On April 10, 2010 I woke up in my new bedroom in a small village in Ukraine. Today, would prove to be a busy day, but not without little celebrations throughout the day. Our Peace Corps schedule is both very busy and exhausting. Boot camp, as I jokingly called it before I left, it is. We have 4 hours of intensive language training everyday, Monday through Friday. We also have 2 hours of individual language tutoring a week in addition to living in Russian speaking families and having to interact in a community where very few people speak English. In addition to language training we also have technical training and cross-cultural training and community meetings. We are essentially working 24/7… even when we are sleeping. This is in our Peace Corps contract that we are expected to ‘be on’ 24/7.
On my birthday, I got up around 6:30 and jumped in the shower. I then had breakfast with my Host-Mom Leana. She promptly scolded me for soaking the bathroom the night before with my hand-washing that I hung in the bathroom for want of a better place to hang my wet clothes (apparently there is a clothes-line outside, but nobody told me so… oh well). Breakfast in Ukraine generally consists of leftovers from dinner the night before, so I ate Ukrainian ‘green’ borscht and then some farmer’s cheese (seems like a cross between feta cheese and cottage cheese, with the flavor of cottage cheese, but the consistency of feta) with apricot compote and some bread. Breakfast is usually a lot of food and it’s hard for me to communicate that I can only eat so much, but thankfully, they let me serve myself so I can somewhat control my portions.
So I ate breakfast and then I gathered my things and then Leana and I hung my clothes on the line outside before I hurried off to meet my group to take the Marshrutka (local mini-bus) to Chernigiv to meet our Cluster link (which is a group of women ages ranging from early 40s to mid-60s). Before I left my Host-Mom came into my room and said Hoppy Berthday to me and presented me with a new bath towel and I almost cried. She has really gone out of her way to make me feel comfortable and like a member of the family and this gesture was really beyond sweet (especially since I soaked their bathroom the night before).
On the walk to the bus stop I was thinking in my head… I’ve walked this Earth for 34 years. UGH. My Technical teacher wished me a Happy Birthday in Russian, but I don’t remember how to say it. The bus rides are interesting, we pay 2 Hryvnia (7.8 Hryvnia to the dollar) to get to Chernigiv then we had our Cross-Cultural class in one of the language teacher’s apartments. Before we started the Cluster link had apparently been forewarned that it was my birthday and they had all chipped in and got a cake, chocolate, fruit and juice so during our break we had a little birthday celebration. This was great since I didn’t expect anyone to know about my birthday and being so far from friends and family and having the new ‘family’ take the initiative to do something special felt really great. Even though we have only known each other for a little over a week now, it seems like we all have each others’ backs. It’s nice.
After class my cluster went off on our own in the ‘big city’. Being in a small village of 2000 we felt like kids in a candy store being set free since we have been kept on a tight leash since we got here. We went ‘shopping’ for essentials which included vitamins, skin lotion (the water is very hard with lots of minerals and hard metals… it literally smells like rust), notebooks and… 3G zip modems so that we can access the internet from our homes (Kim and I don’t want to abuse my families’ internet and 3 of the others don’t have internet in their homes). For 50 American bucks you can have the zip drive and a decent amount of internet access and then you can replenish with your credit card, no commitment, no monthly service charge – sounds good to me. I call it a little birthday present to myself. I figure, I can compose the emails or blog entries before hand and then just cut and paste so as to conserve the time.
After that we grabbed a beer and shot the shit for a bit, then headed off to grab some free wifi and and pizza at the Dva Gusya (Two Geese) where we bumped into other Peace Corps volunteers with their laptops Skyping and emailing. (As for beer, we are really not supposed to drink in front of our families, and because our village is so small, they have advised us not to drink there… we are targets to sloppy drunks because we are obviously outsiders and Ukraine has its fair share of drinkers so we can’t just grab a beer together. So, we generally buy a couple bottles of beer from the convenience store and head out to the railroad tracks and have a drink there on the sly. We all say that we feel like we are in high school when we do that, but hey… It makes it all that more amusing).
I bought a bottle of wine and some instant coffee (this is what we drink in the family… it’s not bad… it’s not great either, but hey… I’ve been averaging two cups –these are half the size of our coffee mugs – to their one, so I felt like it was a good idea to replenish the supply) and brought the lot home to the family. We had a light dinner and drank my wine (the wine is sweet red here), then Mama Leana brought out a homemade sesame seed cake with a variety of apricot compotes that she had made. It was good. Now it’s just me and my computer. It’s been a very good day.
Small note, yesterday we had a Personal Health Day where we met as a group with one of the PC-staff Medical Officers. Dr. Sasha gave us all a Typhoid vaccine (they gave us Hep A and H1N1 at the Soviet Resort in the beginning) and went over the contents of our medical kit (extremely comprehensive, I didn’t need to buy the Benadryl and Ibuprofen and Imodium that I did, but hey…). Then in the afternoon we discussed the HIV problem in Ukraine and went over how to put a condom on… We each individually had to put the condom on a dildo to show that we knew how to use a condom. We did this with the senior group, so the women, who are mom and dad’s age were mortified that they had to do this. Vicki was like… I haven’t had to do this for 30 years… It was funny. Bottom line is that the Peace Corps medical care is top notch and if they can’t handle the problem in Ukraine the PC med evacs us to either Bangkok or Washington, DC for medical care. I asked if I could request Bangkok, which got some laughs, but apparently only for routine procedures. So if I need my gallbladder removed, I get a free trip to Bangkok.
