Big Dirt (end of July)

I was home for a week, just long enough to do lots of laundry, paperwork and planning, a bit of exercise, and sit around in my underwear in my apartment, sweating by day and being eaten alive by mosquitoes at night, since I have to leave my balcony door open to have any chance of a breeze, and windows don’t have screens here. I went with Matt and Anya to a place in the river where you can lounge in the rapids—it was worth the 3 hours public transport to get there, and the hour waiting to hitchhike back, to be able to immerse myself in a cool body of water. I also went with Kamilia and her son to another local watering hole, a little closer but more prosaic; it was a large pond with a sandy bottom and grassy banks, located on the grounds of a children’s camp. When I wasn’t home sitting around sweating in my underwear (which I seem to have done a lot of this ridiculously hot summer, including right now as I type this), my social engagements included sitting on a bench in the park with Pasha, Marina, and anyone else who happened to walk by, once it had cooled off enough in the evening to venture outdoors. I will need to channel “The Giver” and store these hot summer days in my memory, for use later when I am freezing in an unheated apartment come winter.

Camp IKNOW preparations were stressful, since I was supposed to bring two students, but the second one kept changing, as kids chicken out or parents changed their minds. Finally I called Kamilia and asked if her best student wanted to come. She is only entering 7th form, which made her the youngest student at camp and disadvantaged linguistically, because many students were in 9-11th forms and some had just graduated. But she earned herself a niche as a little fairy princess for being so cute and braiding all the counselors’ hair after day 3 or 4 with no shower. She is not shy and does what she wants no matter what you tell her, but I still think she got something out of camp so I’m satisfied. (I was worried on the train when I asked what she’d done at camp before, and she said “rested,” and on the first day when she said she had a headache and was laying in her tent once lessons started, but I let her rest for ten minutes and she got up by herself.)

My other student was a gem, all the counselors agreed. Her tent leaked, she slept in a cold wet sleeping bag, her favorite shirt got a stain from another wet shirt whose color bled onto it—I came up with the brilliant solution for her to tie-dye that shirt instead of a white one, so no one would notice the stain—but she never complained. She filled up buckets from the well several times a day, volunteered to wash dishes even when her team wasn’t on duty, confided in me that she learned at camp many things she had unknowingly done before to hurt the environment that she wanted to change (which she put into practice the day we saw her carrying all her candies from town in her hands, having politely declined a plastic bag), and was a rock star bouncer/money collector/public relations representative on the night of our eco-disco fundraiser.

I headed up Team Blue with Ashley, another volunteer, and our four girls were so sweet and hard-working, even when we made them peel and chop vegetables for an hour, or mop the floor by hand, or go talk to everyone they saw on the day we did community needs assessment. That makes it sound like camp was horrible, but actually it was really fun. We started each day with morning wake-up call (the anthem for which became this ridiculous song called “Running on the Beach” that is an inside joke with Peter and Katy’s family) and mandatory exercise (students could choice between running or another activity, usually games, except I did yoga on the last day). Teams had different cooking duties each day, but Team Blue distinguished itself with tasty dishes, especially “Mexican Night” (for which the beans were delivered pre-cooked by the director of the Center who we ran into at the bazaar), and I was proud of our inventive use of leftovers. We slept in tents and had to lug water from a neighbor’s well for cooking and washing, but we had the Eco Center building for classes, so it was a pretty nice set-up.

Classes were on leadership, Project Design and Management (we went through all the steps and the students actually completed a project of their own design, an eco-disco to raise money to install trash cans on the beach; at the disco they also organized a trivia game with prizes to educate participants), and specific problems related to the environment in Ukraine. We also had morning and evening games, campfires on the nights it didn’t rain, and an excursion to a local castle.

On the last night we had a shashlik celebration with real s’mores (I demonstrated proper marshmallow roasting technique)! The meat wasn’t ready till 10 pm (at which point I busted out my handy headlamp to see my food), so we ate Peter’s birthday cake first and did affirmations, taping a piece of paper to everyone’s back and writing nice things about them.

Quite apart from the kids having a good time, the counselors had a lot of fun too, adopting orphan kittens and reminiscing about Little House on the Prairie, and getting caught in a downpour on our way back from a grocery run at the bazaar. A FLEX alum came and talked to the students about opportunities to study in America, and their enthusiasm was catching (she also taught them cheerleading, for which they got equally excited). One morning we were awoken at 6 am by two boys who had climbed to the balcony of the eco-center to remove the flag and run around singing the Ukrainian national anthem. That was an interesting cultural difference being out west—students rebuked me for using Russian words! I countered by saying Surjik is a cultural reality where I live in Ukraine. My girls and I were the last group to leave—besides the leaders Katy and Peter—so we helped clean up camp and then had a Ukrainian-style farewell with the directors: tea and chocolates and fruit on the front lawn.