Kickin' it in K-town

The last weeks of training were very busy. We successfully conducted our teacher seminar and I co-taught a lesson on the royal family with more observers than pupils, but miraculously was not nervous and actually enjoyed it. We sang “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” and played “Hot Crown” to practice prepositions using royal commands. The teachers all received packets with the resources Bilky/Borova created, including a guide to lesson planning using the communicative method, audio CDs with recorded textbook dialogues and fairy-tales, and pictures of famous sites in the U.S. and Britain with written English descriptions. I went on a day-trip to Kiev with Sean and Alia, and we ended up hanging out with some volunteers we met that day at Peace Corps office, an exercise in spontaneity I thoroughly enjoyed. I love when opportunities for adventures big and small present themselves. We also ran into a PCV who married a Ukrainian and was in Kiev to obtain his green card before they fly to the States. Later that week we had another fieldtrip to Kiev, this one a Peace Corps sponsored visit to the English Resource Center maintained by the U.S. Embassy at the University. Our teacher left us at the wrong metro and never bothered to apologize or admit to her mistake, which was slightly infuriating. More information on the finer points of that lady is available upon request. This is not the proper place for such carryings-on. After our LPI we enjoyed our last night at Next, the Internet café we know and love. I even thanked the waitress for putting up with us for the past 2 months, and said we wouldn’t be coming back. So she laughed when I walked in the door the next day with Lauren, who had to send a quick e-mail—clearly we just couldn’t get enough of the place! Right before that, a total stranger turned around on the middle of the stairs in the “department store” and handed Lauren a bejeweled plant for no reason. We were still standing confused on the corner as she waved good-bye. Strange things happen in Ukraine.

My goodbye luncheon on Sunday was so nice—the local historian was there, even though it was his 80th birthday, 2 of Olya’s friends whom I had never met were also there, and they brought Olya’s grandson with them. Everyone made long toasts to my health and happiness and success, and we sat at the table all afternoon…a few hours into the meal, one of the woman’s daughters showed up, pregnant, with her husband, because the woman called them and told them to come meet the American. They were a young couple and very nice, so we chatted about the American health system and Ukrainian politics. Right before they left, Olya called them back in so they could all have a good laugh together over what I insisted was my winter coat. The girl promised to meet me in Kiev the next day and give me her old coat. Peoples’ generosity never ceases to amaze me. On my saint’s day, Andrei and his wife stopped by to bring me flowers and stayed for dinner. My full name in Ukrainian, following the system of patronymics, is pronounced Katerina Pavlivna Yavorski.

On Monday morning, Olya enlisted a neighbor to help us carry my stuff down to the school to meet the bus that didn’t quite take us to Kiev. It broke down every 5 minutes because it was too cold out, so we had to commandeer a marshrutka driver to take our stuff and us to the Swearing In Conference; but the marshrutka was half the size of the previous bus, so I ended up sitting on a pile of precariously shifting luggage for the rest of the trip. Monday after lunch was site announcement: all 112 trainees gathered in the conference hall and Peace Corps unveiled a map of Ukraine, listing off the future volunteers in each region. The rest of the conference was organized by region, so Bilky as a collective ceased to be. We still ate all our meals together though, and it seemed to me that most people stuck with their training groups. I met a few new people, but I’ve yet to formally meet the majority of Group 37. At night we hung out in our pjs and speculated on our new lives. Sara is not far from Russia, Sean landed in a beautiful resort city known for its proud maintenance of Ukrainian culture, Lauren is across the Carpathians and off the map as the first volunteer in a small town—I imagine a braided Heidi carrying well-water with the help of a wooden yoke to a cabin in the mountains—and Alia and I are in mid-sized towns in the western central part of the country. All anyone could tell me about Kozyatyn was that it is a major railway hub, which bodes well for future travel, but kept conjuring images of post-Soviet industrial sprawl to mind. I just liked that it starts off with “kozy,” and that my counterpart’s last name was “Mocha-lova.”

The next day we met our counterparts, although mine has been at a sanatorium with her daughter for a month (at first my regional manager said in rehab, which prompted some interesting speculation on my part, but then she clarified that it was a rest for health reasons) so another English teacher from my school came to the conference instead. She has bright red hair, which I liked, because for the rest of the conference she was easy to spot. I also took an immediate liking to her, which was a relief. We were all nervous to meet our future co-workers, since a willing counterpart can be such a great help during a volunteer’s service. During the next few days, we had sessions on teaching about HIV/AIDS, applying for grants for community projects, and dealing with the reality—and paperwork—involved with living on a stipend that averages to about $5 a day for all expenses other than housing. It was bitterly cold all week, so I was actually quite glad that the coat drop-off worked out.

The Swearing-In Ceremony itself elicited more emotion from me than I thought it would. My friend Sara sang the National Anthem, new volunteers gave speeches in Ukrainian and Russian, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and the Minister of Education both spoke, we stood and collectively gave our oath of service (swearing, among other things, to faithfully uphold the Constitution of the United States of America), and at that moment I officially became a Peace Corps Volunteer. After dealing with (insert impolite epithet) Ed, and the T-stan fiasco, and every other bump in the road, it felt good to have finally made it…to the starting point. There was a reception afterwards, and Olya took off work to come, which was so sweet of her. Then the PCVs began unceremoniously heading off to site.

Of course, the bus I was on got stuck in standstill traffic, and we watched the time tick away until, one by one, everyone missed his or her respective train. Four hours later, we got back to where we started, and had to spend another night in the dormitory, in the same rooms we had been in for the conference, the sheets still rumpled from our hasty departure. Honestly, the worst part was knowing that I’d have to go through the whole luggage loading and unloading process again the next day—that and the fact that I could have been to my site and back in the time we spent stuck in Kiev traffic. Lauren, Sean, and Nikita had also been stuck on unlucky buses, so after expensive, disappointing Chinese food we watched “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and went to bed. I played Bananagrams in the train station the next day with other PCVs as we waited for our trains—Peace Corps was taking no chances this time and had sent everyone hours ahead of schedule. A porter loaded up a cart with all my bags and I breathed a small sigh of relief when I took my seat on the train next to my counterpart—at first the conductor didn’t want to let us on, because Peace Corps paid for only two tickets (on the train that we missed the day before, they had bought four to fit my luggage as well, but they tried to save money on everyone the second time around). I played Christmas music on my i-Pod and shared the headphones with Olena. The next hurdle would be to successfully exit the train with all my bags—now including a giant babuysia bag with the Peace Corps-issued space heater—in the two minute stop at my station. Luckily people are nice, and handed my stuff to me on the platform. My school director and Aleksiy Oleksiyovich, the Physics teacher, met us at the station, and we took a taxi to my apartment. The heat had been turned off for three days, and it was freezing. The building itself has no central heat, so even with the space heater and a small wall-mounted heater plugged in, I still resorted to long underwear, wool socks, and my new down sleeping bag for the next week. Mr. Fix-it, as he will later come to be known, showed me how the gas and hot water worked, and I was left alone in my new apartment at 10 pm. I did a little happy dance for my newfound freedom, admired the sparkly wallpaper, and went to bed.

The first week was full of interesting mishaps as I gradually dealt with one new problem after another in my apartment. I’ve had a lingering, but mostly mild, cold pretty much all winter, which cycles through varying phases of severity. It didn’t help that the first week I had very little need of my ancient refrigerator (I’m pretty sure it was manufactured in the 1950s, maybe it’s even the original model, and it makes a noise like a freight train every 20 minutes), as my entire apartment functioned like a giant fridge. What I was in need of, however, as my counterpart Olena informed me, was spreading mustard paste on the bottoms of my feet to cure my cold. She even bought it for me so I obliged. It yielded a slight tingling sensation, so no harm done. Then she decided to bring me berries from the snowball tree—yes, it does exist!—to make a curative tea, but when she knocked on my door I couldn’t open it. I heard a small tinkling as a little brass bit from my lock fell to the floor, and the key refused to enter the lock. I was trapped in my freezing cold apartment, and she was stuck in the dark hallway bearing snowball berries. What to do but lower my key out the 3rd storey window for her to try from the other side? Luckily I had decided not to throw away that ball of twine I found in my apartment when unpacking and had doubted I would ever need. Unfortunately, though, someone had something magnetic on a 2nd floor balcony, because the key kept getting sucked into it, so I finally just yelled “Oberezhno” and tossed it in the snow with string attached. She couldn’t open the door either though, so Mr. Fix-it came and open-sesamed the stupid thing, but the lock was definitely broken. The next day I had to close the top lock with the help of a screwdriver to twist the skeleton key in place until he came after school to install a new lock. I carried the screwdriver in my purse all day. Mr. Fix-it had earlier been called to my apartment to make the boiler work (though that was just me being stupid, because faucets in Ukraine do not always yield hot water when turned to the left where the little red symbol is, but sometimes inexplicably switch things up and have hot water emerge from the faucet with the blue mark that clearly indicates “cold” in the rest of the world), although I did not tell him that and instead decided to pretend that he was magical and could fix anything.

In my apartment I can have either hot air or hot water, because I must unplug the heater in order to turn on the boiler and keep things from blowing up, i.e. not use too much electricity at one time. Then I wait an hour and magically have hot water till it runs out. Sometimes it’s not very hot, or sometimes there’s no water at all, like the time I had just gotten in the shower (which by the way has wallpaper instead of tiles lining the sides, which just seems like a bad idea) and the water turned off, and I was left wet and cold and grumpily decided to heat up water on the stove for a bucket bath, but then right as I was about to use it, the water came back on, so I finished my shower and then used the boiled water to soak my feet with another packet of the mustard paste as I sipped snowball berry tea and thoroughly enjoyed the vagaries of life. I also learned to make a frying pan out of some odds’n’ends in the kitchen, and that a broom handle and some gymnastics can successfully retrieve the metal wrench-like bit that turns on the gas for the stove, when it unexpectedly falls behind said stove. It is not uncommon for water or electricity to go off in Ukrainian apartments, so I spent one night without heat (my heater is electric) in every pair of long underwear and wool socks that I own, under all the wool blankets in my apartment plus my sleeping bag, and thus conquered my fear of dying from the cold. I also cooked vareniky using the light from my headlamp when the power went out. Who needs electricity? Ukraine is the land of milk and honey—or at least the place where I’ve learned to appreciate a glass of freshly boiled milk sweetened with honey to sooth a sore throat.

My apartment (usually) has running water and electricity and a functioning indoor toilet. I’ve seen several wells at houses near the center of town though, so not everyone in Kozyatyn has running water. I get hot water in the bathroom by turning on the boiler, but the hot water faucet in the kitchen is dry, and some people don’t have hot water at all. Visible discrepancies in wealth seen at close quarters are always interesting to me. Even within families whose houses are in the same complex or within walking distance, one might have no running water or an outhouse, whereas the other has a Jacuzzi, microwave, and flat screen TV. I’m still debating the relative merits of using boiled tap water, since Olena says she even cooks with clean drinking water that is sold in 6 liter bottles, and I’ve read that boiling can concentrate some trace heavy metals in the water supply to unsafe percentages--but maybe a dash of arsenic, beryllium, and mercury will make up for the spices I wasn’t able to add to the chili I made today. Kozyatyn has roughly 25,000 residents, 3 supermarkets, at least 2 streets with Soviet names like Lenin and Red Army, a small daily bazaar and a big bazaar on the weekends, a park, and various other stores and administrative buildings in its relatively compact center. Perhaps my favorite observation to date has been the daily sighting of parents dragging small children, groceries, and sundry items through the snow on wooden toboggans, a preferred method of transport in a town with no snowplows and plenty of snow. I also saw a woman exit the bazaar via horse and buggy today. The most unnerving bazaar purchase for me is always eggs, which are sold loose in a plastic bag, to which you then add your other purchases and navigate the crowd and make it home and marvel that none have cracked. Everyday activities take longer here: cooking, cleaning, getting to where you need to go... I’m never bored because I rarely finish all the things on my to-do list. I live in the center but my school is in the burbs, so I can either walk 40 minutes through ice and snow and bitter wind—or slush and giant puddles after a thaw—or take a 20-minute bus ride. The bus almost never comes when it is supposed to, however, and it is not fun waiting for it in the cold, so I may try to start walking soon. One early morning as I waited for the bus it was so cold the air was clouded with a weird sort of haze, but the sunrise seen through it was breathtaking.

My first week at site my oblast had another quarantine, so instead of observing lessons I prepared the top students for Olympiad, an English competition. I spent 9 hours on Sunday helping the local English teachers with Olympiad, which took place at School #1, which I can see out my window. I read the listening portion for the 11th graders, made the answer key with the teachers, corrected all the student essays, and listened to their speaking portion as well. That was all well and good, except that it seemed more arbitrary and less impartial than a competition should be, especially designing the answer key, because there was definitely room for ambiguity in some of the more poorly worded questions. I networked a little with teachers from other schools and then literally sat for hours while they tabulated the results. That part was less fun. My second week was the last week before winter break. Classes only went until Wednesday, and the teachers were frantically entering grades in the class journals, which were also due by that date, so I still didn’t get to observe any regular lessons, but I did get to know the students a little through some activities we did while the teachers worked. I also ended up teaching an entire class when my counterpart never came back after a meeting during the break. The bell rang, all the students stared at me expectantly since I was in the front of the room, and I silently debated for a minute or two whether or not I could feasibly ignore them, before deciding it was better if I pretended like I knew what was going on. On the last day I showed “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” on the new projector using my flash drive hooked up to the school computer, demonstrating a pretty snazzy confluence of technologies for a PCV.

Coming soon: a Christmas story!