Dolls and doughnuts (01/07/2009)

The doughnut is enormous, as big as her face. And her fingers look so sticky in the photo that any parent wants to go looking for a napkin.

Her name is Ilsa, and her picture is currently the desktop of the computer screen in my office at the newspaper. She wears a pink and white knit cap and a coat with a pink floral design.

But the dominant item in the photo is the giant doughnut that is headed for her mouth.

Ilsa and two other kids she has never met - Ilia and Lille - gave our Christmas a boost this year.

With our daughters grown and no grandchildren to spoil yet, Ilsa, Ilia, and Lille were an excuse to prowl through the toy department, sizing up dolls and Legos to buy and send to Christmases far from home.

Ilsa lives in Oxford, England, though the doughnut photo on my computer was taken on a street corner in London.

Her mother, Salla, is a Finnish journalist now studying on a Reuters Fellowship at Oxford University. Her father, Denis, was my interpreter on a couple of projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan a few years back.

Denis was working for me when I first encountered Salla. In fact, I was with the two of them the night they met. So obviously I have an attachment to their 3-year-old daughter.

I'm also attached to Ilia, the 6-year-old son of my friend Svetlana Kulikova and a great fan of Legos, particularly those involving Star Wars.

Svetlana and I met when she was teaching at the American University of Central Asia and I was conducting a seminar there.

Ilia was about 2 or 3 when I first encountered him, and I've felt like an honorary uncle ever since.

We've stayed in touch with Svetlana while she finished her PhD in journalism at Louisiana State University, not an easy thing to accomplish while you're a single parent with a child thousands of miles away in the former Soviet Union.

A few years back, Svetlana managed to visit us in Jay County for a weekend, and it was clear that the separation from her son was incredibly painful for her.

Fortunately, they're together these days. She's teaching at Georgia State University in Atlanta, doing a particularly good job with foreign students who have come to America to study journalism.

As for Lille, she's in the States as well. She's also 3, and her mother Tamuna was my interpreter back in 2000 in the republic of Georgia.

Now Tamuna and her husband Ramaz and Lille are in, of all places, Fargo, N.D. (The thought of January in Fargo chills my fingertips.)

Tamuna is a Muskie Scholar, working on her master's degree for a couple of years, after which she and her family will be required to return to Georgia.

I've never met Lille, but she looks a great deal like her mother. And it's clear from e-mailed pictures that she enjoyed her Christmas present, a baby doll that is getting smothered with attention. Based on e-mailed pictures from Georgia, it's safe to say Ilia is in Lego heaven after opening his gifts from Indiana.

And as for Ilsa in England, she received a baby doll as well.

But I hope she licks the doughnut stickiness from her fingers before playing with it.

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