Blog2, Calculate This

Our Director in Zaporozhye, Olga Rubel, had meetings scheduled for the entire day. I met with our financial advisor who provides guidance on how ensure that we are doing as much as we can with the legal framework work of government. The laws for charitable organizations in Ukraine are always evolving and we are committed to working within that framework. Later in the morning I visited the Prometei Centre and met with preschool children who have special needs. Together with other Mennonite organizations such as the Family Centre and the Florence Centre we are supporting programs for these children. Coming out of a major conference, which we sponsored in December 2014 in Zaporozhye, we are now involved in a joint program with a school to graduate some of these children into grade one this September. I met with the school principal and reviewed some classroom changes we are funding to accomodate these children.

I met with KRAM, a local organization that operates a warehouse of donated materials to help refugees. One of the most telling descriptions of the current conflict is a school math book that was brought to the school warehouse with a bullet hole through the book. There is some irony here that it is a math book that has the bullet hole. Math is the tool which we all use everyday in making decisions, in solving problems, in showing what went wrong, or why something works. While I was not particularly proficient at math, I recognize the beauty and precision of the tool. War is quite the opposite. It is rough justice at best, and indiscrimate and painful. Math can give us universal truths, truth is a casualty of war.

Maybe this book has been transformed to teach us more than math. It can teach us how violence can destroy numbers, take away the answers to questions, destroy equations and equality, and make holes that almost impossible to repair.

 

Ben Stobbe

benstobbe16@gmail.com