Holy whirlwind Batman. After packing up my apartment in Balakleya, I hurried back to Kiev and got ready to head back to Washington, DC for medevac. I slept in the Peace Corps office in sick bay and they drove me to the airport at 3 am or something and then wham bam thank you ma’am, later that same day (due to the time change) my brother picked me up at Dulles and we grabbed dinner before he drove me to Georgetown to the hotel that I would be living at for the next three weeks. I should note that the dinner tasted like the most amazing thing I have ever eaten. It was grilled salmon over a bed of mixed green salad with blue cheese, pieces of boiled potatoes, pecans, pine nuts, figs, tomatoes… it was amazing. Salads in Ukraine tend to be simple, either tomatoes and cucumbers, or cabbage, or something not all that vegetable related and mayonnaise laden (i.e. cubed lunch meats, kielbasa, peas and mayo or something gross like that). Lettuce is not readily available in most places and as for mixed greens and baby lettuces, forget about it. Blue cheese is hard to find and at the point I ate this magnificent salad, I had not eaten grilled salmon since I left the States at the end of March last year. Needless to say, it was quite possibly the best salad I have ever eaten. This is something you can only appreciate if you have been deprived of or are not able to access the food stuffs in that salad.
Much of my medevac was an exercise in food porn. I had a list of certain foods I HAD to eat while I was in the States and overall, I think I did a good job. It only helped my cause that I was in Georgetown surrounded by tons of good eateries. In addition to food, I had a bunch of whirlwind visits with my friends. Danya came to DC the first weekend I was there. Elizabeth was in town for work my first week. My second weekend, I took a train to Connecticut to see the folks, family and friends. The third weekend I took the Megabus to NYC and caught up with my friends there. I was constantly busy. One of the days in NYC, I had a lunch date, followed by a coffee date, followed by drinks and dinner, followed by a jazz concert, and I crammed in a manicure all with different sets of friends. I definitely made good use of my time and still managed to eat a NY slice and NY bagel at some point.
In addition to all the travelling and visits, I also caught up with friends in DC and took some pretty amazing walks around the city since the weather was just starting to open up to Spring. I had an amazing roommate at the hotel who helped me keep things light and assisted me in taste testing the various cupcakes, cookies and pies in the immediate vicinity of the hotel. We bonded over trash TV and lounging on the couch. What could have been a very stressful experience was made all that much more comfortable by someone I just clicked with. It was a great three weeks and now, if I want, I have a PCV to visit in South Africa.
While all this sounds great and fun, I was also going through a barrage of tests that were neither easy, nor pleasant. I left Ukraine very uncertain about my health and almost certain that I wouldn’t be allowed to return to Ukraine and finish my service, but as it turns out I was perfectly healthy and all the cause for alarm was just dated mammography and ultrasound equipment in Ukraine. In DC, I got poked, prodded, biopsied, squished and scanned and everything turned out to be okay. So guess what? I was headed back to Ukraine. But the operative question was, where was I going when I got back to Ukraine?
Right before I left on medevac it was determined that I would be changing sites and moving somewhere else due to the problems I was having with my organization in Balakleya. I had emailed the Peace Corps the week before I returned, but to no avail since people were on the road travelling. So when I arrived I had no idea where to go, and as I soon learned, they didn’t know quite where to send me either. So the adventure continues.
