Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Time Flies When You are Eating Tons of Mayonaise
Time is literally flying here. I can’t keep track of the days. The last week went by in a blink. I’m not even sure what happened last week. I mean, we laugh A LOT in our group whether it’s busting on each other or just getting a kick out of the fact that one of the words in the Russian language that we use a LOT is ‘Kak’ pronounced ‘cock’. One of the highlights of one of our language classes was when Conor asked a question with the word ‘kak’ in it and Kim innocently said, “Conor likes ‘kak’.”, and then immediately realized what she had said mid-sentence. That one definitely brought on some tears of laughter.
On Wednesday the 21st we took a tour of the library in Chernigiv where we were given library cards and invited to join the English Club. They mentioned how John La Plante, the 81 year old Peace Corps volunteer from Connecticut had started both the English and the French Club at the library, but that since he had left they had found a replacement to run the English Club, but that they hadn’t found anyone to run the French Club. So guess who opened her big fat mouth and said, “I speak French!”? Yep, that would be me. So I committed to running the French Club once a week until I leave at the end of June. I think it’s kind of funny. One of the reasons that I was bummed that I wasn’t sent to Africa is that I wouldn’t be using my French. Who would have thought I would be speaking French in Ukraine? Crazy.
My family takes me to the sauna or as they call it the banya. My host-parents and their friends rent a private sauna suite. We have gone the past two Thursday nights. Things I have learned… First, that you are supposed to wear a wool cap in the sauna. This one puzzled me a lot. It’s freaking hot as hell in there and then you want to trap the heat in? I didn’t get it. My Russian wasn’t enough where I could ask why, so I asked my sister who speaks English why… I guess they wear hats to protect their hair from the dry heat. Who knew?
The people here like what they call ‘the contrast’, and this explains a little about all the Russian/Ukrainians on Brighton Beach/Coney Island that would go swimming in the winter when it was freaking cold in New York. You go in the sauna, get hot, start to sweat, then go and dump ice cold water on yourself or go outside in the snow, or just cold as it is at night here right now. Hot/Cold/Hot/cold for two hours. There is a lot of shooting the shit and eating sunflower seeds. The men drink beer and the women drink tea and water. My host-dad tried to tell me the other night that drinking beer at the banya was good for you, but then my host-mom started screaming Niet, Niet!! (No! No!) and then miming heart palpitations and saying that it was bad for me. I told her she didn’t have to worry, and that I have no desire to get super hot and sweaty and then dehydrate myself even more. It’s hot, I don’t want to pass out. My host dad is 4 inches shorter than me, who would carry me home?
First night at the banya, my host-mom dragged me around like a small child. She showed me the toilet, to go outside to cool off, to take a cold shower after being in the hot sauna, etc. As the night came to a cap, she also showed me that we should shower and wash our hair before we went home. This is where the not quite understanding the language bit me in the ass. She explained the shower, then I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do so I paused and then she said, is it okay if we shower together? I thought the look of horror on my face was really obvious, but she stripped off her bathing suit and started showering, so I really didn’t have much choice, but to do the same. So within two weeks here, I’ve seen my host-mom naked. My host dad also walks around the house without a shirt on, and my host-sister dashed around in her underwear one day… I guess, they must accept me as one of the family. Nakedness is good, right?
Clash of the Titans is opening next weekend at the movie theater. I’m not exactly sure if it will be dubbed or just subtitled in Russian, but I am pretty pumped to get to see a movie here. It’s also time to start planting potatoes here. My family is planting on Saturday. I wonder if I will be included. I offered to help in the garden a week ago, but they told me I didn’t have to. We’ll see. I’d be happy to help, but then again, I do get very little free time here so usually when we have free time we head to the city to get internet access and café lattes. I’m also learning to play cribbage, which I am pretty pumped about.
Beck Newman is a Rock Star for having coffee with me on Skype.
I’m blanking on a lot of stuff that happened at the moment. I will try to be a more conscientious blogger in the future.
Ah funny story of the day. We get a coffee break during Russian lessons about halfway through. Conor is meat deprived in his host-family, so Kim brought Conor a hotdog from her host-house. Many jokes ensued about Kim slipping Conor the wiener. Natasha, our Russian teacher, asked me “What does this mean, wiener?” So I explained that ‘wiener’ is another word for ‘hotdog’, but also ‘wiener’ is another word for ‘penis’. I should mention that Natasha is very good-humored and patient with us. So she giggled about this as well.
On Wednesday the 21st we took a tour of the library in Chernigiv where we were given library cards and invited to join the English Club. They mentioned how John La Plante, the 81 year old Peace Corps volunteer from Connecticut had started both the English and the French Club at the library, but that since he had left they had found a replacement to run the English Club, but that they hadn’t found anyone to run the French Club. So guess who opened her big fat mouth and said, “I speak French!”? Yep, that would be me. So I committed to running the French Club once a week until I leave at the end of June. I think it’s kind of funny. One of the reasons that I was bummed that I wasn’t sent to Africa is that I wouldn’t be using my French. Who would have thought I would be speaking French in Ukraine? Crazy.
My family takes me to the sauna or as they call it the banya. My host-parents and their friends rent a private sauna suite. We have gone the past two Thursday nights. Things I have learned… First, that you are supposed to wear a wool cap in the sauna. This one puzzled me a lot. It’s freaking hot as hell in there and then you want to trap the heat in? I didn’t get it. My Russian wasn’t enough where I could ask why, so I asked my sister who speaks English why… I guess they wear hats to protect their hair from the dry heat. Who knew?
The people here like what they call ‘the contrast’, and this explains a little about all the Russian/Ukrainians on Brighton Beach/Coney Island that would go swimming in the winter when it was freaking cold in New York. You go in the sauna, get hot, start to sweat, then go and dump ice cold water on yourself or go outside in the snow, or just cold as it is at night here right now. Hot/Cold/Hot/cold for two hours. There is a lot of shooting the shit and eating sunflower seeds. The men drink beer and the women drink tea and water. My host-dad tried to tell me the other night that drinking beer at the banya was good for you, but then my host-mom started screaming Niet, Niet!! (No! No!) and then miming heart palpitations and saying that it was bad for me. I told her she didn’t have to worry, and that I have no desire to get super hot and sweaty and then dehydrate myself even more. It’s hot, I don’t want to pass out. My host dad is 4 inches shorter than me, who would carry me home?
First night at the banya, my host-mom dragged me around like a small child. She showed me the toilet, to go outside to cool off, to take a cold shower after being in the hot sauna, etc. As the night came to a cap, she also showed me that we should shower and wash our hair before we went home. This is where the not quite understanding the language bit me in the ass. She explained the shower, then I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do so I paused and then she said, is it okay if we shower together? I thought the look of horror on my face was really obvious, but she stripped off her bathing suit and started showering, so I really didn’t have much choice, but to do the same. So within two weeks here, I’ve seen my host-mom naked. My host dad also walks around the house without a shirt on, and my host-sister dashed around in her underwear one day… I guess, they must accept me as one of the family. Nakedness is good, right?
Clash of the Titans is opening next weekend at the movie theater. I’m not exactly sure if it will be dubbed or just subtitled in Russian, but I am pretty pumped to get to see a movie here. It’s also time to start planting potatoes here. My family is planting on Saturday. I wonder if I will be included. I offered to help in the garden a week ago, but they told me I didn’t have to. We’ll see. I’d be happy to help, but then again, I do get very little free time here so usually when we have free time we head to the city to get internet access and café lattes. I’m also learning to play cribbage, which I am pretty pumped about.
Beck Newman is a Rock Star for having coffee with me on Skype.
I’m blanking on a lot of stuff that happened at the moment. I will try to be a more conscientious blogger in the future.
Ah funny story of the day. We get a coffee break during Russian lessons about halfway through. Conor is meat deprived in his host-family, so Kim brought Conor a hotdog from her host-house. Many jokes ensued about Kim slipping Conor the wiener. Natasha, our Russian teacher, asked me “What does this mean, wiener?” So I explained that ‘wiener’ is another word for ‘hotdog’, but also ‘wiener’ is another word for ‘penis’. I should mention that Natasha is very good-humored and patient with us. So she giggled about this as well.
Trying to Catch Up
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.
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.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Birthday
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.
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.
First Entries...
Entry 1: The Big Departure
The days leading up to ‘the big departure’ were pretty tough. I had a lot of trouble balancing seeing and spending time with people and actually getting the administrative stuff done that I needed to get done. I think this succeeded in elevating my stress level a lot, because I knew I had to get a lot of stuff done and nothing was getting done. The biggest help was spending an afternoon with Louise wherein I brought over all the stuff that I wanted to bring and she packed it. She packed a lot of it, but now that I am settled at my family’s house in a small village in Ukraine, I have since realized that I brought way too many clothes. I’ll probably be thankfully for that later, but damn those bags were heavy.
The anxieties I was experiencing were completely normal, but that didn’t make the last days any easier. Packing with the timeframe of two years with a limit of 100 pounds hanging over your head is really daunting. Making sure that you’ve remembered to get all your administrative paperwork done so something doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass later. Making sure you are spending enough time with the people you care about, because you never know what might happen in those 2 years that you are away. It’s a lot to handle. Turns out when you get to the first day of training, you aren’t the only one freaking out. Everyone is.
I think the BEST thing I did was go a day early to DC. Yes, it gave me a chance to see my brother before I left, and I did NOT sleep that first night in DC, but the next morning, I got up early and was able to get all of the paperwork that I had been avoiding done (I think, I hope). Student loans have been deferred, state taxes have been file, Peace Corps paperwork has been filled out, bills paid, etc., etc., etc.
By a little before noon when I headed down to check-out of my room and then re-check-in with the Peace Corps group I was starting to feel like I was bristling with a bit less anxiety.
Oddly enough the first few people that I talked to as I was checking and in our ‘luggage room’ turned out to be 3 out of the 4 people who would later be my ‘cluster’ during training. A Peace Corps Cluster is a group of 5 people that you are grouped with throughout your training and throughout your term of service. This is your new family. I just thought it was kind of odd that out of the 77 people milling around, these were the people that I met first. The other odd sentiment that I was having was that I felt like I had already met or that I knew A LOT of the people that I was meeting for the first time. Also odd, but extremely refreshing was that probably a third of the volunteers were my parents age or older. Not so odd, everyone was extremely anxious and worried about the same exact stuff that I had been feeling stress over. (At least I didn’t have to sell my house before I left, car yes, but some of these people sold houses pre-departure, whoa). This was also refreshing… We were all in the same boat, and nobody had any idea what was going on.
We went on to spend the day split into 2 groups/rooms with roughly 40 volunteers in each. We discussed the Peace Corps, our anxieties and did some group bonding exercises. Peace Corps handed out money cards with 140 bucks on it to cover our incidentals, extra baggage fees, dinner, tipping to the hotel staff and bus drivers, etc. and told us to go retrieve the money now, because we probably wouldn’t have the chance to do so I in Ukraine. I met my roommate for the night, D,who was nice enough to slip me some Tryptophan since I had not slept in 2 nights. Then I hit the road and had dinner with Kelly, where she further put me at ease seeing how she went through this when she left for PC Senegal. I can’t say that I slept through the night, but I did sleep that night which is a lot better than the 2 nights of no sleep before.
Departure day I was feeling a lot better, things were falling into place and we were getting ready to go. I ducked out for a walk to grab one last bagel and coffee before leaving. I had passed a small park with a hill full of daffodils and cherry blossoms (in Georgetown) Tree Hill Park and had decided that that would be a good place to eat a bagel and drink some coffee. Got to the top, ate my bagel and decided to call my mom, because I thought she would get a kick out of the fact that a third of the new volunteers were her age or older. My mom gave me the news I think I had been waiting to hear, the news that my grandfather had died the night before. Oddly enough, I can’t explain how, but I kind of knew that it was going to happen. I knew someone was going to die the night before I left. I also knew I couldn’t get too upset over it. I just had to tell myself, that this is what he would have wanted for himself. He was miserable in the nursing home. It’s hard to think about it this way, but it really is the best thing for everyone.
The ride to the airport, and the flight in general, weren’t really noteworthy except that I shuffled a few things in my bags and managed to avoid the $150 overweight bag fee. I think it was close and she just decided to waive it. Frankfurt airport was annoying, we got off the plane and went through security only to arrive at our gate and have to go through security again. There also wasn’t a bathroom by the gate, so if you wanted to go, you had to go out and then go through security again. At least you could leave your carry-ons with someone else and not have to worry about that part of the hassle.
Once we arrived in Kiev, they loaded us all up on 2 buses and drove us 2 hours into the Chernihiv Oblast (region) for our first 2-days of training at a ‘wooded retreat’. The place where they took us was a former Soviet ‘resort’. The key-word being Soviet. I would liken it more to a summer camp, a Soviet summer camp that was probably at its prime in the 80s. Three people shared a room and I shared with the two girls in my cluster Kim and Cassie (Cassie is also from Connecticut). It was warm enough in the room, we even had hot water, but it smelled very damp and moldy. The cafeteria was always freezing. The auditorium was slightly warmer, but I use the word slight and there were mosquitoes everywhere in there. Resort this was not, but then again, this is the Peace Corps and giving us a crash course on being cold and uncomfortable was probably necessary for some people. The Peace Corps Boot Camp has begun.
My cluster consists of Kim (Bronxville, NY from Delaware), Cassie (from Shelton, CT), John (Pittsburgh, PA), and Conor (Salt Lake City, UT, he is also 6’7” tall). Our Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator (LCF) is named Natasha, and our Technical and Cross-Cultural Facilitator (TCF) is named Sveta. Our Cluster is linked to another Cluster located in the city of Chernihiv. Our Link Cluster is part of the Senior Program made up of women primarily my parent’s age.
Family/First Impressions/Easter
After being here a little over a week, it feels like we have been here for months. When we got dropped off in our village our Mamas picked us up and we walked to our houses. We all headed off to Russian speaking houses. I was placed in the Nehai (Knee-high) family with Mama Leana, Papa Valera and their two teenage daughters Katya (19 years) and Tanya (16 years). They have a guard dog named Amour who is chained in a pen in the driveway separate from the gated entrance. I think he’s all bark and no bite, but I haven’t and probably won’t test that theory. After a week he knows my voice enough where he’ll stop barking if I tell him to ‘Knock it off!’. They also have a grey poof of a cat named Tisha.
Their house is nice. They have a sizable yard and garden in the back and my bedroom is on the ground floor with the entryway, living room and kitchen. Upstairs, I’m not really sure about. Their bedrooms are all up there, but I haven’t seen them. At the top of the stairs is a den with the TV and the computer/internet. The house only has one bathroom and it is in the basement at the bottom of a very steep flight of stairs. I go down backwards, I think it’s the only way I am going to get down without taking a spill at some point in the next three months.
Leana and Valera like gardening and it seems like they grow a lot of the vegetables and fruits that we have been eating. I’ve been eating rather well. I won’t starve anyhow here at the Nehai’s. Bread and salt are a traditional part of the Ukrainian meal. Salt is plentiful due to a shortage in the past and bread is NOT to be wasted because it is a symbol that Ukraine survived the Great Famine that was engineered by Stalin during the time that he forced farm collectivization. Three to five million Ukrainians died of starvation while surrounded by fields of wheat and stocked government storehouses. Ukraine borders were reportedly shut to prevent people from leaving during this time. Many historians believe that the famine was part of the Soviet leadership’s strategy to solve the ‘nationality’ problem with certain countries.
The Nehai’s have had six previous volunteers so mealtimes consist of a lot of different dishes that we serve ourselves. Thankfully, they haven’t been serving me big plates of food that I wouldn’t be able to eat, seeing as we were told preemptively not to waste food and to eat everything that you are served. I arrived on Good Friday and apparently in an Orthodox household Easter is celebrated from midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning through to 5 am. So I guess I missed it, because I wasn’t invited to the church and I slept that night. That’s fine, I really needed the sleep. But from what I’ve gathered the family goes to church around midnight with a basket of samplings of the Easter feast (having a nicely presented basket is important). The priest blesses the Easter food that is presented in the basket, then the families celebrate Mass, and then go home to celebrate with a huge feast. Then they all go to sleep around 5 in the morning following the feast.
The typical contents of the Easter Basket that they present at the church is Paska (Easter Bread), Pysanky (Easter Eggs), Krashanky (Dyed Eggs – variety of colors, but there must be a red one), Eggs (hard-boiled and peeled), Salt (small amount), Butter (should be nicely shaped and decorated with cloves), Cheese (Sweet Cheese – mixture of farmer’s cheese with confectionary sugar, raisons, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg), Horseradish, Kielbasa.
I woke around 9 on Easter and the Papa was waiting up for me. He served me a small feast of the leftovers and a glass of wine. Wine and morning coffee, an odd combination, but do I ever refuse a glass of wine? The red wine in Ukraine is typical a sweet red wine. What he laid out on the breakfast table was a HUGE amount of food. There were hard-boiled eggs, Paska (which to me tastes and has a similar consistency to French Brioche, but with raisins in it), there were some battered and pan-fried fish cakes, pan-fried sausage cakes, some blood sausage, ground pork pastries, and some mayonnaise-y salads. But the one thing I didn’t try was some kind of gelatinous chicken or pork bowl. I think they boil chicken or pork fat into a kind of soup and then let it cool into a gelatinous blob. I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s apparently a delicacy. They eat it just straight up.
We ate again as a family (minus Mama, she is a nurse and apparently had to work on Easter Sunday) with Katya’s boyfriend Yuri. So the whole spread came out again, as did the wine and a bottle of cognac and Papa made toasts while he and Yuri downed the cognac. Us girls, drank wine and certainly didn’t down it in one gulp like they were doing with the cognac. We sat around the table for awhile, and then Katya sent me upstairs to use the internet. (I should mention that Katya is studying to be an English teacher at the University so she actually speaks English really well). The rest of the day we kind of hung around the house. Then everybody dispersed and left me alone, but not before they fed me a meal by myself. (They seem to feed me a lot by myself, and I can’t quite figure out if it is because they are just busy, or if they are worried that I am hungry, or what, but I seem to eat a lot by myself).
Easter Monday is also a holiday, but not for Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). We had four hours of intensive language study, followed by Community Mapping wherein we walked around the village and identified important buildings and where each of the other volunteers lived. Apparently in our village there are 2 larger Convenience Stores and one small one. A School (brand new building built in 2008), and Village Administration building, a Post Office, and a Medical Clinic. Starry Bilose has a population of roughly 2,500 people. The school, as we would later find out with our visit, has approximately 180 students from ages 6 through 17. The community also has two churches, one Orthodox and one Baptist.
Our village is named after the river that flows through town is and means something along the lines Old Village by the river. Apparently there have been prehistoric artifacts found in the community and the best estimate is that our village has been around since Stone Age. The community was officially created 860 years ago.
This past week was filled with intensive language consisting of 4 hours a day, Monday through Friday, then we also had Technical and Cross-Cultural training, as well as our Health day where we got another immunization and then our Health and Medical overview. Our days are very full. When I get home at night for dinner, I am usually exhausted. One night I got home around 5, I ate, and then I was fighting to stay awake at 6. I nodded off, but then forced myself to do my mandatory reading and study Russian.
We also had Technical meetings with the local school staff and local administration. We were introduced to the English teachers and the school Headmaster and the majority of the students and were taken on a tour of the school facilities. We were invited to come to the school during the school days to use the internet lab and the cafeteria. Apparently, we can eat in the cafeteria at lunch for 4 Hryvnia. After our tour, we discussed with the English teachers their needs and what we kind of projects that we could work on with the school. The students start taking English lessons in their 2nd Form (age 7). They have a state of the art language lab, an auditorium, and outside they have basketball courts and a turf soccer field as well as a playground. It’s up for discussion, but we should meet with the English teachers again some time this week to start discussing what kind of projects would be realistic for us to work on with the students seeing as their school year ends at the end of May and we are only here in Starry Bilose through mid-June.
After our visit at the school, we met with the Village Council President and introduced ourselves to him in Russian. (These were very basic introductions: My name is; I am from America, State of Connecticut, town of Windsor; I am a Peace Corps Volunteer; I am a Manager by profession). He introduced Starry Bilose and we discussed what we could contribute to the town. Apparently, the big problems that he listed off were garbage (there is a lot of litter and the community only has a garbage pick up once a month); the roads (only the main road is paved, the rest are dirt); and lack of a kindergarten. We will be planting trees and flowers at the new medical clinic on Tuesday and helping with a town wide clean-up on Saturday the 17th (Soobotnik - Earth Day). We are going to put our heads together regarding the kindergarten, we having been discussing tag-team Babushka daycare.
The Village Council President’s name is Nikolai Nehai. Apparently, he is distantly related to my family, but they aren’t sure how. Anyhow, he is an interesting character, a bit of a renegade. He got word that people were planning on building summer houses (dachas) down by the river. They were set to start building on a certain day and he got up in the middle of the night and planted a whole bunch of trees so that they were unable to build there. I think it will be interesting working with him.
We also made a trip to Chernihiv on Thursday to attend our first formal Technical session where we attend with the entire group of Community Development Volunteers. One of the Senior Volunteers, Jud, who has been here for a year already and in his former life was the Maine State Rep for AARP gave a presentation and gave us his impressions of his experience thus far and gave us some helpful tips as to how to proceed with our service once we get to sight. Communication and networking are big big big. We also had some cross-cultural discussions about our service and discussions about realistic expectations for our future projects.
After the meeting our Cluster took the opportunity to get cell phones and to take advantage of the free WiFi in McDonald’s. I got a Double Cheeseburger Menu with Fanta, which is something that I haven’t eaten in years, but damn it was good after a week of different kinds of sausage and kielbasa and hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise based salads.
What are my first impressions after a week of training? Peace Corps is no joke. It’s tough to be thrust into a family setting where you don’t speak the language and then to start class at 9 am and get home after 6 pm when you are trying to get by in an unfamiliar language in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar food and stimuli. I am exhausted every night after dinner and then I have to retreat to my room and study Russian for a couple of hours, but I am loving every minute of it. It’s tough, but for me, the Peace Corps motto seems to be right on. It’s the toughest job you will ever love. I don’t regret making the decision to do this at all. I know that there will be times when I will regret it, or hate it, but when all is said and done, you pick yourself back up and get on with it. I really do believe this will be a great adventure.
The days leading up to ‘the big departure’ were pretty tough. I had a lot of trouble balancing seeing and spending time with people and actually getting the administrative stuff done that I needed to get done. I think this succeeded in elevating my stress level a lot, because I knew I had to get a lot of stuff done and nothing was getting done. The biggest help was spending an afternoon with Louise wherein I brought over all the stuff that I wanted to bring and she packed it. She packed a lot of it, but now that I am settled at my family’s house in a small village in Ukraine, I have since realized that I brought way too many clothes. I’ll probably be thankfully for that later, but damn those bags were heavy.
The anxieties I was experiencing were completely normal, but that didn’t make the last days any easier. Packing with the timeframe of two years with a limit of 100 pounds hanging over your head is really daunting. Making sure that you’ve remembered to get all your administrative paperwork done so something doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass later. Making sure you are spending enough time with the people you care about, because you never know what might happen in those 2 years that you are away. It’s a lot to handle. Turns out when you get to the first day of training, you aren’t the only one freaking out. Everyone is.
I think the BEST thing I did was go a day early to DC. Yes, it gave me a chance to see my brother before I left, and I did NOT sleep that first night in DC, but the next morning, I got up early and was able to get all of the paperwork that I had been avoiding done (I think, I hope). Student loans have been deferred, state taxes have been file, Peace Corps paperwork has been filled out, bills paid, etc., etc., etc.
By a little before noon when I headed down to check-out of my room and then re-check-in with the Peace Corps group I was starting to feel like I was bristling with a bit less anxiety.
Oddly enough the first few people that I talked to as I was checking and in our ‘luggage room’ turned out to be 3 out of the 4 people who would later be my ‘cluster’ during training. A Peace Corps Cluster is a group of 5 people that you are grouped with throughout your training and throughout your term of service. This is your new family. I just thought it was kind of odd that out of the 77 people milling around, these were the people that I met first. The other odd sentiment that I was having was that I felt like I had already met or that I knew A LOT of the people that I was meeting for the first time. Also odd, but extremely refreshing was that probably a third of the volunteers were my parents age or older. Not so odd, everyone was extremely anxious and worried about the same exact stuff that I had been feeling stress over. (At least I didn’t have to sell my house before I left, car yes, but some of these people sold houses pre-departure, whoa). This was also refreshing… We were all in the same boat, and nobody had any idea what was going on.
We went on to spend the day split into 2 groups/rooms with roughly 40 volunteers in each. We discussed the Peace Corps, our anxieties and did some group bonding exercises. Peace Corps handed out money cards with 140 bucks on it to cover our incidentals, extra baggage fees, dinner, tipping to the hotel staff and bus drivers, etc. and told us to go retrieve the money now, because we probably wouldn’t have the chance to do so I in Ukraine. I met my roommate for the night, D,who was nice enough to slip me some Tryptophan since I had not slept in 2 nights. Then I hit the road and had dinner with Kelly, where she further put me at ease seeing how she went through this when she left for PC Senegal. I can’t say that I slept through the night, but I did sleep that night which is a lot better than the 2 nights of no sleep before.
Departure day I was feeling a lot better, things were falling into place and we were getting ready to go. I ducked out for a walk to grab one last bagel and coffee before leaving. I had passed a small park with a hill full of daffodils and cherry blossoms (in Georgetown) Tree Hill Park and had decided that that would be a good place to eat a bagel and drink some coffee. Got to the top, ate my bagel and decided to call my mom, because I thought she would get a kick out of the fact that a third of the new volunteers were her age or older. My mom gave me the news I think I had been waiting to hear, the news that my grandfather had died the night before. Oddly enough, I can’t explain how, but I kind of knew that it was going to happen. I knew someone was going to die the night before I left. I also knew I couldn’t get too upset over it. I just had to tell myself, that this is what he would have wanted for himself. He was miserable in the nursing home. It’s hard to think about it this way, but it really is the best thing for everyone.
The ride to the airport, and the flight in general, weren’t really noteworthy except that I shuffled a few things in my bags and managed to avoid the $150 overweight bag fee. I think it was close and she just decided to waive it. Frankfurt airport was annoying, we got off the plane and went through security only to arrive at our gate and have to go through security again. There also wasn’t a bathroom by the gate, so if you wanted to go, you had to go out and then go through security again. At least you could leave your carry-ons with someone else and not have to worry about that part of the hassle.
Once we arrived in Kiev, they loaded us all up on 2 buses and drove us 2 hours into the Chernihiv Oblast (region) for our first 2-days of training at a ‘wooded retreat’. The place where they took us was a former Soviet ‘resort’. The key-word being Soviet. I would liken it more to a summer camp, a Soviet summer camp that was probably at its prime in the 80s. Three people shared a room and I shared with the two girls in my cluster Kim and Cassie (Cassie is also from Connecticut). It was warm enough in the room, we even had hot water, but it smelled very damp and moldy. The cafeteria was always freezing. The auditorium was slightly warmer, but I use the word slight and there were mosquitoes everywhere in there. Resort this was not, but then again, this is the Peace Corps and giving us a crash course on being cold and uncomfortable was probably necessary for some people. The Peace Corps Boot Camp has begun.
My cluster consists of Kim (Bronxville, NY from Delaware), Cassie (from Shelton, CT), John (Pittsburgh, PA), and Conor (Salt Lake City, UT, he is also 6’7” tall). Our Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator (LCF) is named Natasha, and our Technical and Cross-Cultural Facilitator (TCF) is named Sveta. Our Cluster is linked to another Cluster located in the city of Chernihiv. Our Link Cluster is part of the Senior Program made up of women primarily my parent’s age.
Family/First Impressions/Easter
After being here a little over a week, it feels like we have been here for months. When we got dropped off in our village our Mamas picked us up and we walked to our houses. We all headed off to Russian speaking houses. I was placed in the Nehai (Knee-high) family with Mama Leana, Papa Valera and their two teenage daughters Katya (19 years) and Tanya (16 years). They have a guard dog named Amour who is chained in a pen in the driveway separate from the gated entrance. I think he’s all bark and no bite, but I haven’t and probably won’t test that theory. After a week he knows my voice enough where he’ll stop barking if I tell him to ‘Knock it off!’. They also have a grey poof of a cat named Tisha.
Their house is nice. They have a sizable yard and garden in the back and my bedroom is on the ground floor with the entryway, living room and kitchen. Upstairs, I’m not really sure about. Their bedrooms are all up there, but I haven’t seen them. At the top of the stairs is a den with the TV and the computer/internet. The house only has one bathroom and it is in the basement at the bottom of a very steep flight of stairs. I go down backwards, I think it’s the only way I am going to get down without taking a spill at some point in the next three months.
Leana and Valera like gardening and it seems like they grow a lot of the vegetables and fruits that we have been eating. I’ve been eating rather well. I won’t starve anyhow here at the Nehai’s. Bread and salt are a traditional part of the Ukrainian meal. Salt is plentiful due to a shortage in the past and bread is NOT to be wasted because it is a symbol that Ukraine survived the Great Famine that was engineered by Stalin during the time that he forced farm collectivization. Three to five million Ukrainians died of starvation while surrounded by fields of wheat and stocked government storehouses. Ukraine borders were reportedly shut to prevent people from leaving during this time. Many historians believe that the famine was part of the Soviet leadership’s strategy to solve the ‘nationality’ problem with certain countries.
The Nehai’s have had six previous volunteers so mealtimes consist of a lot of different dishes that we serve ourselves. Thankfully, they haven’t been serving me big plates of food that I wouldn’t be able to eat, seeing as we were told preemptively not to waste food and to eat everything that you are served. I arrived on Good Friday and apparently in an Orthodox household Easter is celebrated from midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning through to 5 am. So I guess I missed it, because I wasn’t invited to the church and I slept that night. That’s fine, I really needed the sleep. But from what I’ve gathered the family goes to church around midnight with a basket of samplings of the Easter feast (having a nicely presented basket is important). The priest blesses the Easter food that is presented in the basket, then the families celebrate Mass, and then go home to celebrate with a huge feast. Then they all go to sleep around 5 in the morning following the feast.
The typical contents of the Easter Basket that they present at the church is Paska (Easter Bread), Pysanky (Easter Eggs), Krashanky (Dyed Eggs – variety of colors, but there must be a red one), Eggs (hard-boiled and peeled), Salt (small amount), Butter (should be nicely shaped and decorated with cloves), Cheese (Sweet Cheese – mixture of farmer’s cheese with confectionary sugar, raisons, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg), Horseradish, Kielbasa.
I woke around 9 on Easter and the Papa was waiting up for me. He served me a small feast of the leftovers and a glass of wine. Wine and morning coffee, an odd combination, but do I ever refuse a glass of wine? The red wine in Ukraine is typical a sweet red wine. What he laid out on the breakfast table was a HUGE amount of food. There were hard-boiled eggs, Paska (which to me tastes and has a similar consistency to French Brioche, but with raisins in it), there were some battered and pan-fried fish cakes, pan-fried sausage cakes, some blood sausage, ground pork pastries, and some mayonnaise-y salads. But the one thing I didn’t try was some kind of gelatinous chicken or pork bowl. I think they boil chicken or pork fat into a kind of soup and then let it cool into a gelatinous blob. I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s apparently a delicacy. They eat it just straight up.
We ate again as a family (minus Mama, she is a nurse and apparently had to work on Easter Sunday) with Katya’s boyfriend Yuri. So the whole spread came out again, as did the wine and a bottle of cognac and Papa made toasts while he and Yuri downed the cognac. Us girls, drank wine and certainly didn’t down it in one gulp like they were doing with the cognac. We sat around the table for awhile, and then Katya sent me upstairs to use the internet. (I should mention that Katya is studying to be an English teacher at the University so she actually speaks English really well). The rest of the day we kind of hung around the house. Then everybody dispersed and left me alone, but not before they fed me a meal by myself. (They seem to feed me a lot by myself, and I can’t quite figure out if it is because they are just busy, or if they are worried that I am hungry, or what, but I seem to eat a lot by myself).
Easter Monday is also a holiday, but not for Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). We had four hours of intensive language study, followed by Community Mapping wherein we walked around the village and identified important buildings and where each of the other volunteers lived. Apparently in our village there are 2 larger Convenience Stores and one small one. A School (brand new building built in 2008), and Village Administration building, a Post Office, and a Medical Clinic. Starry Bilose has a population of roughly 2,500 people. The school, as we would later find out with our visit, has approximately 180 students from ages 6 through 17. The community also has two churches, one Orthodox and one Baptist.
Our village is named after the river that flows through town is and means something along the lines Old Village by the river. Apparently there have been prehistoric artifacts found in the community and the best estimate is that our village has been around since Stone Age. The community was officially created 860 years ago.
This past week was filled with intensive language consisting of 4 hours a day, Monday through Friday, then we also had Technical and Cross-Cultural training, as well as our Health day where we got another immunization and then our Health and Medical overview. Our days are very full. When I get home at night for dinner, I am usually exhausted. One night I got home around 5, I ate, and then I was fighting to stay awake at 6. I nodded off, but then forced myself to do my mandatory reading and study Russian.
We also had Technical meetings with the local school staff and local administration. We were introduced to the English teachers and the school Headmaster and the majority of the students and were taken on a tour of the school facilities. We were invited to come to the school during the school days to use the internet lab and the cafeteria. Apparently, we can eat in the cafeteria at lunch for 4 Hryvnia. After our tour, we discussed with the English teachers their needs and what we kind of projects that we could work on with the school. The students start taking English lessons in their 2nd Form (age 7). They have a state of the art language lab, an auditorium, and outside they have basketball courts and a turf soccer field as well as a playground. It’s up for discussion, but we should meet with the English teachers again some time this week to start discussing what kind of projects would be realistic for us to work on with the students seeing as their school year ends at the end of May and we are only here in Starry Bilose through mid-June.
After our visit at the school, we met with the Village Council President and introduced ourselves to him in Russian. (These were very basic introductions: My name is; I am from America, State of Connecticut, town of Windsor; I am a Peace Corps Volunteer; I am a Manager by profession). He introduced Starry Bilose and we discussed what we could contribute to the town. Apparently, the big problems that he listed off were garbage (there is a lot of litter and the community only has a garbage pick up once a month); the roads (only the main road is paved, the rest are dirt); and lack of a kindergarten. We will be planting trees and flowers at the new medical clinic on Tuesday and helping with a town wide clean-up on Saturday the 17th (Soobotnik - Earth Day). We are going to put our heads together regarding the kindergarten, we having been discussing tag-team Babushka daycare.
The Village Council President’s name is Nikolai Nehai. Apparently, he is distantly related to my family, but they aren’t sure how. Anyhow, he is an interesting character, a bit of a renegade. He got word that people were planning on building summer houses (dachas) down by the river. They were set to start building on a certain day and he got up in the middle of the night and planted a whole bunch of trees so that they were unable to build there. I think it will be interesting working with him.
We also made a trip to Chernihiv on Thursday to attend our first formal Technical session where we attend with the entire group of Community Development Volunteers. One of the Senior Volunteers, Jud, who has been here for a year already and in his former life was the Maine State Rep for AARP gave a presentation and gave us his impressions of his experience thus far and gave us some helpful tips as to how to proceed with our service once we get to sight. Communication and networking are big big big. We also had some cross-cultural discussions about our service and discussions about realistic expectations for our future projects.
After the meeting our Cluster took the opportunity to get cell phones and to take advantage of the free WiFi in McDonald’s. I got a Double Cheeseburger Menu with Fanta, which is something that I haven’t eaten in years, but damn it was good after a week of different kinds of sausage and kielbasa and hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise based salads.
What are my first impressions after a week of training? Peace Corps is no joke. It’s tough to be thrust into a family setting where you don’t speak the language and then to start class at 9 am and get home after 6 pm when you are trying to get by in an unfamiliar language in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar food and stimuli. I am exhausted every night after dinner and then I have to retreat to my room and study Russian for a couple of hours, but I am loving every minute of it. It’s tough, but for me, the Peace Corps motto seems to be right on. It’s the toughest job you will ever love. I don’t regret making the decision to do this at all. I know that there will be times when I will regret it, or hate it, but when all is said and done, you pick yourself back up and get on with it. I really do believe this will be a great adventure.
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