Not a Peep

My first two-hour run was awesome! I went way the heck out of town but somehow found a highway that looped back, ran past my school, and all over the place. The wind out in the fields was ridiculously strong. My second two-hour run was accidental, and afterwards I was pretty sure I gave myself Achilles tendonitis. My heel had been hurting for a week since that run. I took a gamble on another loop road that didn’t pay off, finally asked for directions in a cemetery (I was informed that I was very far away from where I wanted to be), and had to turn back past all the tractors and trains and empty stretches of windswept fields with babuysias on bicycles I had seen before. (PCMO text update: I did inflame my tendon, but it was the “Tibialis Posterior” rather than the “Achilles,” thank you very much).

Palm Sunday is actually Willow Sunday in Ukraine, because willow branches are blessed instead. I went to the Catholic mass upon Lena’s invitation, but didn’t actually see her there till halfway through the service, so I sat in the choir with Kamilia. We both went for “Religion, Round 2” at our friends’ church (of the Nazarene), which was in Russian (but I understood some metaphors about girls in miniskirts and coaches in boxing rings). Several of my friends stood to speak at different points. I enjoyed the informality of the service, which was held in the same basement room where we have our English club. We all met up at Kamilia’s later, and Nadia came from Vinnystia! Dinner was followed by karaoke, and on the way home, Pasha said he could tell I was American by the way I walked, which oddly offended me (I like to pretend I keep the neon “Obvious American” sign to a dull glow). Then he explained it was because I don’t wear heels everywhere, and I couldn’t argue with that. As much as I admire pretty shoes, I’m not enough of a masochist to actually wear them on a daily basis.

I took the bus to school on Tuesday, an indicator of how much my foot was hurting. I sat next to my director and used the opportunity for some detective work on the Internet mystery (Financial or technical problem? Status: unresolved). On Wednesday in Kiev I scored a free shirt from the drop box, got my heel checked out by a PC doc since I was in the office anyway (he said nothing serious, just overworked), and explored headquarters, but the office was eerily empty, as all had gone to welcome the new group of volunteers arriving that day. I did chat a bit with the director, his wife, and the #2 guy on their way out, and had pelmeni with squash sauce for lunch with the HIV project coordinator. I then ambled through Kiev for 2 hours on my way to an embassy-sponsored training on using blogs and wikis in the classroom, most of which wasn’t new to me, but I’m still glad I went. I called Olga (the pregnant girl who gave me her coat in December) and waited for an hour to rendez-vous at the metro for an hour’s stroll through the botanical gardens. Her son is now one month old.

Next stop: Odessa! I found my way to the couchsurfing address, Susanna let me in to her apartment at 6 a.m., and then we both went back to sleep. Later we compared life philosophies before her friend came with precisely half an outfit, and then we strolled around the streets laughing at the looks she got. City of humor, indeed. I bought a ridiculous sparkly cowboy hat to avoid being totally eclipsed, but it kept flying off my head. We met up with more of Susanna’s friends and went to a basement practice room with dusty cement walls, floor, ceiling, and pillars; some played cards while others rocked out and I marveled at the serendipity of my life. Back at Susanna’s, we watched “South Park” in Russian, drank, and ate sunflower seeds. I am constantly in awe of the patience Ukrainians exhibit for gnawing at the shells to extract the tiny seed, over and over again, for endless hours of entertainment. I was also the only one not taking straight shots. Substances flowed free and pure. The next day I waited till 1 p.m. and she was still not up, so I left a note and went for a liberating solo stroll about town and along the Black Sea, and had a photo sesh at the Potemkin steps. I didn’t feel like being too touristy though, so I called Susanna on a whim and asked if she would cut my hair (she had mentioned before that she was a part-time hairdresser, so now I have bangs for the first time since kindergarten) and then I listened to another jam session before baking an apple crisp and rushing to my train. The pregnant daughter and her mother in my compartment were wearing matching sweatsuits for the journey. I’m pretty sure my feel smelled bad, but I’m sadly ok with being a smelly kid in Ukraine. Laundry especially is overrated.

I sought out flowers in Kiev for Olha before taking the elektrishka to Bilky and helping with the tail end of Pasca (Easter bread) baking. Olha and I caught up and made vareniky before I went to bed at 8 p.m., got up at 1 a.m., walked half an hour to Borova in the dark with our basket, placed it in the queue around the church, and went inside to stand for the (short) 3 hour version (some people come at midnight and stand all night). Orthodox interior design was what I’d call “divine chaos,” icons covering every inch of the walls with no apparent logic, and newcomers pushing forward to light candles and bump chins with a fancy icon on an altar in the front. The priests circled and prayed in a front room, occasionally popping out to throw a blessing at the crowd, which exclaimed and prostrated itself in unison (me doing everything backwards, Catholic style from left to right), and likewise whenever the chorus repeated, well…the chorus. There was communion for the really devout, and the rest got to kiss the cross. I welcomed the bowing as a covert forward bend (stretch and shake it out, hallelujah). The structure wasn’t as clear as a Catholic mass, but there did appear to be some kind of gospel, during which the priest entreated the congregation to understand their faith.

The blessing of the baskets was the most beautiful thing I have seen in Ukraine. As we stood in the dark cold and a light drizzle, a line of baskets lit by candles snaked around the church, and the priestly procession perambulated thrice before liberally dousing us all with holy water. We ate the main Easter meal at 6 a.m. (first the blessed things, beating our eggs, cutting with the holy knife, and saving the holy crumbs) and went to bed till noon. Ate, slept, ate. I hung out in pajamas with 2 old ladies all day, complaining about aches and pains and eating some more. It was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend the holiday. Andrei the history guy/octogenarian and his wife came for a late afternoon visit, and then I caught the last train home.

On Easter Monday I went on a walk with Pasha, Slava, and Marina. In Ukrainian, the verb “to walk” is equivalent with the concept of “to hang out with,” but it also usually quite literally entails walking around town. I also formulated a theory on American obesity as opposed to the infuriatingly fatless European physique; it states that Ukrainians work harder for their food, so it takes longer and therefore they eat less. Case in point: symuchkiy, or sunflower seeds, are something of a national obsession here. Ukrainians keep handfuls in their pockets at all times, and expertly extract each individual nut from its shell with their teeth, one after another, without end. As an American who values convenience and quantity, I haven’t yet accepted symuchkiy as suitable snackage—it’s way too much work for way too little food. My friends drank juice and ate dried fish (to get at the meat of which you have to peel off the skin as well) and cheese, whereas I opted for prepackaged ice cream. Theory, confirmed. We sat in the park, walked around the island where the stadium is, and proceeded to get the song “Running, Running” stuck in each other’s heads.

April Showers Bring...the tax deductible season of giving!!!

April Fools! Instead of the witty, insightful personal commentary you so silently associate with your furtive forays onto this blog (joke's on me there), today you will find a sincere request for financial contributions to help fund our youth leadership camps in Ukraine. Kindly look at a calendar, and you'll notice that in exactly one week we land on April 15th. What better time than now to make a tax-deductible gift that not only helps spiff up the figures in your household budgetary records, but also brings joy and peace to the world? Am I exaggerating?

Probably, but allow me to elaborate...

In addition to my primary TEFL assignment as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kozyatyn, I have become involved with a working group of volunteers called the Gender and Development Council (GAD).

Every summer, GAD, in partnership with local Ukrainian organizations, organizes two summer camps for Ukrainian youth, ages 14-17. Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) and Camp TOBE (Teaching Our Boys Excellence) provide a unique opportunity to gather 40 girls and 20 boys from different parts of Ukraine to participate in a camp dedicated to learning about gender issues, leadership, and team building. Camp topics include “Project Design and Management,” “Counter-Trafficking and Domestic Violence,” “Healthy Lifestyles and Body Image,” “HIV/AIDS Awareness,” “Human Rights,” and “How to GLOW/Excel,” in combination with fun leadership and team building exercises and excursions.

This year, in order to include more youth and increase the sustainability of the camps, GAD and our partnering organizations are planning two GLOW and one TOBE camps. Two camps will take place in the eastern town of Kreminna, and the other camp will be held in the western town of Kolomiya. Holding camps in both regions of the country will make traveling easier for campers and will give us the opportunity to work with more Ukrainian organizations.

We are lucky to be working with Ukrainian partners who are eager to help make these camps a success, but we are still in need of funds to help make these camps a reality. Through the Peace Corps Partnership Program, we are asking friends, family, and local businesses back home to help us cover costs for these camps.

In order to make these camps a reality, we need to raise $6,601. Only $110 sends one Ukrainian student to camp for the entire week! Please consider making a tax-deductible donation in order to help empower Ukrainian youth to become the future leaders their country needs. Every little bit counts!

You can make a donation at the following website:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=343-170

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for helping to empower Ukraine's youth!

Sincerely,

Kathleen (on behalf of the GAD Council)


P.S. If you do choose to donate, please shoot me an e-mail to let me know so I can thank you personally. As the website is currently set up, we are not able to see our donors' names until after the grant closes. Thanks again!!

Ukrainian Beauty Pageants, Polish Folk Dancing, and Korean Carrots

After a winter of icy roads and bitter winds, I’ve gone on my first few runs of the season! It was pretty glorious to be able to run again, though after a false start at spring we got more snow, and my 3rd attempt to run left me slipping, sliding, and dodging vehicles as I tried to pick my way down the middle of the road. All winter long I’d been “going in for” yoga, and I think it’s definitely made me stronger, because picking up running after such a long break wasn’t as painful as it normally is. My hope is to run a half-marathon organized by another volunteer on April 17th in the Carpathians, although with my level of training that may be a foolhardy goal. It’s something to work toward though, and at the very least I’ll run the 10K. At any rate, a trip over the mountains and a hearty frolic through the hills is in order. I ran for 100 minutes last week, which is longer than I’ve ever run in my life, and I was pretty pumped. I got plenty of strange looks too, which always amuses me. I stare back and smile until they look away.

Anya and Matt came over one Saturday, and we made the first brownies she’d ever had in her life! Then she fell asleep while we were watching “Wedding Crashers.” It was nice to have them over to my house and not just go out to a café.

I can’t possibly convey in words how much the sunshine has put a spring in my step (as well as on my doorstep). I walk around with a smile on my face, commenting on the weather to anyone who will listen. One nice day I set out to find the stadium—I knew we had one, but I hadn’t seen it yet. I found it on an island in the middle of the river—which I also hadn’t seen before—and my counterpart said it used to be the old Jewish cemetery (I didn’t ask why it was turned into a stadium).

International Women’s Day is a national holiday (March 8th) in all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. I don’t know why we don’t celebrate it, because it started as a female garment workers’ protest in New York City 100 years ago. (Maybe its socialist origin made it an undesirable event in the states?) On Thursday, students came up to me between lessons, speeding through the well-used phrase, “We congratulate you on the [insert special occasion here], wish you happiness, health, etc. etc.…” and presented me with flowers, chocolate, and other nice things. I spent the actual holiday baking in the kitchen and cleaning in the house, the irony of which was not lost on me. But it was by choice, since I invited Andrei, Pasha, and Kamilia over for tea and homemade cookies. Pasha recounted how in his dream Arnold Schwarzenegger killed him, and then we had an honest conversation about drug use and fabrication (many drug users in Ukraine also know how to produce their own drugs). An interesting afternoon altogether.

On Wednesday I visited Katia and Co. in an attempt to reconnect with them (Lena’s extended family, who I haven't seen since Winter Break), and we made fresh salads for dinner—I had more green vegetables that meal than I’d had all winter! She bought broccoli in Poland and asked me what to do with it, since people don’t really eat it here. All our toasts were to women, since the men of the house were absent.

I’ve discovered a new “секoнд гeнд” store near my school, which is a dangerous development given my love of thrift stores—but you can’t really argue with dress pants, a dress shirt, and a skirt for $8, right? (Except if you remember that’s almost twice what I make in one day, but shhh!)

I invited another volunteer from GAD to hold a self-defense seminar for my 9th form girls in honor of Women’s Day, and it worked out great! We took them out of English and PE, and set up mats on the stage in the auditorium, and they learned about domestic violence and how to protect themselves. They were really enthusiastic about practicing the punches, kicks, and blocks, and as a grand finale Jean taught them how to throw an attacker and they practiced on her. The girls all wanted to know when she could come back, and the boys were very interested in what we were doing (they kept trying to peek into the auditorium), so I hope to build on that enthusiasm for future projects! We stayed at Kamilia’s the night before, since Jean went to her village school in the morning and then my school in the afternoon. Jean’s puppy came too (she terrified Djora at first, until he realized he was bigger). The second night they stayed at my apartment and she whipped up a spicy meat sauce with macaroni while I pretended to lesson plan, and then we watched a movie and had a half-night’s sleep before she had to wake up to catch her train at 5 am.

That night I smelled smoke in my apartment and found my fuse box fuming. Mr. Fix-it came to the rescue, and I will live another day. I also had to consult my brother on an urgent matter of technical support. He advised me to restart my computer. Brilliant! Also brilliant: Russian Vegetable Pie! Thank you, Babuysia’s Cookbook.

Another personal victory I’m rather proud of: I finally finagled the downstairs neighbors for tea and cookies! They are very elusive, so I ambushed the husband while we waited for the garbage truck, and asked when I could bring them the cookies I had baked (I’d been slowly eating them and soon there would be none left for the intended recipients, but like I said, they’re hard to track down, and cookies sitting on your counter are just asking to be eaten). But we finally got acquainted, and I made them suffer through my photo album while their 5 year old played with his trains.

This past weekend I was supposed to meet my cluster for a reunion to celebrate Alia’s birthday, but plans fell through and I ended up having a bizarrely impromptu yet satisfying weekend at home. On Friday, Kamilia, Slavic, and I met with someone important to get the go-ahead to inform vice principals of our project. He was very friendly and Polish and liked my last name; he said to stop by for tea sometime, and did I prefer muscular or intellectual men? I said intellectual, and he said he’d work on it. Note to self: good person to go to if I need something done in town. Afterwards, Slavic and I ended up going to a beauty pageant that Kamilia had prepared one of her students for. I have never seen an audience more excited for a non-sporting event. They were wild, and it was hilarious. There was an evening gown contest, as well as an improvised song-and-dance talent portion. Out to coffee later, I discovered Korean carrots (spicy, garlicky, delicious) and a Frenchman (choose your own adjectives) in town. I was pretty excited about both.

On Saturday I invited Kamilia, Slavic, and Andrei over to bake apple pie. We added walnuts and rounded it out with vanilla ice cream for a satisfying culinary experience. Djora came too, and I set up “Hercules” on my computer for him to watch, because I promote Disney at every opportunity. Slavic kept retreating into the kitchen to do the dishes, protesting that he hadn’t helped cook. I wasn’t going to stop him! Later I went to Polish language class, just because. There I saw everyone I knew in town: my neighbors, my counterpart and her sister, a teacher I’d met at Olympiad, and one of the girls that comes to my “Adult English Club,” who I ran into as I was walking there, and who was also going for the first time just to check it out. I didn’t really learn very much (they’ve had several weeks of lessons already, and not knowing the alphabet or the proper pronunciation slightly limited my understanding) but I had a good time. At the end, the teacher asked if I would be joining the Polish folk dancing group for a concert in May. Why not? So I went to rehearsal on Sunday, and blundered my way through a waltz-y folk number before going out to drink milkshakes and talk about boys and more serious things with Luda, the girl from my club who is enamored with all things Italian. I rounded out the night watching a Reese Witherspoon film in Russian. Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian in one day? Why not?

On Monday I had a nice chat with my counterpart, going over all the things we’re supposed to talk about. Our “meeting” occurred during the 45 minutes we were waiting for the bus, which is all the proof I need that I can get to school faster on my own two feet.

Tuesday after Adult English Club (is it just me or does that name sound slightly risqué?) I walked with Kamilia back to her house (we picked Djora up from her mother’s on the way) and we prepared a power point to present our project to the vice principals of extra-curricular activities on Friday at the lyceum. The presentation accomplished what it needed to, and the two Slavics joined Andrei, Kamilia and I to visit Pasha and Sasha at work, and then bum around town for a bit. I like these Friday afternoons, when I never know what will happen.

An Exhaustive Account of My Life for the Past 5 Weeks (Don't Say I Didn't Warn You!)

The second to last Saturday in January, my coworker Lena and her daughter came to my apartment and we made pizza, Ukrainian style. This involves lots and lots of mayo, as well as hardboiled eggs, chicken, and canned corn. It took about 3 times longer than it should have to bake, because my oven doesn’t ever go above 200 degrees. Its only functional setting is “flame.” In the meantime we played bananagrams, which the 21-year-old daughter really got into.

My Regional Manager came for a site visit one Friday. We met in the library at my school and talked for over an hour about how everything was going, then we had a rather awkward meeting with the English teachers because they got yelled at for not giving me class lists, not having regular meetings to discuss issues and ideas, and making it known the to kids that my lessons are considered supplementary and not obligatory. Natalia Frantsivna has been on edge lately because she’s up for observation this year, so anyone can come at any time to see her classes and the town administration never gives her any notice. My RM was surprised because Natalia Frantsivna usually likes to laugh and joke, but that day she was at her breaking point. After a quick chat with the landlady/VP about the high electricity bill due to heating costs, we rode in the Peace Corps Vehicle to my apartment so Natasha could check it out before leaving.

After she left, I had one hour before meeting Slavic and Pasha for tea and pizza at “The Cube” near my apartment, a fast food restaurant/café/bar whose cubical façade is constructed of some multicolored semi-transparent material that makes it a convenient landmark and meeting place. I had a great time chatting with them for a few hours in Ukrainian/Russian/English, about American films and music (Pasha is a devoted Natalie Portman fan) as well as religion, because they are both active members of an American-based Protestant denomination church that meets in the Community Center in town, whereas I describe myself as a “Cultural Catholic” who is spiritual but not religious, because I think any way that you choose to manifest your faith or worldview is equally valid as any other. My adult English club meets in the same place as their church, because the club’s members are drawn from the church parishioners who want to learn or practice their English. It was a little difficult to navigate at first, due to their varying levels of English proficiency (one guy worked in England for a few years picking fruit and now has a British accent, whereas the pastor knows only a few words in English and stopped me every few seconds to write a new one down), but I asked them to think about their expectations and what we can all get out of the club, and so far it’s been going well just conversing. I’m glad Slavic asked me to start it because I always enjoy it, even though I drag my feet on the way to yet another commitment during the busiest part of my week. They’re all interesting people and I’m looking forward to hanging out with them more in the future, as well as developing future projects and partnerships. In fact, they were the main reason I invited Kamilia to the PEPFAR conference with me, because knowing a group of former drug users who go around to local schools giving presentations on healthy lifestyles seemed like a great resource to draw on for a future HIV/AIDS project. I also hope to draw on their youth group connections to maybe spark an interest in some kind of organized volunteerism at my site.

That Saturday I went with Kamilia to Vinnytsia; we were going to go skating because she has never been, but it was really cold and we weren’t sure it would be open before English club, so we settled for tea at Nadia’s. I left the club early to report to Region 3’s designated Consolidation Point for a test of the Peace Corp Emergency Action Plan, i.e. What To Do If Something Really Bad Happens. Then we all went out for pizza and had a meeting of The Collaborative, which is basically a chance for volunteers near each other to gather on a semi-regular basis and exchange ideas, compare notes, offer support and advice, etc. “Near each other” is a relative term in Peace Corps Ukraine, however; two girls spent the night at my house since it was too far for them to get back home that same day. I sent them off to the train station the next morning, ran to the bazaar, and met up with Kamilia and the guys to do some PEPFAR project planning in a mix of Russian/English/Ukrainian at a pizzeria.

Since my last post, I’ve had several sleepovers and cooking adventures at Kamilia’s apartment—once on a weekday when I went to her house after school and didn’t go home again till after school the next day. Together we’ve baked carrot cake and cinnamon buns, and then chicken, cheese, and mushroom blinchiki (crêpes) with Andrei, a great cook who lives with Slavic and Pasha in a dormitory owned by their church, which also runs the adjacent rehab center that they went through a few years ago.

Cooking has become my new hobby (mainly to facilitate my principal hobby of eating, but also as a productive means of procrastination), so I’m slowly making my way through the Babuysia’s Cookbook, and have resolved to make at least one new dish each week. (For an up-to-date accounting of my culinary exploits, check out the tally I’m keeping in the sidebar.) Then there are the days when I eat strange combos from my fridge that I find appetizing but few others would, I’m afraid. I have very low standards for edibility, and I get a weird thrill from efficiently ingesting leftovers. I also can’t throw any food away, even if it’s other peoples’ food and even when I’m not hungry. My dad earned the nickname of garbage disposer in college for the same trait, and my mom used to guilt me into finishing my plate by saying there were starving children in Africa. The food would probably be better off feeding stray dogs from the trash than adding to my own fat stores, but my mouth just won’t listen to reason. Today in Vinnytsia the Country Director (sitting next to me in the Italian restaurant we went to after our Meet Your Neighbors Meeting, and several times offering me his leftover slices of pizza, none of which I refused) remarked that I ate quite a lot. I nodded in simple agreement. It’s true.

I was visited once more by Lena, this time accompanied by her falcon-taming husband, who fixed the broken door on one of my cabinets while Lena helped me translate my newly minted “Rules of the Classroom” into Ukrainian. Later, over tea, I got to hear about her husband’s fascinating profession: apparently he trains falcons, and they’re really valuable (or they would be, if there was a market for them in Ukraine); he loves all animals, so their house sounds like a menagerie.

I invited my neighbor over for tea and she brought beer and fish, so we had a good time. We’ve since gone through a couple more rounds of blitzkrieg food battles: I hand her a plate with something, turn around and she’s gone and filled it up with something tastier. We haven’t had time for tea again, but she did stop by to show me some new pictures of her mischievous granddaughter.

The next weekend I went to Ivano-Frankivsk for the Tourism working group meeting on Saturday. We discussed project ideas to promote tourism in Ukraine, and talked about the website of travel information we’re putting together for volunteers. Alia was there and Sean lives only an hour away, so he came up after the meeting to hang out. It was great to catch up with him, and then everyone went to a nice restaurant for dinner and another café for dessert or beer (I opted for chocolate over malt beverages). Saturday night 10 volunteers slept at one guy’s apartment, and miraculously almost everyone had some kind of cushiony surface. John, the volunteer who hosted us, is 65 and used to be a ski instructor for the Army, brought a waffle iron to Ukraine, and was wearing Euro-trash teenager jeans. We woke up the next morning to the flash of a camera, as he documented the most volunteers he has ever squeezed into his apartment. To get to Ivano I was really excited for my first overnight train, but didn’t know how anything worked. The conductor handed me a plastic-wrapped package with two sheets, a pillowcase, and a towel. I asked the lady across from me what to do, and instead of just explaining she jumped up and made my bed for me (you grab a mattress from the top shelf, fold the sheet over it, and get a blanket and pillow from the stack at the front of the compartment). Other interesting observations: you can get hot water from the samovar, so most people bring their own mugs with all their other picnic supplies; they also change into pajamas—you can ask people of the opposite gender to leave the vicinity while you do this—and have slippers for the train. Traveling platzcart is the train equivalent of steerage on the Titanic, and it’s just as fun as the scene when they’re all dancing and drinking beer (I haven’t seen any dancing yet, but I’ve seen plenty of beer drinking). People are very friendly and willing to strike up a conversation. On the way back, Pete and I hung out with a young couple from Fastiv; they shared their hardboiled eggs, sausage, butter, and bread, we got off at a long stop to buy beer, and played cards till it was time for bed. The tricky bit is vaulting into the top bunk, if that is where you’re sleeping, because there’s no obvious way up. It’s always funny when you get on an overnight train in the morning, because everyone riding it for the long haul is still passed out. Two overnight trains and 27 travel hours later, I was back in Kozyatyn by 4:30 a.m. Monday morning, and back at work 4 hours after that.

I went on an accidental date the other day, accidental because I thought it was an interview and he was under different illusions. A guy had come to my school looking for the American (the third person to seek me out at school) and I was busy preparing for my next lesson during the break, so I asked him quickly what he wanted. From what I understood (this was all in Ukrainian/Russian), he was writing a thesis on the psychology of teachers and wanted to get an American perspective. I consider it part of my job to talk about America, so I asked how much time he needed and said I could meet him next week. Unfortunately I couldn’t set a time then so I had to give him my number. When we sat down at the café I turned to him and asked, “So, how can I help you? What do you want to know?” He replied laughingly, “Oh, right down to business! Why don’t we just sit and chat?” So we talked for a while and sometimes he seemed to be asking legitimate questions, but I don’t think he is writing a paper on the psychology of teachers. When I tried to leave, he begged for 10 more minutes, and I obliged but finally stood up to go. He walked me most of the way home (which is normal in Ukraine, because girls can’t be expected to walk anywhere by themselves), but I stopped him on the corner to say goodbye so he wouldn’t know exactly where I live. He asked if he could see me again and I mumbled something vague before walking away. I complain about my lack of dating prospects, but then I turn away seemingly nice guys for tricking me into dating them.

A week or two later I got a call from an unknown number (in America I don’t answer those, but in Ukraine if someone is calling my phone I usually need to answer), so I did—and it was Accidental Date Guy. He wanted to invite me—not to an interview this time—but to tea or even borshch. I told him if he wanted to invite me to hang out with his friends in a group I would be perfectly happy to do that, but I wouldn’t hang out with just him (in Ukraine if you’re alone with a guy in public, you’re assumed to be on a date, even if you’re just walking somewhere—more on that later). He thought I was shy and promised to behave, but I tried to make it clear that I simply did not want to go on a date with him. Finally I just hung up, and 3 missed calls and 2 hilarious English text messages later, he’s even farther than he was before from getting me to go out with him. (Exhibit A: “Please a telefone. Im bad speak english. Im have a speak. You no anderstand me. Im apologize.”)

The main reason to avoid casual dating in my town is the strength of the gossip chain. Almost 30,000 people live in Kozyatyn, but everyone says it’s really just a big village, and here’s a case in point: when I went to grab the key to the English room from the Vice Principal (who is also my landlady), she smiled knowingly at me and asked who I went out with last night. I knew instantly what that meant: either she or someone she knew had seen me walking with Pasha to our Tuesday night English club. I laughed and clarified that he was technically my student and definitely not my boyfriend.

A teacher I met at Olympiad back in December called to invite me to tea with her students at School #1 to celebrate their English Week, so I brought my pictures and chatted with a group of 8th-11th formers for 3 hours, eating pierozhky plus all the chocolate and cookies within reach. I asked them for recommendations of Ukrainian bands and we had a photo shoot afterward.

When you make plans to meet someone, they invariably call you 5 minutes before you’re supposed to meet them, to make sure you’re still coming. I find this both mildly insulting, because it implies that you’ll back out on your word, and counterproductive, because at that point I’m usually walking toward the designated meeting point, and then I have to stop to find and answer my phone.

I went to my first GAD meeting in Kiev over Valentine’s weekend. On Friday I took the electritchka from Kozyatyn to (almost) Bilky, but got caught up in a conversation with two old ladies and so lost track of the stops, accidentally exiting at the village before my training site. Unfortunately it was cold and snowy and there were no buses or trains, but I reasoned that if I walked along the tracks I would eventually get to Bilky. I did—pride slightly wounded, but sense of humor intact—and Olha and I baked and ate and chatted for a few hours before I headed on to Kiev for the night with Lauren and Camille, who are both also in GAD and had come back to Bilky to visit their host families as well. The next morning we treated ourselves to delicious cappuccino and cake for breakfast before 8 hours worth of Gender and Development in Ukraine. It was a grueling but inspiring day and I had trouble narrowing down my subcommittee options before deciding on the newspaper, summer camps, and Women in Development. I was nominated for President but the bid for power was short-lived. After dinner with the Bilky crew, we made our way to the disco for a PCV Valentine’s Day party. We had to pay a cover to get in, and then realized how frumpy we looked in our cardigans and jeans compared to everything that is stereotypical about European nightclub fashion (ie tight and glittery with short skirts and long heels and nothing but skin in between), so we went to the bathroom to assess the situation. We had paid, we were committed, we were going to make it work. Logical or not, we decided the best way to be less underdressed was to take off more clothes, so off went the jeans, and the long underwear was reborn as “sexy” leggings tucked into our winter boots. Parading around a disco in my underwear necessitated a quick succession of drinks to justify the decision, and then I was at peace with my degradation and ready to dance. We slept in our winter coats on the floor of an apartment rented by PCVs we’d never met because we didn’t want to wake up someone to let us into the GAD apartment that late. I woke up surprisingly refreshed the next morning, stopped in Bilky to collect my laundry and several days’ worth of rations, and then it was home sweet kozy-town.

Two weeks later I went to the PEPFAR training conference with Kamilia at a Soviet resort in the woods outside Kiev. We had sessions on the biology and transmission of HIV, stigma and discrimination (a huge problem in Ukraine where people won’t go for treatment because their neighbors will see them entering the HIV clinic, and many still believe that AIDS is only a drug-users disease), project planning, implementation, and evaluation, a practicum, and a panel of people living with AIDS. I got a lot of great ideas and hopefully we’ll be able to start our series of lectures traveling to local schools, with contests to be judged at a concert in May. It was also great to meet volunteers from older groups and get to know them better. The Sunday after we got back, Kamilia and I went to Andrei’s to project plan over chai.

At a teachers’ meeting on Wednesday, I learned that anyone who wanted to go to the town concert for Women’s Day had only to say the word and they could leave after 6th period to make it in time. I felt bad cutting my last lesson short, but I had to miss our school concert and teachers’ party on Friday for “Meet Your Neighbors” in Vinnytsia, and I wanted to see at least a little of how the holiday is celebrated. On Thursday in school my students kept coming up to me with chocolates and flowers and congratulating me with the 8th of March. I love Women’s Day—thank you, female garment workers in New York, for inspiring the International Socialist Party!

Last week it warmed up to 40 degrees for a few days in a row and a lot of snow melted. I was able to see Kozyatyn from a whole new perspective—what lies beneath! It was fascinating to see what I’ve been walking on this whole time without even realizing it.

Imagine my consternation one day after ingesting coffee and grabbing hold of the door handle to the little girls’ room (true tale, students and teachers pee together) to find it locked. I checked back a little later. Still locked. Slightly worried about when I would be able to empty my bladder (identifying opportunities to pee is always a top priority for me), I asked the Vice Principal about the bathroom situation. She said, “Oh, there’s no water in school today, so the bathroom is closed.” I eventually learned that there was one outside, but that one had open stalls with no doors. My long Ukrainian coat came in handy when girls from my next class joined me in the latrine. Yay for the Ukrainian outhouse equivalent of the towel-wrap trick at the beach, when you can change in the middle of a crowd and not get cited for public exhibitionism!

I finally ventured to our school canteen, hoping to buy a bun like I see my students with all the time, but instead I got sat down by the ladies in the kitchen and served a plate of food, just like the first formers. The older grades don’t get lunch, but the American gets fed like the children.

The last time I bought water at the bazaar, the water lady invited me into her shack for tea. Didn’t go yet, and she hasn’t mentioned it again. Bummer.

Memo to the guest of honor: for birthdays in Ukraine, the tab is on you. Mum’s the word when my birthday rolls around—this system does not give you incentive to celebrate and sing yourself. I went to a bar with Anya and Matt for her birthday, and instead of letting me buy her a drink, she bought me a whole meal.

The scene: a quiet apartment, rug folded back and yoga mat spread out, my arms and legs striving for a graceful expression of Warrior Two, when the calm voice guiding me in the pose is replaced by the terse foreign commands of a railway worker. My computer speakers have an un-zen-like tendency to pick up somehow on the local frequency of the railway station, which I wager would make anyone fall out of tree pose.

After our Meet Your Neighbors “zoostrich” the whole group went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner with the Regional Manager and the new Country Director, and then Safefy and Security Director Papa Serhiy kidnapped us all in fancy Peace Corps Vehicles and took us back to a rented apartment to film a party scene for a safety video that future generations of trainees will watch to discuss how to avoid similar situations. I find it pretty hilarious that I will be forever immortalized in a film about what not to do. Papa Serhiy graciously dropped me off at the train station afterward, smooth-talking his way out of a speeding ticket on the way by kindly requesting the officer to check out his diplomatic plates.

The actual teaching part of my job has so far been a bit of a rollercoaster. I’m embarrassed to still be learning student’s names, but I’ve manufactured at least a half dozen excuses as to why it has taken me so long: they don’t always find it necessary to come to “individualnie urok” (when I have students on my own it is not the whole class, so it is an extra lesson for those who do come), so I can’t keep track of who’s who, plus I didn’t have class lists for the first two months, and on average 20 % or so of students were absent with the flu (or in my case slept in late or went home early or had to go to the music school or got detention for writing bad words in the bathroom), and then the final problem is distinguishing between chubby and tiny Max, redheaded and blonde Katia, and all the triples and quadruples of recurring first names in each class. There are moments when I love it (when a 5th former hands me a valentine’s card, or when a 6th former bashfully asks if he can join my class too, or when they GET it and the lesson works) but more often than not I’m stressing out about creating balanced lessons from scratch each week: drawing half on the current topics and half on issues I want to cover, searching out or creating audio and visual materials, deciding how to incorporate speaking, listening, reading, and writing and at what level, as well as how much to focus on vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation for 9 groups of students from 5th-9th form takes a lot of time for someone who’s never taught before.

I’ve learned to hate the system of daily grading, because after every activity and especially at the end of the lesson they swarm on me and ask if they have marks, and I’m supposed to instantly rank them on a 12 point scale based on every little thing they did during the lesson, which I don’t usually remember because I’ve been concentrating on teaching the lesson and getting everyone to participate, not taking notes on mispronounced words and incorrect grammatical constructions. I can tell by the students’ reactions if I’ve marked them too high or too low, based on if they’ve jumping up and down and asking me to sign their daybooks or if they go all quiet and walk away looking like they want to sulk or cry—or worst of all, try to convince me to give them a higher grade. That boggles my mind, since my idea of a teacher’s authority and the respect it should engender does not seem to prevail here in Ukraine. This is especially true when it comes to homework, which they simply don’t do. Maybe I was unusual, but as a child the idea of not doing my homework was inconceivable. When a student gives a presentation in class, the other students call out suggestions for his grade at the end, and if it’s too low he whines to the teacher. At our last Collaborative meeting, another volunteer shared the idea for a classroom activity called Messenger and Scribe, in which a text is divided into sentences placed around the room, and student pairs must alternate reading and remembering each sentence to retell to their partner, who then writes it down as dictated. I tried this with my 8th form, but they were so focused on getting the right answer that they completely disregarded the purpose of the activity (to rely on memory) in favor of taking pictures of the text with their cell phones, writing on their arms, shouting the sentences to their partner across the room, etc.

Also, our current system of team teaching needs work: half of my weekly lessons I co-teach with three of the four English teachers at my school, but we do not sit down together and co-plan like we did for team teaching during training. With Lena and Larissa we usually look at the lesson in the 10 minute break before class and decide who will do what from the book; sometimes I call Natalia to see what she wants, or she asks me to plan some specific activity, but then she will often ask in class what else I’ve planned, and seem surprised when I say nothing. And yet I wouldn’t presume to plan more when I don’t know what else she wants to do with them, since technically they are her students and she meets with them without me so I never know where she’s left off. Sometimes I teach the whole lesson and she sits in the back and does her own paperwork, asking me at the end what grades I have assigned, and sometimes we haven’t talked before the lesson so I haven’t planned anything and she says, “Not to worry, I will do everything,” leaving me sitting uselessly at the computer table off to the side, feeling somehow chastised. My biggest problem with this system is that the purpose of team teaching is to combine efforts, exchange ideas, and learn from each other, and it seems like little of that is happening here. I try my best to use the communicative method, but with so little planning, much comes straight from the book, and my positive example is limited to NOT calling children stupid and lazy to their faces, and trying to get everyone to participate fully. They are all more experienced teachers than I am anyway, so in terms of skills transfer, I don’t know how much I can offer yet.

I am the third volunteer at my site, and I sometimes wonder if applying for a volunteer has become a habit rather than a need for my school. I don’t mind providing free English lessons to students, but I hate the little voice in my head that sometimes whispers that’s the only reason I’m here, to ease the teaching burden of the other English teachers. I’m being overly cynical here, but it is an important thing to think about. On the other hand, I’m inviting another volunteer to do a Self-Defense/Domestic Violence seminar for the 9th form girls next week, and both my counterpart and the vice principal are excited about it and support the idea, so I think I’m the one who needs to take a step back and see what is important for my site. But a remark my counterpart made in passing again gave me cause for concern. She wasn’t interested in PEPFAR (which is fine, because it’s not her job to teach kids about HIV/AIDS), but she thinks an HIV/AIDS project is unnecessary at our school since the kids are “bored with it,” and making copies one day she turned to me and said, “If you want to know what you can do to help, see how this copier doesn’t work very well, and the computer is very old? That’s what we really need!” This is what I personally struggle with as a PCV in Ukraine: how necessary am I, when a replacement computer is the highest priority? I wanted to go where I thought the need was greatest, but Africa twice fell through, Turkmenistan turned me down, Latin America didn’t work out, and now I’m in Eastern Europe. Yet Peace Corps is in Ukraine because there IS a need.

At the same time, I recognize the great potential PCVs here have to make an even bigger difference, precisely because Ukraine is more developed than most Peace Corps countries. We have more resources at our disposal, and we can do more with them, but the desire has to come from the community. So while I don’t think getting a new computer by itself is a Peace Corps worthy endeavor (when we already have one that usually functions), if I can get the English teachers comfortable with and committed to using technology in the classroom, then it suddenly becomes sustainable and oh-so-worth-it. Our classroom used to have access to the internet, and I would love to get it back. With the internet, a computer, and a projector (which my school acquired through a grant written by the last volunteer), our students’ English learning opportunities would be almost without limits. One future project idea I have is to start a journalism club with an online school newspaper, exploring topics like democracy, citizenship, domestic violence, and environmentalism. To be honest, it could be any topic, I just want my students to learn to think critically about what is important to them. I also really want them to get involved in volunteerism, so I’m hoping to do something small for Earth Day this year and look into longer term more regular activities, maybe with the orphanage or rehab center that I’ve been told are both in town. But all of these things are my ideas, and if I want anything to be sustainable I need to spend more time talking to teachers, administrators, and students at school to see what they want and are willing to support. And for that I need better Ukrainian skills, but unfortunately studying is the last thing I want to do in my rare and therefore precious moments of free time! The only thing less likely to get done than studying is my laundry.

As a TEFL volunteer I struggle to reconcile myself to the fact that I live my life here in English. I skyped with Meredith the other day and we laughed at the irony of our mutual resentment of speaking English with people who know other languages—we would much rather be learning theirs than teaching ours! This is not an immersion program; as much as I love learning and speaking foreign languages, I’m here to teach my native tongue. With my students, coworkers, and friends I speak English. I plan my lessons and projects in English. I have a few friends and acquaintances who don’t speak any English, but I don’t see them on a regular basis, much less a daily one. In fact, I’ve been recently trying to reconnect with all the families I spent time with over the holidays, because I haven’t seen or heard from them since then. I went so far as to show up on my neighbor’s door (though of course armed with an apple crisp!) two nights ago, hoping to have tea and catch up. We did, and it was great, though it lasted three hours (which, on a side note, I’ve found to be the minimum amount of time I can respectably spend as a guest at someone’s home). We watched the video of Zlata dancing in the town concert for Women’s Day that I had gone to on Wednesday (I hadn’t realized she was in it), toasted to women and crazy love with homemade wine (those are traditional toasts, I’m not making this up), and played with their adorably obliging tabby cat. They also showed me their efforts to digitally re-record and preserve Lida’s old family home videos that her father had made in soundless black and white, like films from the 1920s. It was really fascinating to see films originally recorded on old reels, and I admired her father’s knack for capturing poignant childhood images, as well as some great historical clips from the Soviet era.

It takes me forever to write these updates so please comment; think of it as signing the summit log of a really tall mountain that you just climbed to the top of, and your reward is the eternal glory of an electronic signature. It also proves your superior reading skills, by being able to get through such a disjointed set of observations and musings.

The Holiday Marathon in Ukraine:

Rule # 1: Pace yourself. If dinner were a track event, the best analogy would be a really long relay (the only caveat being you hand the baton off to yourself and start over). You’re expected to keep up a steady pace for a long time, but there are times when the pace quickens for a handoff as a new round of guests arrive, and times when you can respectably set down your fork for a breather…or another toast.

Ukraine has 2 Christmases and 2 New Years, and people celebrate both the night before and the night of. My favorite is “Old New Years,” if only because the name is so ridiculous. Catherine the Great changed the calendar, but the peasants saw no reason to stop celebrating on the old date, and instead just welcomed the addition of another holiday.

On December 24, I went to school in the morning to work with the students preparing for Olympiad. That night I went to Olena’s sister’s house for dinner with her family. Houses in Ukraine usually don’t have enough chairs for a party, so the table is moved next to the couches in the living room, and then chairs and benches are added as needed (I’ve seen people sit on the arms of the couch too). This is convenient after the meal when you recline to digest and wait for tea. Of course, you never go “guesting” empty-handed, so I’ve baked a lot of cookies and apple crisps these past few weeks (the apple crisps because people keep giving me apples from their orchards and I can’t eat them fast enough before they go bad, and the cookies to spread American love of baked goods). On Christmas Eve the meal is meatless, and there are 12 dishes to represent the 12 apostles. Kutya is a special Ukrainian dish eaten only on Christmas, and traditionally it is the first dish served (since the Orthodox do everything three times, they have to eat three spoonfuls before they can have any other food—by contrast the Catholics don’t count, they just scoop it out). “It” is made of buckwheat or semolina sweetened with honey, poppy-seeds, grapes and walnuts, and each woman has her own unique way of preparing it. A lot of fish is also served (whole baked fish, fried fish, slices of smoked fish with lemon layered between the slices and raw onions on the side), and mayonnaise salads abound: salat olivie is a crowd-pleaser with carrots, potatoes, hardboiled eggs, kielbasa, pickles, and peas held together by mayonnaise; salat shuba is an interesting concoction known as a “fur coat,” with a bottom layer of salted smoked fish and diced onions, and subsequent layers of grated potatoes, mayonnaise, grated carrots, and grated beets; I’ve also had mayonnaise salads with such diverse ingredients as pineapple, fresh cheese, and krab sticks with a “k.” Varenyky with mashed potatoes or cabbage is common, as are individual vegetable sides of mushrooms, cabbage, beets, pickled tomatoes and cucumbers. Red caviar is spread on thinly sliced bread, cushioned by a layer of cream-cheesy stuff. The next day meat appears on the table: liver tort with layers of mayonnaise and grated hardboiled eggs, kholodets (fish or meat jelly, served cold, and so far the dish with the dubious honor of being the only thing I’ve tried once and will not eat again)…

Sorry if I get a little carried away talking about food, but those who know me well know I make it a point of honor to try any food once, and since I love trying new foods, these feasts require stamina (both to imbibe and to describe). So, back to the actual holiday. Lena’s two-year-old nephew showed me the family photos, her brother-in-law practiced his new favorite toast (“To the childrens!”), and general merriment was had by all. The next day was even better. I had to go to school, because one kid said he would be there to work on Olympiad and I guilted myself into going, but I got there late and he had already gone home, so that was a waste of time (plus Olena asked me why I didn’t just tell him not to come. Nobody told me “no” was an option)! Anyway, I went to Lena’s other sister’s house for Christmas dinner (the two houses are on the same property, and their mother lives with Olha and her family, but Katia’s house is the nice big new one) and got there early to help out. The meal was pretty much the same, with the addition of meat as well as a soup cooked over a wood fire in a cauldron outside, and I split my time between talking to the dad while he cooked the soup and I threw a ball to their giant scary dog, helping Liza, their nine year old daughter, grate hardboiled eggs and spread mayo for the liver tort (which sounds gross but is actually really tasty : ), and chatting with Katia and her guests. After several rounds of food and toasts, we sang Christmas carols in Ukrainian, Polish, and English (I even sang “Silent Night” for them at their behest, though I warned them it would not lull any small children to sleep), and then we had a wild dance party in front of the fireplace. The adults lingered around the table to chat, and the chatting gradually gave way to dancing (after drinks), as the kids played on the computer and ignored their crazy relatives—I was reminded so much of McKeever family parties that I smiled (to myself), since I had no one to share the joke with (it often amuses me that I continue to willfully spin around the globe and insert myself into other peoples’ lives in situations where I can’t fully communicate with them).

On New Year’s Eve I went to my other counterpart’s sister’s apartment and celebrated with their family. I came prepared with my photo album to pass the time till dinner, and a Russian holiday special was on in the background as we sat down to eat at 10 pm. Apparently midnight signals the beginning rather than the end of the festivities in Ukraine, because after the meal, Natalia Frantsivna’s brother-in-law donned a green velvet suit to dress as Deed-Moroz or Father Frost, the Ukrainian equivalent of Santa Claus, and we all headed to the Christmas tree in the center of town, much to the delight of wandering groups of intoxicated youth, who begged to pose for photos with Deed-Moroz. At 2 am we decided to make a “quick stop” at the apartment of the godparents of one of Natalia Frantsivna’s daughters. On New Year’s it is acceptable to call on your friends and family at any time of night, and they must be ready to ply you with food and drink. Our host and hostess were clad in nightgowns, but they willingly obliged. Sasha and Dasha went home to bed, and I would have given anything to follow suit, but instead I followed the rest of the family back to the sister’s apartment for tea and cake. I finally crawled into bed at 6 am and slept till 2 pm the next day. I was looking forward to not getting out of my pajamas when I got a call asking if I wanted to go back to the sister’s house and eat the leftovers. Since I never say no to an invitation, I suited up and headed out. There was still no running water in the apartment (the faucet had also been dry the day before, which made preparing the meal difficult), the brother-in-law grabbed snow off the balcony and melted it for tea. I taught Sasha and her 10-year-old cousin how to play Egyptian Rat Screw.

After New Years comes Orthodox Christmas on January 7th, and I was invited this time to Natalia Frantsivna’s mother’s house for Christmas Eve. Sasha and Dasha played the piano and everyone sang more carols, while I applauded the collective musical talent of the family. At the head of the table was an empty place setting with a slice of bread covering the shot glass—I asked about it and learned that a place is set in memory of family members who have died. Natalia Frantsivna asked when I was going to my student Katia’s house the next day, and when she learned it wasn’t until 5, she said that left me time to come back to her mother’s house for lunch! So I baked two apple crisps for Christmas, Take Two, and played some more cards with the kiddies before heading off to Katia’s house in the village. She is a 9th form student of mine and the best English student at school, but her sister is slightly less interested in her studies. Theirs is another nice big house conspicuously contrasted by the modest cottages surrounding it. Once again, I was warmly welcomed into the midst of another family’s holiday celebrations. The food was delicious, with some slightly fancier takes on the holiday staples. Sour apples preserved in alcohol seem like an acquired taste, but the honey cake was divine. Katia’s father sat next to me and periodically tried to persuade me to take vodka shots—they even wanted me to try the grandfather’s homebrew, but I left that for another day. His surname is Yavorski, so he and his wife took an instant liking to me. Although, everyone here insists that my last name is Polish and not Ukrainian, which throws our family mythology for a loop. I was persuade to join the children as they knocked on doors in the neighborhood and asked to sing a song about Christ being born, in return for which their neighbors were expected to give them candy and money. I dutifully learned the first verse and mouthed along to the rest; the neighbors gave me crooked glances, but tossed a few kopecks and candies my way. The older male cousins stood a cool distance away in the street and smoked, while I pretended to be 5 years old and extorted money from strangers. Katia also showed me her grandparent’s barnyard animals, and explained that there used to be two pigs before they set the homemade sausage on the table. Back at the house we sang for the adults and got more candy and cash, before counting our loot with the glee my brothers and I used to tally up Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Halloween. Then we all watched the home video of the parent’s 25th wedding anniversary, and Katia demystified the traditions: my favorite is that the groom must wash his new mother-in-law’s feet in the most expensive vodka he can afford, and then replace her symbolic old pair of shoes with a nice new pair. I was sent home with my empty apple crisp dish refilled with leftovers, plus my pseudo-Halloween stash and a ceramic souvenir of a Cossack country celebration to remember the occasion. I think I was most excited about the leftovers. I used the turkey leg to make borscht later that week. I love figuring out how to use everything in my fridge and pantry. The other week I gingerly opened a jar of preserves of unknown origin that had been in my apartment when I arrived—it turned out to be whole strawberries floating in tasty sweet liquid that I’ve been using to flavor my oatmeal.



I didn’t do anything for Old New Year’s, which was fine by me, although some boys did knock on my door and sing me a song. They didn’t throw seeds of grain on my floor like they did on my friend’s. I gave them candy but no money, and then speculated, when I heard one spit in the hallway, if they symbolically spit at stingy people. Spitting in public is not uncommon in Ukraine though, and I think he probably just had an excess of phlegm.

I was exhausted with the holiday guesting schedule, but the first time it let up and I was home alone with no need to bake an apple crisp, I wondered what to do with myself. I like living in my own space, but I also like being around other people. So I’ve made it a point to introduce myself to my neighbors by knocking on their doors and offering cookies, which usually elicits an invitation to tea from anyone over age 12 (when kids answered the door they just took my cookies). I really like the older woman who lives right next to me with her husband (and they have the most adorable little granddaughter, who they were watching during the holidays). I had dinner and then tea with her and we chatted for 3 hours. I am in a sporadic food war with her though, because when I gave her cookies, she returned my plate with garlic cakes, and a few days later knocked on my door with fresh homemade doughnuts and scones, and later a jar of leftover kutya, which I returned filled with my homemade chili, but she is still up by one. I haven’t had time to make her an apple crisp. The other two apartments upstairs house an old Russian lady whose husband was in the hospital when I called on her, and a widower whose poor health means he rarely leaves his apartment. Both spoke mostly Russian, but I still had a good time. The old lady apologized that she could only offer me candy, and the old man gave me apples (you are never supposed to return a dish empty). She was employed here under the Soviets and never left (which is the case with a lot of people, I’ve found). The guy used to drive trucks across Siberia, I think.

I love hearing peoples’ life stories! Natalia Frantsivna’s husband was born in Baku, and he was some kind of local administrator under the Soviets, but I like to imagine his mustache belonged to the KGB. And Andrei—the Bilky historian—when he was 4 the Nazis burned his village, and after the war his mother rebuilt their house. The couple downstairs worked for 2 years in Italy, and together we reminisce about Italian food and toss around words from various Romance Languages. They served me real coffee, and I ran into the woman the other day and said they should come for tea sometime; she said when, I said not today, and we parted ways with me 90 % sure I had invited them on Sunday at 5. Sure enough, she rang my doorbell on Sunday and said they’d run and get some wine and then be right up. I showed them my pictures and we talked about gas prices and travel in Ukraine and America, an impressive feat, since I don’t actually know how much gas costs in America, nor how many liters there are in a gallon, which made comparisons difficult.

I also went back to Lena’s sister Katia’s house, played chess and checkers with their kids, and watched “Prince Caspian” on their flat screen TV. Katia and her husband’s kuum and kuma (the godparents of their child), whom I met at their house on Christmas, actually live in the building next to mine, so Lida has sent her daughter to me with fresh food on occasion, and one day when I could hear music coming from the town center, they knocked on my door and invited me to check it out. It was a concert sponsored by Yulia Timoshenko as part of her election campaign, so I went home with a free poster of the blond-braided lady holding a bunch of wheat. Lida invited me to her house for lunch after I hitched a taxi ride with the food-war neighbor and her husband to the train station (they were heading to Kiev to return their grandchildren to their parents, and I needed to buy my ticket to visit Alia); lunch lasted till 8 pm, since we looked at all their pictures of trips to Poland and videos of their daughter’s folk dance concerts, and then watched “Ratatouille” in Ukrainian.

For a few weeks my only social engagements were with children or older adults, and I was entirely missing the 20-30 year age bracket. Jessica’s friends graciously stepped in to fill the gap. First, my visit to Alia in Starokonstantiniv was brief, but a welcome change of pace. I had to wake up at 4 am to catch the train at 5, and when I got on it was dark and there were bodies passed out on benches all over the place. I had to walk through the whole train to get to my compartment (which is frowned upon, since Ukrainians magically know where on the platform to stand in order to be right in front of their compartment when the train stops), and then I stretched out on a bench, pulled my hood over my head, set my alarm for 3 hours, and passed out myself. I awoke to find an old man drinking tea and doing a crossword puzzle across from me. The conductor ladies on the train befriended me because I kept anxiously asking if we were at my stop yet, and we chatted a bit before realizing they would also be on my return train the next day. Once I got to Alia’s apartment, I didn’t leave for the duration of my visit (Alia went to an accordion concert with her counterpart while I took a nap), except to pick up another PCV who lives near her and was also visiting. She made us both jealous with stories of her puppy, and we made tacos with homemade tortillas, substituting carrots and cabbage for lettuce and tomato. Chicken, onion, sour cream, and spicy ketchup rounded out the experience. The next day the other volunteer left early and we watched a movie in Alia’s bed, since we didn’t want to get out of our pjs but we couldn’t go back to sleep. Then the volunteer came back because the bus to her village couldn’t run due to poor road conditions. She ended up taking my train.

When I got back home, I found a sticky note in my door, written in English from someone named Kamilia; it said she knew the old volunteer and supposed I lived here now, she wanted to practice her English, plus she was a good cook so I should give her a call. Then I got an e-mail from Jessica’s best friend Anya, who lives in Kiev but grew up in Kozyatyn, and is dating an RPCV who returned to Ukraine after COSing and is now working in Vinnytsia. They sometimes come to Kozyatyn on weekends, and Anya invited me to go out with them last Saturday. We went to a few cafes and had wine and chocolate, then tea, and then beer and French-fries. First though, I went to Matt’s Vinnytsia English Club in the morning with Kamilia, and since we got there a few hours early, we passed the time at her best friend Nadia’s apartment drinking tea. Kamilia had turned out to be the one English teacher who faithfully attended Jessica’s English Club, and she showed up at my school one day to introduce herself, post-sticky note. I was sitting in the teacher’s room the next day when a guy poked his head in and asked where he could find the American. The teachers silently pointed to me. He introduced himself and wanted to know if I would have a club for adult learners. I said I’d get back to him but first I needed to find a space where we could meet.

On Monday I had to go to Vinnytsia again for a Peace Corps mandated swine-flu vaccine; I’d been there twice before, both times leaving from the same track on the same platform. This time around, the same train (I thought) was waiting on its usual track ready to go, so I hopped on and sat down. It lurched to life a little earlier than the two other times, but I wasn’t worried till it began to lurch in the wrong direction. Then I got worried. A babuysia confirmed my suspicion that I was not in fact on the train to Vinnytsia I had purchased a ticket for. Luckily she, like so many other people I’ve met here, went out of her way to help me. It so happens that she lives in a village one stop away from Kozyatyn, so I got off with her at 8:15 am on a bitterly cold Ukrainian morning and we together crossed the tracks and stopped at a desolate, snow-covered country road to wait for the bus back into town—or rather, to wait and see if the bus might come. For that is what you do in Ukraine, where there’s never a printed schedule, and even if there is, it more often than not goes unheeded. “They’re more like guidelines, anyway,” as Captain Jack Sparrow would say. The bus did in fact come, but the driver waved his hands apologetically to indicate that it was already stuffed to standing room capacity, and so neglected to stop. We were left alone again on the country road, this time with no hope of a bus, and a good chance of losing the ability to count to ten on my fingers if I continued to stand in the cold (this whole week the temperature has hovered in the 0-10 degree range—both on the street and at school. Most people keep their coats on. I have also adapted the rice crispy cereal slogan to suit my wallpaper, since “snap, crackle, sparkle” pretty much sums up its activities at the moment, as it is cracking from the cold.) A girl about my age also had to get to the center, so she called a cab and we split it (the babuysia went home after several times ensuring that the girl would help the American get back to the train station). The girl got out without paying and I thought, oh well, she took advantage of me having further to go and got a free ride, but at least the babuysia was nice, but then when I tried to pay the driver he said not to worry about it, so it turns out everyone was nice! I had to buy a new ticket on a more expensive faster train, but all in all my little misadventure could have gone much worse. Once in Vinnytsia the shot took all of 5 minutes, and since there were no other volunteers around (I had hoped to run into people and go out to lunch), I called Nadia and asked if she wanted to meet up. We had lunch and she wanted to show me a museum, but it was closed since it was Monday (we still ended up talking to her curator friend for a good half-hour). Then she helped me find the restaurant where Miranda had called to say she was eating lunch (Georgian cuisine—the country, not the state!) with another volunteer, so I hung out with them for a few hours before catching a marshrutka back home.

On Wednesday I started my French Club—next week will be Spanish—and on Thursday I was supposed to have Film Club, but I couldn’t get the ancient computer to play the movie from my flash. Only Kamilia and Slava (the guy who wanted me to start an English Club for adults) had shown up anyway, so I went to Kamilia’s house and we baked a blueberry tart, watched the episode of “Friends” I had planned to show at Film Club on her computer while we ate dinner, and then I played with her 2 year old son and had tea with her husband and his best friend while she tutored the pupil who unexpectedly showed up at her doorstep (who happened to be one of my 5th formers, since she lives near my school). We watched “Legends of the Fall” and she asked if I would stay the night and go to her village school on Friday; since it was cold and dark and I didn’t want to walk the 40 minutes past the railway station to my house, I said yes (plus I though it would be interesting to see the village school). Her husband works as a security guard in Kiev, a few days on and then a few days off, so he left for work that night.

Her son Djora’s bare bum took a liking to the pullout couch where I was going to sleep, so he decided to hang out there without any pants on while I looked at pictures with Kamilia. I got over it. Just like I got over the fact that I’ve worn my long underwear pretty consistently for the past 2 weeks without washing it. Besides, it was pretty convenient to just take off my shirt and pants and have another shirt and pants already on to use as pajamas. And my finger worked just fine as a toothbrush, so I’ll have you keep your snarky comments about my slipping standards of hygiene to yourself. You try doing yoga in a t-shirt with the space heater unplugged so the boiler can heat up and then realizing that the water isn’t going to get any warmer so you shiver through a shower before gratefully donning that long underwear once again. I like baking because the oven functions as another space heater.

I hung out with the kids at Kamilia’s school on Friday morning, playing ping-pong on the table in the hallway and eating mashed peas in a broth with a sausage thrown on top from the cafeteria, and trying to get them to ask me questions. One girl knew all about me and I was wondering how till she said she read an article in the paper; a local reporter came to the school and interviewed me the other day, but I didn’t know the story had already run. Then Kamilia and I and Slava’s friend went to the local history museum and had an exhaustive guided tour of its three rooms, and later polished off some tea in the multi-colored cube building near my apartment. I got home 33 hours from the time I had left my apartment the day before. These last few weeks have been just as busy, but I'll have to cover them another time. This weekend I'll be in Ivano-Frankivsk for approximately 24 hours, but to get there and back I'll spend 27 hours on a train (all that for a two hour meeting--stretching even my love of travel to the breaking point).

Love to all and a special thanks to Lisbeth for the postcard and Mrs. Rand for a lovely letter; both got held up in Kiev but eventually followed me to site and were my first mail here in Kozyatyn!

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!

Break out your kazoos--I just graduated pre-school!

Training ended today! We had our last Ukrainian class Thursday morning, and today was the LPI (Language Proficiency Interview), plus one more official thank-you visit to the local administration—and now we’re free! The LPI was a 10-minute conversation, kind of anti-climactic after 2 months of training (but I did feel satisfied when she said my conversation skills were especially impressive since I arrived 3 weeks late), and then we had tea with the mayor. On Monday, a bus comes to take us to Kiev for the 3-day Swearing-In Conference, and we also find out then where we’ll be living for the next two years. Next Thursday I’ll officially be a Peace Corps Volunteer, after swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution to the best of my ability in front of the Ambassador. Then all 100+ new volunteers head off to our various permanent sites, cut off from the crutch of our cluster-mates, together with whom we’ve spent every day of training. Just in time to be alone for Christmas! Good thing I came to Ukraine armed with digital copies of my favorite clay-mation Christmas videos! Maybe I’ll make my students watch them, since December 25 is a regular workday here and I’ll probably be teaching.

I still as yet have no idea what the particulars of my site-placement will be, so future internet access is TBD, but a little note about this blog and why I’m writing it: part of Peace Corps service is to provide asked-for technical skills to further the development of the host country, but another goal of Peace Corps is to facilitate cross-cultural understanding—both at home and abroad. So I envision this blog as an interactive forum, where my friends and family can learn about Ukraine and help me introduce Ukrainians to American culture, rather than a space for me to send thoughts off into the ether. To that end, I ask you all to contribute to this online conversation. I can keep a journal for myself, so I’ll only write online if this information is interesting and useful for you—let me know what you want to hear!