Two weeks later… I’m having a lot of trouble finding the time and energy to write. We are so busy. I’m usually exhausted after I eat dinner and then after 4 hours of Russian language a day, we usually have a couple more of studying and homework. Is it paying off? Well kind of, but I have to keep reminding myself that I have only been learning the language for 3 weeks. And we have come a long way in 3 weeks.
So much has happened in the two weeks that have passed that sometimes I feel like my head is spinning. Yesterday, when we were at the internet café I looked at my Cluster mates and asked, was that really just last night that we were drinking beer and playing Uno? It felt like days ago, but I digress, we have two weeks to cover here.
I try to keep the calendar on my Itouch up-to-date so that when two or three weeks of a packed schedule have passed I can have some recollection of what we did during the week. So, during the week starting April 12th, a lot of our activities were centered on Earth Day activities and building our network of contacts within our village. On Tuesday the 13th, we agreed to plant trees with the school children. I think as a group we were ecstatic to do this, because it meant that we would not be able to wear our formal business wear to our language class.
Did I mention that we are expected to dress professionally when we attend our classes and trainings during the week? It’s a bit much when your language teacher is holding class down an often very muddy dirt road. In addition, it’s also Ukrainian tradition to remove your shoes before you go in the house – remember the dirt roads? So I think all of us dress professionally from the ankles up, but then wear sneakers to navigate that road. Ukrainians take a lot of pride in their appearance, so looking your best is very important. I will not, however, even try to manage that dirt road in 3 inch heels like my teacher does. She is absolutely amazing.
We started the day with language class and then headed over to the store to meet the English teacher Natasha and her students. They had selected a handful of students to participate. They had all the shovels and buckets and kept to themselves. We walked over to the area where we would be building trees, got a quick explanation from the Mayor as to how to do, and then we were set free. I just grabbed a shovel and started digging and things all started to fall into place. At that point in time the extent of our language was pretty minimal, so both the PCVs and the students struggled with their respective English and Russian introductions, but the kids schooled us on how to plant trees. They showed us how to carry the buckets to the river and the good spots to fill them up with water, and then we carried the full buckets back. Let me tell you, those buckets were HEAVY, at least for me. And these kids were hauling them back with a lot more ease than I had.
As I was struggling one of the teenage girls that was wearing a little too much makeup and playing music on her cell phone (someone I didn’t think was very interested in helping) ran over and helped me with some of the weight of the bucket. We carried both grabbed the handle and carried the bucket together, and I thought that was just great. We worked together. And little by little we all worked together. One of the guys would dig a hole, one of the kids would run over with some water and dump some in the hole, one of us would drop in the tree and then we all would rake the dirt back in the hole and stomp it down. Unfortunately, the tree planting only lasted a little less than two hours and then we all dispersed, grabbed lunch and then headed back to language class.
The rest of the week was a lot of language and some technical. We visited an after school program in Chernigiv with our Cluster Link. We drank beer by the train tracks. Conor and I have started downloading the last of the Lost episodes we are missing while we are at the Internet café with the faster internet connection. I’ve gone over his house to watch them and we usually grab a beer and drink it while we watch. Here is a cultural difference, apparently, because I am drinking beer at his house while we are hanging out alone; we are now together according to his Host-Mom. Conor also comes over my house to drink beer, but my Host-Mom is more laidback. John, Cassie, and Conor have all come over my house and had a beer, so does that mean we are all together?
Saturday the 17th we participated in the village-wide clean-up projects that were organized to celebrate Earth Day or Svodnick, as they called it here. We worked with the teachers at the school to clean up the premises of the old school grounds. It was rainy and cold so we started cleaning up the insides of the buildings. There was a lot of junk, a LOT of dust which may or may not have had asbestos and lead paint in it, and more dust to sweep up. We collected all the papers and stuff that was littering the floors and hauled it all outside and then burned it. Then we did our best to sweep up all the dust. It was nasty. I am really hoping that we didn’t inhale anything harmful.
It was interesting to see the difference in health and safety standards that we witnessed. No face masks, not any thought that the dust might be harmful. And since garbage pickup is rather limited here (once a month) the practice is to burn a lot of the garbage. So we burned a lot of stuff that we probably shouldn’t have burned as well. After two hours of dust, damp, cold and inhaling the fumes of burning garbage, our PC group was just about done. Health-wise we kind of decided as a group that we were done. We aren’t supposed to participate in anything that is damaging to our health and inhaling likes of dust and other stuff, plus hanging out in the cold and wet and maneuvering over loose floorboards and holes in the floor was not in our best interest. But we helped out for a couple of hours, so we did what we could.
