Seniors program helps shrink gap in cultures, ages
Tamara Artsiushkevich moves her hand back in forth over the table, acting it out, but there are blank stares all around. Opilki, repeats the interpreter, a returned Mormon missionary who speaks excellent Russian but has never come across this word before. He bites his lip, gets out his dictionary, flips through the pages. When he finds what he's after, he looks surprised.
"Sawdust," he says.
Tamara nods her head. She is explaining her childhood during the Nazi occupation of what is now Belarus, in the former Soviet Union. When things were really tough, she says, her mother would try to make the rations of flour more substantial, and to this day Tamara can still feel the way the sawdust stuck in her throat.
There are many ways to have a difficult childhood, of course. And also many ways to still be a giggly, playful child in spite of it. Today, six decades removed from her own deprivations, Tamara and her husband Barys are part of Salt Lake County Aging Services' Foster Grandparent program, where they provide a quiet, kindly presence for children whose own grandparents may be thousands of miles away, in Peru or Bosnia or China.
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