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!

Happy Thanksgiving/Днем подяки!

Thank you all for being in my life. I could wax poetic about what it means to me to have the family and friends that I do, but then I would cry, and I'd rather make you laugh instead. So here is a list of titles that describe moments of my life and impressions of these experiences in Ukraine. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to write stories to accompany these titles. Some of you have heard sneak peaks from me, but you must decide what to do with the power of your information (creativity and misdirection are encouraged):

The man coat and hysterical laughter;
slumber parties with 60 some-things;
Squirrels (capitalized);
stockings;
Hansel and Gretel and the wicked witch of hair-drying;
social life lamer than 16 year olds (ok, you can probably figure that one out yourself);
Sara and the (red, knock-off, Armani) purse;
History man: a lisp, 9 fingers, and a pumpkin;
steaming jeans and boiling water;
The Tragedy of Olga’s son (this one's actually not funny at all, but provides a sobering reminder of the everyday lives of Ukrainians);
The Arch of Friendship and a couple of beers

Love and a vodka toast to your health!

Photos!

I tried to think of the best way to share photos with anyone who wants a visual representation of my Peace Corps experience. Here's the link:

http://yaworsky.shutterfly.com/

Let me know what you think!

Holubtsi and Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! I’ve successfully survived two weeks in Ukraine and have started to establish some routines and wrap my head around training.

Then again, my training is anything but routine. The Minister of Ukraine mandated a three-week closure of all schools and universities due to H1N1, so we are officially in “quarantine.” Peace Corps Headquarters even called each volunteer to announce the “Alert” stage of EAP (Emergency Action Plan), which is just a fancy way of saying, “Pay attention to the news and don’t use public transport/go far from your site.” Last week schools were also closed for fall break. So after a month in Ukraine (7 weeks for everyone else), I will have observed two lessons and taught none. Yet the technical aspect of my training is supposed to consist of observing at least 10 classes taught by Ukrainian English Teachers and my fellow trainees, in addition to planning and teaching 15 of my own lessons. Even though we won’t be teaching for a while, Peace Corps has decided that we will plan lessons anyway, since we may be able to use them at site (and it’s good practice).

Despite the quarantine, we still have 4 hours of Ukrainian every day, on top of which I have 3 hours of individual tutoring each week (everyone else has 1). We have a coffee break halfway through, and go to the store (one of two in Bilky) after the lesson to buy food for lunch, which we cook at our LCF’s house (we almost invariably eat bread, kielbasa, cheese, and vareniky—aka pierogi—with sour cream and tea). On top of language training we have technical training, so even though we aren’t teaching, we have lesson planning, sessions with our TCF (basically seminars on predetermined topics twice a week, once being Saturday morning). Then each week there is usually a special session, which alternates between health and safety training and visits from Peace Corps staff to evaluate training—next week we have our Site Placement Interviews!!! We are also working on a Community Project together with the Borova group: we will be recording dialogues from the English books the school uses, conducting a demo lesson at a seminar for the English teachers in the community, and compiling a guidebook with examples for each stage in lesson planning using the communicative approach.

Olya leaves breakfast out for me, which I heat on the stove, and we eat dinner and do the dishes together (though she always give me more food). I live 2 minutes from my LCF’s house, so those who know me as Pokey will be happy to hear that I am never late, nor early, but arrive precisely when I mean to. Even without a lengthy commute (everyone else has between a 15-30 minute walk) I feel like every minute gets used for work, so I allow myself only a few minutes before bed to read, and I do yoga once a week. I haven’t gone running yet, but yesterday we didn’t start till noon, so I went for a walk around the village, since I haven’t really explored it yet. I noticed a lot of half-built houses, or ones with projects underway. Every house has a fence and at least a small garden. There are lots of dogs in the street, and they are not nice. Only the main road is paved. The landscape reminds me of Auburn, which is funny because that’s where my Ukrainian great-grandmother ended up after emigrating. The town center has a “department store,” several other shops, library, bazaar, post office, and a few pharmacies.

Two Sundays ago was chore day. Olya and I made liver’n’lung pies with fresh dough, pinching the edges and spreading egg yolks on top with broken bits of cloth (no pastry brush), and then it took her a few tries to start the gas for the oven, but we baked them along with a tray of cherry pies (which, not surprisingly, I prefer). Next we beat the rugs outside, swept and mopped the floors (with a rag wrapped around a stick—no Swiffer here), and harvested cabbages/weeded the garden for the winter. Yulka (the chained dog that I walk by on my way to the outhouse) and I share the same diet—she gets whatever I don’t eat. Everything else gets composted behind the outhouse.

On Halloween we had a morning session with a PCV about to COS from Lviv (aka advice from a volunteer just finishing his service), and I found it really inspiring. He told us his mistakes and what he would have done differently, and I appreciated the concrete advice. Later, to mark the holiday, I asked Olya if I could invite people over to watch a movie. I waited till the last minute so she couldn’t go out and buy stuff to play hostess, which was a good idea because she still put out tea and fruit and chocolates. Then we watched “El Orfanato” on my bed, which was appropriately terrifying.

Last Sunday Olya and I went to Fastiv, a city half an hour in the other direction (from Kiev). We bought grain for Yulka at the bazaar and walked around a bit, past a giant statue of Lenin. On the train and in the market a lot of people had scarves over their mouth and nose (myself included, since Olya made me—and it was cold). Then back at home I made holubtsi!

It snowed this morning. The first snow—light and fluffy, that melts when it hits the ground, and that you’re excited to see because it’s not February. But I’m unreasonably afraid of the coming winter, considering I’ve lived in Upstate New York and Maine.

The best way I can describe my environment in Ukraine so far would be 1850s meets 1950s meets today: we wash dishes in the bathroom sink and get water from the tub, garden vegetables and preserves are stored in the cellar of the outdoor kitchen, which also has a brick oven for baking bread, I pee in a bucket…but then I go back to watching “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” or Russian soaps, or Ukrainian MTV on cable television, or I sit in the wireless internet café drinking Stella, or Olya’s grandson tells me he plays internet games, wants to be a computer programmer, and listens to Papa Roach. Be-scarved babushkas share the sidewalk with women in high-heels, tight pants, make-up, and trendy tops (our Country Director calls them brick and stick ladies, respectively, and I find the description apt). Also, apparently sniffing hot salt cures the sniffles—any theories on that one? Since I continue to have a stuffy/runny nose, Olya heated salt on the stove and wrapped it in a cloth, which she made me hold against my nostrils, alternating back and forth.

Squat Toilets and Ukrainian "So You Think You Can Dance"

Yesterday the group piled into two vans, said a quick goodbye (we won't see each other till the Swearing In ceremony in two months), and shipped out to our training sites. I was the first drop-off. The driver kept turning onto smaller roads, past vast flat fields of black earth, down a dirt road...I sensed we were getting close. He stopped to ask for directions. "Bilky? Never heard of it."

We picked up my LCF, though I didn't realize who she was till we stopped and I pointed out my luggage to the driver, who left me and my mountain of luggage to the tender mercies of my very own babushka. My LCF spent a few minutes translating "Do you have any special food needs, etc. etc." and then left me alone with Olya. We spend most of our time pointing at words in the dictionary. Then she feeds me massive amounts of food and I rub my belly to assure her it is tasty, even though I can only manage--with heroic effort--to down half of it.

Highlights: I got locked in the outhouse and had to bang on the door and yell for Olya to rescue me. There is a block of wood that swings over the door on the outside, probably to keep it from flapping in the wind during the winter or something, but it swung over the door when I was inside, and that was not good. And of course I couldn't explain it so she thought I didn't know how to use the door. While unpacking last night, I discovered my face wash had become unlocked and unloaded half its contents into my toiletry bag, drenching the bottom of my hiking backpack and everything nearby. I'm still trying to scrub the suds out of the fabric, but at least it will be very clean! Right now it's still sticky though, and Olya hung the entire pack on the clothes line, which amuses me. I'm sure she thinks I'm crazy, since I spent a good hour trying to scrub the soap out (it's still not gone). Last night I also peed in a bucket. That was not a mistake. Before going to bed, she pointed to the bucket and said "tooalet," so apparently we don't use the outhouse at night. I made sure she had used it for the intended purpose before I did, in case I had misunderstood. I don't know, however, if the bucket is the proper place for other nighttime bathroom visits, and I don't know how I'm going to figure that out either, without some interesting miming/broken Ukrainian.

The house has running/hot water and electricity. The entryway is part mudroom/part hallway (perpendicular to the door, if that makes sense?), then straight ahead is the kitchen, to the left is the bathroom with sink and tub (and bucket), to the right is her bedroom (with a tv), and through a door off the front hallway slightly to the left is the dining room, left off of that is the living room (with another tv, and a wardrobe where I put all my clothes and suitcases and miscellaneous stuff), and straight through the dining room is my bedroom (minus a door). At night she shuts the dining room door and that acts like my bedroom door, so I essentially have dining room, living room, and bedroom to myself at that point. I have to walk past a chained dog on my way to the outhouse, but she seems nice so I pet her on the head and hope for the best each time. Olya has a big garden (pretty typical for Ukrainians, I'm told--they grow a lot of their own food if they can, since the hyperinflation of the 90s hit incomes hard).

Yesterday after lunch and a quick nap, my LCF (teacher), Svitlana, picked me up and we walked to another trainee's house for a party. I was tired, but I wanted to meet my cluster. We walked past a new neighborhood, and I was shocked by the contrast: the houses were double, triple, quadruple the size of Olya's house, and very elegant. Don't get me wrong, I think Olya's house is lovely, but these houses were nice in a different sort of way. It always surprises me when such contrasts exist in adjacent neighborhoods, but I don't know why I'm so taken aback, since it seems to happen everywhere in the U. S. too. We went to Alia's house and I met her host family (a very jolly--yes, I would describe them as jolly--couple with a 16-year-old daughter and a son somewhere in the 8-12 year range) and the 4 other volunteers I will be training with. We sat around the table and worked our way through a big meal (I had eaten two hours ago), chatting mostly in English, with Svitlana occasionally asking one of them to translate into Ukrainian for the host family. They all seemed to understand most of the Ukrainian spoken and be comfortable responding, so I'm anxious to get started. The tv on the counter was showing a marathon of Ukrainian "So You Think You Can Dance," and everyone was entranced.

Lauren has 9 host siblings, Sean lives with host parents, grand parents, and a 3 year old grandchild, and Sarah's host grandparents live in the next town and happen to host one of the trainees in that cluster, so there's a lot of back and forth visiting between their host families. Borova (sp?) is the "big" town and host to another cluster that together with ours makes a "link." I am sitting in an internet cafe in Borova right now with my LCF and three trainees: it has free wifi and we are all silently typing away at our computers. All of my cluster mates have indoor flush toilets, so they were a little shocked to learn that I did not. Frankly, I was too. I don't mind it, but it would be nice if everyone had similar living conditions, whether rustic or modern. In a perfect world, I would also have a bigger host family, with some host siblings, but I didn't have any say in the matter and I like Olya, so as soon as I can figure out what she's saying I'm sure we'll have a grand old time!

Tomorrow I start language class--I'll go in an hour early to start catching up, and everyone else will come at 10. We meet at Svitlana's house, which is just down the street from mine. The school is also very close. The other trainees all taught their first lessons on Friday and will be teaching more this week. We are also going to Kyiv on Thursday. They have never been! Orientation for the main group took place at an old Soviet resort outside the city. My group had a (very) abbreviated orientation right at Peace Corps Headquarters. Peace Corps only lifted the travel ban for trainees yesterday, so no one has left their training villages since they arrived.

That's all for now; I've got my work cut out for me in the next few weeks, so I doubt I'll have much free time, but I'll post when I do!

I made it (so far so good)!!!

I'm sitting in Peace Corps headquarters, 5 needles deep in vaccinations, but I wanted to let people know my training site! I will be in Bilky, a small village to the southwest of Kyiv, and I will study Ukrainian!