Save a Child's Heart

It's amazing how much kids can affect you.
Yesterday, I started volunteering at SACH (Save a Child's Heart) - a humanitarian organization based in Azur, whose mission is to bring children with heart problems from all over the world to Israel to get the surgeries and treatments that they need (but aren't available in their home countries).  Most of the kids there don't speak English or Hebrew, but that doesn't seem to matter at all; the language of fun and playtime is pretty much universal.  Anyway, you'd be surprised how well some of them seem to have picked up the languages.  Most of the children at the Children's House are there with their mothers, and while others came with nurses.  Our job as volunteers is to play with the kids in the House and, on days when we're assigned to the hospital, to visit the kids that are there pre- and post-surgery to brighten up their days.  The moms also need friendly faces, we've been told: some of them have been here for months already, and it's hard for them to be away from their countries, families, languages, and cultures for so long.
The diversity of cultures in the House is pretty cool.  Most of the children there right now are from Africa, and quite a few of their mothers are dressed in what I assume is traditional African garb: colorful, drape-like clothing that forms a hood around the head and falls down to about their ankles.  In the hospital, we'll apparently see more Muslim families; they generally don't stay in the House, since their homes are not far away in Gaza, etc.  I haven't had a hospital shift yet, but I'm sure it will be an interesting experience.
One of the full-time volunteers brought his guitar to the children's house, so there was a constant stream of sometimes-identifiable, always pleasant music yesterday afternoon - even when the boys, who did not actually know any chords, were jamming away.  (They sort of just plucked random strings and made serious, in-the-music-zone faces - which would have created something pretty jarring had they been hitting the notes with all their might, but the way they were doing it softly actually made for a nice background hum.)
It appears that the organization is very well known in Canada - 4 of the 6 or so volunteers I met yesterday were Canadian (I could pick them out right away - voice inflections, vowel pronunciations...when it comes to sniffing out Canadian accents, I am like one of those bomb-detecting German shepherds, or those labs they keep in 30th St. Station to find drugs.  105% accurate - that means that even if you're not Canadian, chances are you actually are.  Don't mess, I know my stuff.)
Unfortunately, I can't go back to SACH until I get a bit of paperwork sorted out; which, thanks to Israel's lovely bureaucracy, will likely take a bit of time (plus, next week I can't go in anyway - major internship crackdown week!  Get ready for more entries in the Raichel blog, summerbackstage.wordpress.com).  After only one day at SACH, I feel that loss of time with the kids as a tangible hole in my day (existence too strong?) - they're so sweet, so strong (despite their physical fragility), so friendly that they've already made a huge impression on me.  Hopefully I'll get to go back sooner rather than later, and make up the lost time before I leave!
Now, off to run in the increasingly hot morning - gotta blow off the steams of frustration.
Adios.