Seniors program helps shrink gap in cultures, ages

The word is opilki.

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.

On a sunny morning, Tamara sits at a tiny table at Neighborhood House, making pretend pizzas with two little girls who speak to each other in Spanish. "Give me Play-Doh," says Tamara, who learned this crucial noun early on in her Foster Grandparent career. Tamara has a shy smile but brings a certain seriousness to the Play-Doh table.

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In the room next door, Barys builds a tower out of cardboard blocks. "Children understand me, but I no good understand them," Barys says with a smile. "They talk like birds."

Barys, who is 68, was an engineer in Belarus. Tamara was a pharmacist. They met in college, in Moscow, then moved back to Tamara's hometown, Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In those days it was called the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Once a part of Lithuania, then Poland, then Russia, it was invaded by Communists after the Russian Revolution and remained a part of the Soviet Union until declaring its independence in 1991. Since then, things have been pretty bleak in Belarus.