left on the streets and in empty apartments and train stations,” she recalled. “There weren’t enough social agencies to take care of them.”

Ekberg carted letters between kids she met in the orphanage and kids back at Grace Episcopal Church, her church back home on Bainbridge. “They would write pretty little notes, Valentines,” she said.

And then, one year, back in Siberia for a celebration, she made a big investment; she bought land.

“I didn’t have any time to find art, so I had a little bit of money,” Ekberg explained. Her friend Natasha pointed out two pieces of property. Ekberg had no idea what she’d do with them, but the cost was cheap and Natasha was persuasive.

For Russians, a summer dacha offered a five-week respite, a break from factory life, a rudimentary shack to stay in while you harvested vegetables for the winter.

For Ekberg, the dacha — which came later, generously oversized thanks to a translation error — was a ministry, a summer camp, a respite for orphans.

Pen pals no longer needed pens; instead of letters, she brought kids with balls and bats and crafts to play with them.

In 11 years, Camp Siberia served 396 orphans and, with scholarships, helped 23 of them attend college.

“We had three doctors out of this program, a lot of teachers, some hairdressers, farm workers,” Ekberg said.

Natasha, that visionary friend, would meet up with each of them once a month to dole out money and check in.

Unfortunately, the program was forced to disband in 2011 for political reasons. The U.S. had recently put sanctions on Russia, Ekberg explained, and Putin was just “angrier than angry,” she said.

“The principals of the orphanages were told that if they worked with Americans, they would be accused of treason and go to jail. So we couldn’t go anymore. It was heartbreaking.”

A former volunteer came to the rescue, though, by introducing Ekberg and the Camp Siberia board to Kitezh, a collective of foster families more than 2,000 miles away.

There, volunteers between the ages of 22 and 40 were raising and teaching 39 children, five of them biological, 12 of them boarders from Moscow and the rest, adoptees from local orphanages.

Together, they built their own wooden homes, their school, their church and worked the farmland. When their children graduated, they sent them to study at prestigious institutions, to take jobs in factories and to start their own families.

Ekberg took her first group, 15 high school students and two other chaperones, to work at Kitezh in 2013.

“We didn’t know what it would be like, if it would even work,” she said.

But a few soccer games wiped away any hesitations she might have had. “Every single solitary night” from 6:30 to 10 p.m., “if it was muddy, if it wasn’t muddy, it was soccer, soccer, soccer,” Ekberg said.

Before long, strangers had become friends and the matches ended earlier and earlier — then, all the students wanted to do was talk to each another.

Of course, they couldn’t stay up all night with the manual labor that greeted them each morning, for this was the reason they had come; there was weeding to do, land to clear, pallets to construct.

In a week, dozens of campers would flock to Kitzeh for the games, the elaborate live action role-play the community hosts annually, and the Bainbridge visitors and their hosts had to put together the costumes, the weapons and the scenery that would animate their fictional reality.

Despite the long days of simple living and strenuous work, Ekberg doesn’t have any trouble filling spots for the program, now dubbed Bainbridge Island-Kitezh to reflect the new location and focus.

Rising sophomores and juniors, the only students eligible for consideration, are eager to figure out who they are, she said, and seem to relish the opportunity to travel to Russia (in addition to Kitezh, students visit Moscow and St. Petersburg).

“It’s the idea of going somewhere without their parents for a long extended time where they’re helping people,” she explained.

Loretta Stanton, Bainbridge Island-Kitezh’s president, added that students usually don’t realize how much they’re going to change through the experience.

“They think they are going to go and change someone else,” she said. “But, [by] day four or five, all of a sudden they start questioning what is important and what isn’t important.”

For Maya Nathan, a junior who went on the trip last summer, that lesson was about friendship and compassion.

“One of the biggest things I learned was how to be compassionate not on your own schedule,” she said. “It’s not just waking up and saying, ‘Today I feel really great; I’ll really give today.’ You have to do that the whole two weeks.”

As someone who relishes her alone time, she said adopting that attitude was tough, but the connections she forged there made it easier.

“I saw that friendships don’t really change all the way across the world.”

It’s like what Stanton said: “I believe small connections over and over and over are what will keep the world a happy place. All the kids that live in Kitezh, now they know there are other people in the world that are good people. Not everything bad that happened to them is going to happen to them. There are good people everywhere.”

On March 19, Bainbridge Island-Kitezh will host a celebration at Grace Episcopal Church. It’s an opportunity for the community to come and learn about the program and meet the students who will be working in Kitezh for two weeks this summer.

For additional information, visit www.bainbridgeislandkitezh.org.