Hey, for the girl, fam.

I wanted to interrupt today's episode really quickly because we have a very special guest.

Her name's Elena, and she is someone who received an Operation Christmas Child box, and it personally impacted her

life and her story.

And so Elena, I'm so excited for you to share this for the girl audience because Operation

Christmas Child means so much to us.

But yeah, please share your story.

We'd love to hear how you were met with the Christmas box.

Fantastic. Well, thank you first for having me here. But I grew up in a former Soviet Union,

and I grew up there with my sister, Yulia. And where we grew up, it was a very small town,

and a very small house in a very broken house, in the sense that we had a lot of broken windows and we could

not fix them because of how poor my family was. And my parents, they would go off and they would work

all day long, but they would never get paid with food or money. They would actually get paid with

alcohol. So while they were working, it was my responsibility as the oldest to try to take care of

myself and my sister. And so that was

just the life that I had until I was about eight years old or so. And when I was eight, my parents

were caught stealing some items. And so they were put into prison. And myself and my sister,

we were put into an orphanage. And truthfully, being at that first orphanage was basically a safe haven

for us in a sense that they provided

us with a way to go to school. They provided us three meals a day. They provided us caregivers there

that would help us to like raise my sister well. And we stayed at this orphanage for about two years.

And then after those two years, we were moved to our second orphanage. And again, we had the caregivers. We had a school. We had the food. But the things that we did not have at this orphanage, we did not have joy in a sense that there was no toys for us to play with. And so I love the fact that we packed these shoe boxes with toys. Because growing up, I didn't have any toys to play with. The things I remember playing with was rocks. Like if you ever heard the game of Jacks, you know, the bouncy balls, twisty things. So imagine that type of a game, but because we had no bouncy balls or jacks, we had rocks. And so we would play the game of Jacks, but with rocks.

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