Eagle Scout's "Miracle" Siberian Playground

As though it weren't enough to help raise more than $60,000 to pay for a new playground at a Siberian orphanage, Alex Griffith felt compelled to fly to the orphanage with a group of volunteers and install it.

Wait, it gets better. An article in The Baltimore Sun by Mary Gail Hare tells how Alex spent his first year of life at the orphanage after having been abandoned as an infant. He was adopted by a Baltimore couple who evidently did a heck of a job raising him. Alex celebrated his 16th birthday while in Russia setting up the new playground. Now that's a homecoming.

While working toward his Eagle Scout badge, Alex remembered photos of the orphanage in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk his parents showed him. Its playground was a dismal mess. Suddenly, Alex had a perfect project to earn his badge.

In just two years, Alex, his family, his Scout Troop and the Bel Air Rotary Club raised $62,000 from a variety of small fundraising projects. That money meant enough to buy "20 playground pieces and ship them, along with two 8-foot-tall wooden carvings of an eagle and a bear that grace the entrance to playground," according to Hare's story.

"Kids were playing on the pieces the whole time we were building it," Alex told Hare. "At the grand opening, there was a long line for the sliding board."

"People kept telling us over and over that we didn't bring a playground to Krasnoyarsk, we brought a miracle," said Alex's father, Dwight Griffith, who went with Alex and three other Scouts and their Scoutmaster on the two-week construction trip. "Every day, we had people to help us, many with tears in their eyes thanking us."

Rotary International found Krasnoyarsk families to put up Alex and his crew. The group toured the orphanage where Alex spent his first year and visited the hospital where he was born. One morning, Hare wrote, when the Americans arrived on the construction site, they saw a Russian worker writing "US + Russia = Friends" in the playground's sandy base.

"The Russians kept posing by the sign like it was a monument," Christian Posko told Hare. Posko, also 16, used money he was saving for a car to help pay for the trip. "I guess they really thought we were building a miracle."

Photo courtesy of Adam Jones, Ph.D., via Flickr