Work in “Ekomebel”. Before Americans came to Russia.
So, what do we call work? Do we always have to work?
This word “work” was turned by 6 students (Danil, Grigor, Lena, Masha, Pasha, Rita) into something fun, useful, progressive, unforgettable thing. Painting wood. What can be more boring than that? It’s ok for one day, but to do the same job during 2 weeks – friends, it’s hard! The same color of the paint, the same brushes, gloves, tons of wood. It’s better to say not tons of wood, but endless lines of wood!
Six students were from different schools, although from the same town. We didn’t know each other. Or maybe a little bit. Maybe heard something. That’s all. All we knew – we had to work for 2 weeks in the same place in this company of people.
First day. Wake up early and get to work at 7:30 a.m. Sun was burning our backs, but we’re painting and painting… Then there was a little nice break and again back to work. We didn’t talk to each other – it was hard under the sun. So, we had four hours of work, a break for 1 hour and again 4 hours of work. Everyone was tired at the end of the day. When we got home, doing anything except sleeping was impossible.
After the second day things came much better. Work became progressive – everyone became a master of this boring job. But nobody said it was boring! Nobody called it so. We found fun sides of being there. We got much news about each other. We listened to music together, having only one headphone. We painted “Dubna” and “LDFA” on the wood. Also several insects were painted into blue. And many mosquitoes were killed… We were working without unplanned brakes, until the two last days. The weather wasn’t always perfect. One day it was raining. And as we had almost everything done, we left it until the next day. There was a small building for us, where we got in to play cards, while the rain was going. But after the break we got back to wood. We missed turning them into blue color, though it was absolutely wet everywhere. And in the last day we played unusual football. Right among wood. There was a championship. As you can guess, all our clothes turned into the blue paint we used. Fun indelible blue spots on everything – are like a memory about these days.
The main result of the work we’ve done – not the endless lines of the painted wood or earned money, but the friendship we created! And we all want to thank Yuri Ivanovich (Lena's father) for a great chance to work together!

Rita Leonova


I would like to tell you about our work days.
Clean up day.
One day (on the 10th of July) we arrived to the embankment of the Dubna river.Well known,that it is a popular place for rest and spending holidays.So,it was a lot of rubbish here.We dressed our LDFA T-shorts and began to pick up this rubbish and put it into big plastic bags.Then boys loaded these bags into special car.We tryed to help our enviroment.You could see the article about it in Dubna newspaper. Later,some parents(Janna Baganova and Ljudmila Pankratova)organised the picnic for us. Nadia Koltina taught American studens to speak Russian.We swam,run and played different games,such as soccer,badminton,hacky-sack and others.We had real fun.

Work paint day(on the 12 of July.)
We also had one work day on the factory,which produces wooden kitchen furniture (Ecomebel).We painted boards. In fact, some people hate paint, but it was not boring. We told about everything and sang songs.In the end,we had excursion and got to know a lot of interesting about wood. But we were very tired and hungry after that...