Oh, Lil, it is an adventure!!!
This is our second year - normally the same child comes every year from 7-12, but ours from last year is going to America instead, apparently there is some sort of scheme where they can stay there for a couple of years - so we will be having a newbie again, a 7-yr-old called Illya (like Kuryakin!) Last year's was called Dimitry, known as Dima, he was very hard work, in fact without DD2 (then 17) riding herd on him every morning to get him dressed we would never have got out of the house and were often late. (He used to hide!)
Nope, we don't speak Russian but they come in a group with 2 interpreters and there is always one on the end of a mobile. (Actually some of us have had Russian lessons this time, from a Russian woman who happened to come here to live, but not very successfully because she was teaching us a bit like a class of 5-yr-olds, learning the letter sounds and lots of repetition, I know the words for bus and train and newspaper but not how to say "you have to get dressed now" or "stop kicking my children" which last year would have been very useful (I'm hoping this one might be a bit gentler!) - can you imagine a roomful of polite English women outwardly complying and inwardly seething and exchanging glances, none of us had the nous to tell her it wasn't helping!
Anyway we do have 5 sheets of helpful words and phrases - last year we had a lot of single word communication like "bed!" "bath!" - and I got the Usborne First Thousand Words in Russian from Amazon, and at least I have a better idea of how to pronounce things now. (Many many words are just the same in Russian only you wouldn't have a clue from looking at them because the letters are so weird.)
They are occupied from 8.30-5 Mon-Fri, they have some lessons and lots of different activities, and also get dental checks, Dima had to have a front tooth out. We have the evenings and weekends to try to amuse him. Videos are a godsend, even in English, there was a VCR at the day centre and they would watch anything.
Initially it is very stressful - esp the very first night, scary for a 7-yr-old - but it does get easier and it was good to see Dima getting fatter, he used to eat like a horse, I used to have a box of peaches ripening on the windowsill all the time and had to watch him or he would eat 2 or 3. (He got paler though, it can be very hot in Belarus, he arrived with a great tan and we had rotten weather so he went home fairly white.) He got on best with the DDs and DH, as I said he used to kick the boys and never did what I said, I got pretty fed up with him!
If you google Friends of Chernobyl's Children (FOCC) they have a website with lots of information.