Dances With Russians

Funny, a year ago I was preparing to fly into Charleston, South Carolina for Christmas with our adult kids. Every year we pick some spot all of us haven't been, and fly in to spend Christmas in an AirBnb. San Marcos, Texas. Cocoa Beach, Florida. Charleston, South Carolina. and Savannah, Georgia just to name a few. Not this year. Spotting this church from the HBO show "The Righteous Gemstones" in North Charleston near where we were staying made my vacation. I love that show! We spent the week singing snatches of "No More Misbehaving" randomly i.e. 'Running round the house with a pickle in my mouth..' and 'Mama said not to but I did it anyway..Misbehavin'

Someone on Facebook reminded me of a crazy tale involving our very short stint with a Russian foreign exchange student. A tale from our days at a fundamentalist church. I was drinking the koolaid, wearing the jumper/frumper, trying to keep working, yet appease the very conservative crowd I was running with. Part of the million dish church social brigade, and prayer-gossip ministry, and we're so much better than you worship team. Trying to raise our teen, our elementary schooler and our toddler to be good Christian soldiers. In those days I had zero sense of humor, and was convinced even my righteous farts smelled of roses and lilacs. Ah, the powerful certainty of religious thought!

Jim had the idea through a friend of his that we should take a Russian kid from a local Russia/America student exchange. He wanted someone to speak Russian to, and me, good little submitting wife thinking this was a splendid ministry me thought that was a fine idea. Little did we know.

First, I had no idea that the organization sponsoring this had been around only a few short years and this was their first year bringing over teens. We got the profile package, and we found out we were getting a 15 year old boy with an unusual name that I'm going to call Ivan here. We prayed for Ivan, we rearranged our small house to put Ivan in with our son, even if our son was elementary aged. It was the only room with twin beds. We speculated on how much fun we would have with Ivan.

And Ivan arrived at Dulles International Airport with the other ten or so kids from the program. He seemed fine, just another normal teenage boy, but things got off to a very bad start quickly when we went out to my car. I drove a few years old Ford Taurus station wagon at the time, very similar to that driven in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation". Ivan looked at my car, looked at me and sneered (it seemed like it to me at the time) "A Ford? In Moscow my father drives a Mercedes.."

That sat about as well with me as eating a plate of greasy nuts and bolts would in your stomach. I grimaced inwardly. We drove off.

That turned out to be the high point. Upon arriving at the house we found that one of Ivan's suitcases was filled with liquor. Yes, this 15 year old had brought copious booze into the house of a pearl clutching fundy me who thought at that time that all alcohol was demonic! I had a conniption fit over that, fearful we'd be arrested for letting a minor drink, so we confiscated it all. Little did we know he was sneaking in to siphon it off and refill the bottles with water.

I started being called into the local high school that my eldest and Ivan both attended every few days for all sorts of infractions. From drinking on the school grounds, to trying to fondle school girls, to cheating off others papers and sometimes just walking out of class, to a laundry list of all sorts of bad things. I spent more time with the school administrators discussing Ivan's wrong doings it started to get ridiculous. At one point the director of the foreign exchange program showed up at the school meetings with his assistant.  The assistant claimed that everything he was doing was 'cultural' and 'accepted' in Russia. I found myself hosting a mini drunken Borat it seems.

There were moments that looking back on it were downright comical. He showed up with a huge boombox and a pile of cassette tapes. I knew his musical tastes would be different than mine, no Steven Curtis Chapman, no Selah, no hymns or worship music. But it was way different. His favorite was a Russian band who named their album "Sex Machina" and the lyrics ran something like "OOooo Oooo Sex Machina.. Sex Sex Machina.. Ooooh!". To add a layer of comedy he liked to breakdance to this song! I fought mightily not to laugh as he breakdanced in my living room to songs about sex.

Six weeks in when my son brought to me one of his mangled toys that smelled of the devil's lettuce that I'd had enough. He had somehow obtained pot and was smoking it in the house using my kid's toy as a makeshift bong. I called the program director and demanded he come get the kid immediately. I was not running a den of iniquity for drunken pot heads no matter what their nationality. Jesus would SO NOT APPROVE!

They hauled him off, and he landed on the doorstep of an extremely fundamentalist Christian family that followed the teachings of the Pearls, and used corporal punishment on him, stripped him of all intoxicants (more successfully than we did apparently) and homeschooled him. Later I heard he begged his parents to take him back to Russia as soon as possible. Poor kid. We were awful to him because we had the fundamentalist stick up our asses, but we were nothing like that! 

We weren't prepared for him and his partying self. The organization ended up folding a few years later. We heard that of the dozen or so kids that arrived only one made it all the way to the end of the school year. I wasn't surprised as there was such a complete disconnect between the kids picked and the families that hosted them. You have to have some inkling of what you're taking on. I think they just never screened any of the kids well because the group ended up having a serious bulimic, and kids with a laundry list of issues including substance abuse.

I often wonder if we had Ivan after we left fundytown how well we would have gotten along. I know that in those days when I had formed an opinion on someone it was difficult to change it, and I was overstretched with work and the kids, not exactly possessing superior patience.