Miss Virginia in Ukraine

"Road Verginia Robertivna"

2008-11-19T08:55:00.008-05:00

As I write this, I am on the plane home. I left Ukraine at 8:00 this morning (my time), and am due to arrive in Washington, D.C. at 3 PM (10 PM my time).

Here are a few stories from my last days in Ukraine . . .

I spent the week of Fall Break getting ready to go home – writing goodbye letters and putting together photo albums for Ukrainians I know. When you have nothing to do but focus on a departure that’s still weeks away, you (or at least I) can get needlessly stressed out over the details. But I was saved from my obsessive tendencies by a visit from my former cluster-mate, Katie. She had some free time before going to Kyiv for medical appointments, so she came to see Bratslav! Unsurprisingly, Nina cooked up a storm for us, and we got to relax a little.

I took her to the Jewish cemetery, and we spent some time looking at the more modern stones. They were really interesting, especially the ones with old photographs. We also visited my school, and talked to my students who were preparing for a regional competition (the Olympiadas). Katie is officially the only other Volunteer to have seen my school’s new sinks! (More on those later.)

As I mentioned in my last post, I didn’t make it to the big Volunteer Halloween party, but my fellow Volunteer Cindy and I had our own small celebration. She was a nudist on strike, and I – as you may have figured out from the pictures – was Sarah Palin. I did my best (and even switched to my “Tina Fey glasses,” which I’ve come to really like), but I suppose that now is as good a time as any to come to terms with the fact that I look nothing like Gov. Palin (and, by extension, Elizabeth Hurley. Does anyone else see that?). Also, I’m not very good at winking.

A couple days later, Clara and I met Katie in Kyiv for the aforementioned doctors’ appointments. It was a very busy three days: we had our various appointments, our close of service interviews with our country director, and our LPI’s (language proficiency interviews). In addition to all that, I spent half the time running around trying to close my PEPFAR grant. Believe it or not, it was difficult to remember the election. It seemed very far away. Even when we sat in our hotel room watching BBC the night before the results came in (remember, we’re 7 hours ahead), I was mostly focused on the math required for my grant’s final budget, and on editing my DOS (“description of service” – an official-type document that you have to write in third person). When Clara and I woke up at 6 AM the next morning, the votes were already tallied! We made it to Katie’s room in time to hear most of McCain’s concession speech (our BBC didn’t work), and stayed for Obama’s speech after that. We had planned on going to a party that the U.S. Embassy was hosting (from 6 AM to 10 AM), but we were tired and still had a lot to do at the office, so our celebration was limited to splitting a persimmon while watching the speeches in bleary-eyed half-disbelief. The PC office has several official photographs of the current President and Vice-President – yesterday, before leaving, I took a “before” picture of them, and maybe a Volunteer with more time left will send me an “after” picture in January!

The rest of our business in Kyiv went well: I closed one grant; survived the “sand-blasting” procedure at the dentist’s; and got “Advanced-Mid” on my LPI! And we enjoyed McDonald’s breakfasts: a new addition to the menu that is only available in Kyiv, so far. We also had dinner with my and Katie’s old Ukrainian teacher, Yulia – who is now married! We met her then-fiancé, which was exciting.

I took my last Ukrainian train-ride home to Vinnytska oblast, and then started the goodbye process in earnest. I gave the English teachers in my town some more resources for teaching about HIV/AIDS, and some goodbye gifts: photo albums with pictures of their schools, and their students at my various seminars; “pesanky” (painted wooden eggs), and letters thanking them for all of their help.

Last Saturday, we had our last big city English club, and a goodbye party for the Group 31ers in our oblast. The next morning, a few of us sat around and watched a DVD of “American Idol” and “The Apprentice” episodes that somebody’s family had sent from the U.S., which filled us with apprehension about returning. But really, what’s the difference? Most of these shows have been remade in Russia and Ukraine, anyway.

On Monday and Tuesday, I had goodbye lessons for each of my classes. I started by thanking them all for being such wonderful students (which most of them were), and then explaining what a “superlative” is. A Volunteer at our COS conference had suggested that we make superlatives for our students. At first, I didn’t think I could come up with enough, but after returning to school in September, I decided that I could manage. I wrote their superlatives on index cards decorated with stickers, and passed them out at each class. Almost every class had a “Miss” and “Mr. Most Likely to Answer a Question.” A few got “Superstar!”, and many were based on physical appearance – like “Happiest Smile,” or “Brightest Eyes.”

For the 9th grade girls whose names I mix up, I gave “Most Likely to Be Called Olena by Virginia Robertivna” (for Natasha), and “Most Likely to Be Called Natasha by Virginia Robertivna” (for Olena). My 6th graders Yuri and Bokdan were each most likely to try to answer questions before the other one, and the Sasha’s who share a name-tag (with two arrows pointing either way) were most likely to sit together. Quite a few got superlatives like “Quiet Girl,” or “Needs to Talk More in Class” – I couldn’t think of something individual for everyone, especially for the kids who never say anything. Lots of the 5th graders got “Good Luck in English Class!”, and most of the 11th graders got “Good Luck in the Real World!”

In the 7th grade, the girls are almost all wonderful, and boys are some of the most obnoxious students I had here. I couldn’t resist: except for Ihor, who got “Most Likely to Understand Everything and Never Say Anything” (which he understood but declined to read out loud), all of the boys in that class got “The ‘Can You Read This?’ Award” . . . and they could not.

After I gave out superlatives and candy, my coordinator, Lyudmila, asked the students to each write me a note. The notes were incredibly sweet, and contained many interesting spellings of my name (variations of Verdjeniya,” though never quite that bad). The title of this post refers to the best surprise in the bunch: two of my 5th graders gave me notes that began with “Road Verginia Robertivna.” You see, the feminine version “dear” in Ukrainian is “doroHA.” And the word for road is “doROha” – pronounced slightly differently, but spelt exactly the same. I had to explain what had happened to Lyudmila – at first, she assumed that they were referring to my upcoming travels (like a theme Barbie – “Road Virginia Robertivna!”).

Lyudmila was worried about what the letters would say, since this was the first original letter in English many of them had ever written. But they were all very nice, and one 11th grader even said “we begs pardon” for not listening more. By now, the word has gotten out about the Partnership grant that we wrote, and all three school buildings have new sinks with running water. So a lot of the students thanked me “for water,” which sounds a little extreme, but I knew what they meant.

That project is finally done – I turned in the final receipts and finished closing it yesterday. It took a little longer than we expected: there were rain delays in September, and our school director broke his hip last spring – but he came to school just so he could make sure this project was finished, when ordinarily he would have stayed home. So, it worked out perfectly; and again, I can’t say how grateful I am to all of you who donated!

My students asked me why I was leaving, and if I would come back. I said that I wanted to come back, but that I don’t know when. When I explained that my family and friends were in America, some students asked, What if they all moved here? Then would you stay? The 5th graders were vocal in their support, though – they said that they were away at a sanitarium for three weeks without their parents, and that it was very hard. A student from School #1, who always speaks to me even though I don’t teach her, told me that her dad works in Moscow, and that she understands my wanting to be with my family.

In addition to giving gifts these last few days, I’ve been receiving LOTS of gifts. All three of my suitcases are filled with gifts and souvenirs. The only clothes I’m bringing home are those that I needed to wrap around gifts. (Don’t worry, I’m also mailing some clothes home – but still, I definitely need to go shopping soon.)

Some gifts that stood out: Lyudmila gave me a massive blue and yellow pillow in the shape of a fish, because I’m a Pisces; my neighbors gave me a figurine of horse-drawn angels with a fake rose; my students gave me a few drawings, including one of me and Lyudmila (I’m wearing quite a fancy red dress); Lyudmila’s husband gave me vodka for my dad and uncle; and, two nights ago, Clara’s host dad presented me with a mace. That’s right, a mace. The mace is a big Ukrainian symbol because of the association with the Cossacks – and I’m proud to say I was able to fit it in my bag with everything else. Also, I had two poems written for me! I never had a poem written about me before! Yana, Lyudmila’s daughter, wrote a very sweet poem in English for me, and the nice vice-principal (there are two, one is scary) wrote me one in Ukrainian (while she was sitting in a seminar, apparently). Very cute.

On Friday, I had a party for the Ukrainians I’ve gotten closest to: my neighbors, Lyuba and Mikola; Nina (my baba); Lyudmila and her husband; and the English teachers from School #1, the technical college, and the orphanage. Not everyone was able to come, but Nina and I made a lot of food anyway. I made some of the same American dishes that we made at the end of training for our host families – chili, macaroni and cheese, corn pudding and brownies – plus a pizza. Nina made holubtsi (cabbage rolls), which she knows I like, and some other Ukrainian dishes. It was funny to see the Ukrainians exclaim over how interesting the American food looked – and then carefully serve themselves very small portions. Welcome to my life, everyone. The chili was a little too interesting for them, but the blander dishes went over well.

On Saturday night, Lyudmila organized a party at a local café for me and the other teachers from our school. Those teachers haven’t ever talked to me much – I think they don’t really know what to make of me – and Saturday night was no different, but it was still nice to see everyone before I left. There was an hour of dancing to awful disco music, during which I tried to think positive thoughts and focus on how ridiculous everyone else looked. I was totally exhausted, but Lyudmila was really excited to have everyone together. She told me that the school director never used to dance before he hurt his hip – but that night, he put down his cane and shuffled along with everyone else!

The next day was Leaving Day: I had to put all of my stuff on a bus and go to Clara’s town to catch the fast bus to Kyiv the next morning. Clara came over and had leftovers and homemade wine with Lyudmila and Nina and me before we left. It was very hard to say goodbye to both women: they’ve done so much for me, and each regarded me as a member of their family. I gave them both photo albums and framed pictures of us together, which they liked – Ukrainians love pictures, and they can spend hours showing you photo albums without ever seeming to tire (or notice if you do). I did my best to tell them how much they meant to me. Lyudmila was still texting me goodbye’s and thank you’s this morning before I got on the plane. Saying goodbye is definitely one of the most difficult parts of Peace Corps. But it has to happen eventually – and I gave everyone stamped envelopes with my address in America, and promised letters and phone calls . . .

So, I’m finished with Peace Corps! I’m coming home as an “RPCV” – Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s very hard to believe. Here on the plane, I’m not really sure I do believe it.

My friend Grant always tells people “No one ever grows up planning to do Peace Corps; well, except for Virginia.” I’m obviously not the only example, but I guess he’s right that a lot of people seem to stumble upon it their senior year of college, without having given it a second thought before. I’ve wanted to do PC ever since I found out what it was – some time during middle school or whenever I first heard about a cousin who was a Volunteer in Honduras. I felt spoiled my senior year because I only worried about one interview, while everyone else was stressing out over all of their options. You would think that Peace Corps might only delay that stress – but the thing is, you have so much time to think over these two years, that a lot of us leave with much clearer ideas of what we want to do and why. That’s how it’s been with me. So don’t let people tell you that it’s just a postponement of the real world . . .

Despite having wanted to do Peace Corps for so long, I’m not sure that I really expected anything in particular. I thought I would be in Latin America, because I studied Spanish, but beyond that I only had vague ideas of what it would be like in terms of a day-to-day life. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about how many grant-writing opportunities there were: it just hadn’t occurred to me that as an English teacher in some village, I would be able to take on larger projects that you normally associate with public health programs, etc. Starting to teach about HIV/AIDS and human trafficking at Camp HEAL was a big turning point in my service – RPCVs are right when they say that you start to figure things out after about a year in country. Camp HEAL was also where other counselors told me I should go ahead and try the sink project, even though I was afraid that it was a crazy, unfeasible idea.

I had several ideas crash and burn, and there were definitely some not fun times. With regard to other Volunteers: Peace Corps brings together a lot of very different personalities, and there are many times when the mix doesn’t work (to put it gently). But I met several wonderful, amazing people that I might never have met otherwise, and, even though it’s only been two years, they know me just about as well as anyone on earth does. PC can be intense in a bad way, but it can also be the reverse.

Clara once said that she kept imagining when all this would be a memory, and I said that I kept imagining when it would be a three-minute story at dinner parties. “Where were you in Peace Corps?” “Ukraine.” “The Ukraine? What language do they speak there?” . . . etc.

It’s not an experience that’s easy to define. In some ways, it’s very different for every person – the other Volunteers in my oblast didn’t always understand what things were like at my school, and I didn’t always understand the way things worked at theirs. A lot depends on the people in your town, your coordinator, your students, and other things you can’t control (things which, thankfully, all turned out wonderfully for me). But in other ways, it’s a bizarrely consistent experience: visiting my PC Twin in Mozambique, we found that our situations had many similarities, despite the glaring, obvious differences.

My dad saw an ad for Peace Corps that said “Never have to start a sentence with ‘I should’ve’.” That’s one way to look at it.

But it’s not the only way – I was watching “House,” and heard the following classic line from Dr. Foreman: “It’s like willingly getting the flu, or joining the Peace Corps.” (The Volunteers whom I repeated that to loved it.) He goes on to explain that these things are “short-term . . . commitment is only commitment because it has no expiration date.” He’s absolutely right. There are very few Volunteers who aren’t constantly aware of how many months they’ve finished, and how many are left. The countdown is a frequent topic of conversation in Peace Corps, for obvious reasons. Even if we love what we’re doing, that doesn’t mean we aren’t pining for Target and Taco Bell.

So I’m going home to those things, and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever leave them again. I’m definitely not the Foreign Service type, like some other Volunteers. I hope that I can find other useful ways to spend my time, but opportunities like that aren’t as obvious when it’s no longer your job to look for them. But that’s actually the real reason I wanted to do Peace Corps – to sort of force myself into the habit of being useful, in hopes that the habit would stick.

One more quotation made me think of finishing Peace Corps, from Bill Bryson’s book about walking the Appalachian Trail ("A Walk in the Woods"):

“It was unlike Katz not to fall upon soft drinks and junk food with exuberant lust when the opportunity presented itself, but I believe I understood. There is always a measure of shock when you leave the trail and find yourself parachuted into a world of comfort and choice, but it was different this time. This time it was permanent. We were hanging up our hiking boots. From now on, there would always be coke, and soft beds and showers and whatever else we wanted. There was no urgency now. It was a strangely subduing notion.”

I’m about to be parachuted back into that world, and I can’t say I’m not excited. Mostly I’m excited to see all of you – I’ve missed you since the very first day of staging, before we had even left the hotel in Arlington. I never seriously considered going home early, but there was never a time that I wasn’t homesick. I talked about you all nonstop; and I appreciate how many people kept in touch with me, more than I can say. I hope you’ll be able to tolerate my talking about Ukraine nonstop – but if you’ve kept up with this blog, then I won’t have to bore you with background details (and I can get straight to the good stuff). Thank you so much for reading it!

The last letters I have to thank people for are from Emily H. and Dr. Brent! . . .

By the time you read this, I’ll be in America, so give me a call. I’ll be busy preparing scrapbooks, doing grad school application stuff, and attempting to rebuild my wardrobe – but I won’t be too busy to talk to you.

See you soon!

Love, Virginia

Pictures

2008-11-04T02:53:00.019-05:00

Some pictures from the disco:

And from a trip to the cemetery with Cindy and Clara:

And some from our trip to Sofiyivska Park:

And finally . . . Halloween. (I was going to go to a big party, but for various reasons we decided not to . . . so we just dressed up on our own):

Final Stretch

2008-10-29T07:01:00.002-04:00

Hello again! I haven’t forgotten about you. I’m just – as I’m sure you can imagine – too busy to think straight (or write readable sentences). 20 days to go . . .

I’ve officially finished teaching, although I’m going to teach some goodbye lessons before I go. It was a good half-semester; though I think the kids and I were getting a little punchy towards the end. They finally figured out that when I ask them to translate an English word into Ukrainian, I sometimes just take their word for it based on how confident they sound. If they don’t hesitate before translating, and if I don’t know any better, I just assume that they’re right and don’t bother looking it up to make sure. Well, as I said, they figured this out – and tried to trick me a few times, which was cute. One day I asked, “What’s ‘to sprint’?” – and one student said, with as straight a face as he could manage, “Sprint-oo-vah-tay.” (Most verbs end in “oo-vah-tey” in Ukrainian – and there are some cognates, like “pack-oo-vah-tay” (a relevant word for me right now).) Maybe they fooled me a few times and I didn’t realize it, but usually I was able to call their bluff by raising my eyebrows and waiting for them to break. Funny children.

Another time, I was teaching the 7th graders about food, and different things that we should put in the refrigerator or freezer. I said that I could put a Coca-Cola (they don’t say “Coke”) in the freezer for an hour to make it cold . . . but (I asked) what else could I do? What can I take from the freezer to put in my drink to make it cold? One boy, still stuck on the idea of what food products we keep in the freezer, blurted out, “Meat!” Usually I keep a straight face when I’m teaching, but I couldn’t help laughing when I asked “You put meat in your Coca-Cola?” The kids are usually willing to laugh at themselves, too, which is nice.

My star 5th graders are now slightly rowdier 6th graders, but they still did pretty well this quarter, despite the adjustment to a more difficult textbook than they’re used to. Unfortunately, since two very smart girls moved away, it’s a much quieter class, and only a few of the kids are usually willing to read out loud. However, one day, quiet Ruslan volunteered, and managed to make it through a few sentences. When he finished, his friend Yuri turned around and shook his hand in congratulations – so silly. Only men shake hands in Ukraine, and even in schools, you’ll see a boy enter his classroom and shake hands with all of the other boys before taking his seat. They’re very formal, in their way.

About a year ago, my coordinator, Lyudmila, started planning a methodological handbook for teaching the 6th grade: a collection of ten sample lesson plans for a relatively new textbook called “Our English.” Her preparation for this was to take meticulous notes while I was teaching those lessons last fall and again this quarter. So when I helped her edit them, I found myself looking at a record of basically every word I said during those classes. Here’s an example from a lesson in which I was explaining different modes of transportation:

“What’s a carriage? Is it like a train? Does it have wheels? Does it have a sail? Does your family have a carriage? A carriage is a wagon that a horse pulls. (In Ukrainian, you say that a train has ‘wagons.’ In English, we say a train has “cars.” For example, ‘What number car are you on?’) Do you know what a ‘fairy-tale’ is? What character in a fairy-tale had a carriage? She went to a dance, and she had to come back home by 12 o’clock, because her carriage would turn into a pumpkin. Cinderella!

There is also a baby carriage – to push a baby in. [Draw a picture.] There is a poem: ‘First comes love / Then comes marriage / Then comes baby and the baby carriage.’ . . . .

[Looking at a timeline exercise in the (very random) book:] What happened in 1100 BC? The ‘first passenger carriages.’ Like Cinderella – people started using carriages in Europe. Did they use carriages in America? No, in Europe. What is an ‘automobile’? It’s just a car. Big word, short meaning. The first car was in France – when? In 1890. How many years ago? 117 years ago. Did the Romans have cars? No. Did Cinderella have an automobile? No.”

Ok, so I know that this excerpt makes it look like I’m on speed, but you have to factor in the long pauses between questions (which contain, ideally, answers and student participation). But really, that is like a word-for-word account of one of my lessons. It was sort of horrifying to see physical proof of how much I talk, and my utter lack of any brain-mouth filter (this is all pretty much off-the-cuff – I’m not proud of how little I plan my lessons, but there it is). It was strange to relive these lessons as I typed and edited them. The booklet will be printed, with an introduction in Ukrainian by Lyudmila, after I leave . . .

So, I’ve lived in Bratslav for nearly two years, and I still don’t know everyone, but everyone sure knows me. People whom I don’t know never hesitate to speak to me in the street and address me by name (though one man called me “Angela,” which was confusing). On my way to school one day, a woman riding a bicycle stopped to say, “Virginiyechka, you still haven’t left?” No idea who she was. I think I said, “Uh . . . no.” The other day, while I was walking home, a man stopped me to point out a faster route to my house. No idea who he was. I sort of nodded, but defiantly continued along the route I prefer (you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere).

I taught my last big city English club, though we’ll have one more meeting before I go. I decided to talk about a book I had just read – Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” about his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. The passages that I read were definitely more appreciated by the more advanced speakers in the group, but everyone enjoyed talking about bears and other dangerous animals. They were all pretty taken aback at the idea of someone hiking for five months for no real reason.

Lyudmila and I finished our PEPFAR project with a disco to raise awareness about HIV. Well, really we didn’t have a disco, so much as an “event.” There was no dancing, outside of the tango choreographed and performed by a few 9th graders. The school administration had had us reschedule the event several times, and in the end, we had to have it right after school instead of in the evening, which meant that no students from other schools could attend. But, as always, Lyudmila went all out, and it was quite a show. She wrote a skit for her new class (the 5th graders) to perform: they all had little paper hats with words like “hygiene” or “vitamins,” and they recited rhyming stanzas about healthy living and the importance of eating right and washing your hands. [Young children reciting original poetry is a very popular form of entertainment here, and it happens at almost every major event.] Then several older students introduced themselves, and performed skits or dances. They had formed “teams” – and each team had their own name, badge, and slogan, in the tradition of the Pioneers (a sort of Soviet Boy Scouts). As I mentioned, a few boys and girls did a tango to Shakira, and others did skits about how eating candy instead of porridge (“kasha”) will make you sick. So, the event wasn’t so much focused on HIV/AIDS, but the students had fun, and the school director and teachers really enjoyed it. Everyone was enthusiastic about planning future projects and seminars with the same theme, after I’ve gone home. So – I’m happy!

I told Lyudmila later that one thing that’s really struck me here is the students’ complete lack of stage-fright. They won’t volunteer to read in class, and they’ll be very shy and retiring in general – but if you ask them to put on a ball gown, do a dance and sing in front of the entire school, they don’t even hesitate. I’ve seen very shy girls get up in front of their teachers and parents and dance in ways that would make Baby from “Dirty Dancing” blush (even after she’d had the time of her life), and then they’ll grab a microphone and sing a solo. It’s amazing. Just the costumes are enough to make my jaw drop, sometimes – one young girl paraded around in a Southern belle-style white hat and poofy dress, complete with wand, at the “First Bell” ceremony this year. I must have had an interesting expression on my face during the tango performance, because the students later ran up to Lyudmila to make sure that I liked it. I did! – and I’m very impressed with them – just sort of surprised, that’s all.

After the “disco,” I went to Trostyanets to visit my friend Clara, and to go to the Halloween party that she organized for the students in her town. It was very involved – all the kids wore costumes, and they had different games like “pin the fangs on the vampire,” and a British version of bobbing for apples where you hang apples from a stick and try to bite them without using your hands. The next day we went over to her host family’s to visit, and made them an apple pie with the apples my coordinator gave me recently. Her host brother and sister speak very good English for their age – they go to a tutor – and are very enthusiastic about talking to us. While eating the pie, her host brother made the enigmatic statement, “There are good things, and bad things.” I said, “Oh?” And he continued, “The pie is good, but it is bad that we don’t have more.”

I’m trying to make sure that I see everyone before I leave, and I was worried about getting to see a former student from my 5th grade groupie class last year, Diana, whose family moved to another town. She was one of the students who called me from time to time (for short conversations, mostly consisting of asking how and where I was), so I had her number, and called her to see if she could come visit me. She came to visit (bearing chocolate and a huge can of strawberries), and told me about her new town and school. I’m still amazed at her English – it isn’t perfect, but she speaks without hesitation. Even if she doesn’t know exactly how to say something, she’ll figure out another way – like when she was giving me directions to her house, she said “You see the school. You see a big blue house . .”, etc. It was nice to see her before I left!

This week, Clara and I took a trip to Uman, a nearby city in Cherkasy oblast. I know I’ve mentioned the sect of Hassidic Judaism that began in my town – Breslov Hassidism. Well, the founder of this group, Rebbe Nachman, is buried in Uman. Every year on Rosh Hashanah, thousands of pilgrims from around the world go to visit his grave. We got to the area where he’s buried, and saw signs in Hebrew everywhere, and one in English advertising kosher food (it seemed like normal kiosk food to me, but it was the off-season). Our taxi driver even did the traditional chant for us (“Uman, Uman, Rosh Hashanah!”). We got to see his tomb, and met a very nice woman who gave us some literature in Russian (which we couldn’t really read), and told us about him. She pointed out where we could make a donation in his name, and assured us (in fairly good English) that Nachman “does favors” even for non-Jews.

Afterwards, we visited Sofiyivka Park: a sprawling park created in the early 19th century, named after Sofia Vitt-Potocka. I’m not 100% sure about her history, but I think she was a slave, then the concubine of someone important, and then the wife of two rich, important men, in succession. According to the guidebook we bought, she was “a very beautiful woman with a big intellect.” As I’m sure you can imagine. [The guidebook also asks, “What is it with Sofiyivka that has charmed numerous visitors?”] The park was very pretty, and it was nice to see all of the fall colors.

Speaking of the weather – it’s been relatively warm! The packing process is sort of a gamble: guessing how much long underwear I’ll be needing before I go, or which sweaters I can afford to do without. The weather’s been good to us, so far – some days, all I need is a fleece jacket! So keep your fingers crossed.

I’ll be spending the next couple weeks doing paperwork, trying to close my Partnership grant (my PEPFAR grant is done, I think), and going to doctors’ appointments and such. I’ll be in Kyiv during the election – so I’ll have internet access at the PC office, and BBC at the hotel! Very exciting!

Thank you to Mrs. Keeley for the nice note! And I’m sorry that so many of you appear to be receiving letters from me three months late! Well, what can you do. I hope you’re all doing well; I miss you – but I will see you very, very soon!

Love, Virginia

Crimea, and Seminars (Long Entry!)

2008-09-27T04:46:00.013-04:00

Hello everyone! 52 days to go. And a whole lot of government paperwork to be done in the meantime . . .

So! For the first two weeks (or so) of school this year, I was sick; so I didn’t do a lot of teaching. Mostly I sat at home and coughed, and ran around town to make sure the four local schools remembered about the seminars on HIV/AIDS that Lyudmila and I were planning. It’s quite a commute to walk to all four schools – my school is right in the middle, and that’s more than a mile from my house – but I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the different English teachers. And the teachers at the technical school almost always ask me to stay for tea and chocolate, so it’s not like I don’t get anything out of the deal.

As I may have mentioned, my coordinator, Lyudmila, and I wrote a PEPFAR grant (the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) to hold seminars for the four local schools this month, and to have a disco afterwards to raise awareness. Luckily for me (and, of course, the community) Lyudmila is a powerhouse, and really took the lead with the project’s implementation. We went to our district capital, Nemirov, to print lesson plans to give to the teachers and students, as well as little pocket calendars and brochures with information about HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. Thanks to Lyudmila, we managed to get discounts on a lot of these things, and we’re well within our budget! (That’s particularly impressive given the recent combination of inflation and the antics of the U.S. dollar, which has meant that anyone who wrote a grant last winter (like I did) probably didn’t get quite what they asked for.)

Lyudmila is originally from Nemirov, and on one of our trips I met her mother and step-father for the first time! Of course, her mother insisted on my eating salad and deruny (potato pancakes), which was fine with me. Her attempts to give me something to drink were more problematic: I consider myself a fairly flexible eater (and I’ve gotten better in the Peace Corps), but there are just some lines I don’t cross. For instance, I’ve never once eaten salo, the fried pork fat they love to eat here (though I’ve eaten things cooked with it, which can be good). I have yet to try holodetz, the jellified meat fat dish served here. And, apparently, some liquids here give me pause as well. First she tried tomato juice, which I’ve never been a fan of, which Lyudmila knew and explained for me. Then she offered me milk, and I accepted. She brought me a full glass, with a spoon in it, and explained that it had to be stirred. Because there were chunks in it. Lyudmila said, haltingly, “It is milk that has . . .” “. . . Curdled?,” I asked. I think it was “kefir,” – the “yoghurt” that Nina made by leaving milk next to my electric space heater. I tried it, but couldn’t handle it. So finally, she gave me hot water with lemon. Good enough. They were very sweet; and when I noticed their accordions on the shelf, they played for me – Lyudmila’s energetic mother dancing around, singing and even using her good-natured husband’s face to beat a tambourine-type-thing against.

At the end of the second week of school, my fellow Volunteers Clara and Brittany and I took a trip to Crimea! It was the first trip for each of us, and we had all been told that we had to see it before leaving. I thought that a trip in September would mean fewer crowds, and less oppressive weather – and I was right, but unfortunately, that week the weather in Ukraine turned chilly and rainy all over. We were better off in Crimea than we would have been up north, but still – no sunbathing.

We decided to fly from Kyiv because of a special deal, and to save time – Crimea is a long train ride away (over 20 hours). I realized after it was too late that I had forgotten my real passport, but thankfully they let me through with my PC identification card. Packing for the trip was slightly confusing, because the website clearly stated that liquids were not allowed in checked baggage. We were skeptical, but went along with it – only to discover at the check-in counter that we had been misled. We hastily repacked, and went on our way.

Even though it was September, Crimea was still pretty busy, and we were turned away from several hotels over the course of five days. We finally found a hotel in Simferopol (where we landed), and decided to call ahead before traveling to Yalta. I made the phone calls because I was trying to use the very little Russian I’ve picked up. (In the East, and in Odessa and Crimea, Russian is the dominant language, while in the West, it’s Ukrainian. Clara claims that I pick up a crazy Russian accent when I switch over, that I don’t use with Ukrainian.) We discovered (with the help of someone who spoke English back to me) that Yalta was holding a conference, and so was all booked. (We were later told that this might have been a racecar thing.) So, we went to Bakcheserai instead!

Bakcheserai was definitely my favorite part of the trip; it’s a very pretty town, with many attractions related to its Tatar history. The Tatars are a Muslim minority group in Crimea, originally from Asia or thereabouts. I don’t know much of the history, but it was really interesting to see how different this region of Ukraine was, due to their influence. I heard the Muslim call to prayer for the first time in my life, which was really cool – though we only heard it once, each day we were there.

We arrived, and began to search for a hotel. Lonely Planet told us about a nice bed and breakfast, so we started searching, and ended up following a man up a steep hillside, after which he indicated that we should keep walking straight. After a long, long walk, with all our bags (and under a very threatening-looking sky), we came to a different hotel, which was full. They helpfully called us a taxi, though, and we stopped in a café to regroup, while it started to rain. This café was maybe my favorite part of Bakcheserai: it had couch-like, cushioned seats with low tables, and great Tatar food. The people who worked there were very nice to us, and a man from Uzbekistan walked up to us and immediately began rattling off everything he knew about America, including city names – including Alexandria! He later had some less charming things to say involving conspiracies and UFOs, and we humored him for a bit before returning, with looks of determination, to our plates. He was helpful, though, in that he called up his friend who ran a bed and breakfast down the road! He even got the friend to pick us up in his car, because of the rain, so that was nice. In the meantime, we discovered amazing Tatar desserts, which mostly involve honey, and which include a version of baklava. Tatar food isn’t that different from Ukrainian food – maybe slightly more Mediterranean – but it was still exotic to us, and we loved the desserts.

We met Clara’s training cluster-mate, Christina, who knows all about Tatar culture, as well as Russian politics, and enthusiastically filled us in on some specifics. The room we were given at the bed and breakfast was very nice, and our host greeted us in the morning with Turkish coffee and peanuts covered in powdered sugar. That morning, we hiked up to a monastery in the hills, which was very pretty, and then hiked even further to a series of formerly inhabited (not sure when) caves. It was sort of reminiscent of the Flintstones – the caves often had little openings for doorways and windows carved into them. We took a lot of pictures, posing in the windows . . .

That afternoon, we got to visit a workshop/gallery that I knew about because of the SPA grant that started it: at my first SPA meeting, I think, a Volunteer from Bakcheserai, who was also on the SPA committee, submitted a grant for a workshop/gallery for Tatar artists, to help ensure that their traditional art continued. So, I was really excited to finally see it, after hearing about it so long ago! The workshop was really neat, and the artists came into the gallery to explain their pieces to us (and, of course, to encourage us to buy them). It was all very pretty, and I finally decided on a wedding present for a friend at home (it will be REALLY late . . . sorry, Carolyn!!!).

In addition to Crimean desserts, we got to try Crimean wine, which was very nice. We ate both nights at a restaurant named for Pushkin, where a very nice cat spent the evening first on Brittany’s lap, then mine. So: desserts and wine, pretty art, and a nice cat. It’s clear why Bakcheserai was my favorite stop on the trip.

Our next stop was Sevastopol, where we spent a few hours visiting with a Volunteer couple in our group, Phil and Carol. They pointed us toward “the Panorama,” which Christina was excited to see, and Greek ruins, called Hersonis. The Panorama is a 3D work of art commemorating the siege on Sevastopol at the end of the Crimean War. It’s a circular room that you can walk all around, with a painted scene continuing off the wall (if that makes sense) into cannons, reconstructed trenches, etc. You can see the French and the British approaching in the distance. They even made the room smell like gunpowder (apparently there is a recording of gunshots and explosions that they play when lots of children come). I’m not very knowledgeable about history, and the whole thing made me think of Eddie Izzard’s imitation of the Germans retreating from Russia (“Oh – it’s a bit cold, a bit cold!”).

We took a very late bus to Yalta, where we stayed in a nice apartment. Unfortunately, the palace that hosted the Yalta Conference (of FDR, Churchill and Stalin fame) was closed, so we satisfied ourselves with a ferry trip to the Swallow’s Nest: a very, very small castle on a cliff, built at the beginning of the 20th century, for someone’s mistress. It was on the cover of the last Lonely Planet for Ukraine, and is very photogenic, but, as Lonely Planet warned, much shorter than you would expect. (Like meeting a celebrity in person, they crack.) It’s about the size of a suburban house. But I was still happy to see it, finally, and we all took lots of pictures, when not ducking out of the photos of Ukrainians. Asian tourists might be famous for how many pictures they take, but I swear, no one can out-do Ukrainians at the random, “glamour shot” photo. Every two feet, at least, there was a Ukrainian girl draping herself against a wall and gazing dramatically at her friend’s camera (no smiles and peace signs for Ukrainian photos). It was pretty intense.

The next day, we woke up early for our journey back to our sites. This required the following sequence of modes of transportation: a marshrutka (minibus); a bus; a taxi; a plane; a bus; a train; a taxi; and a bus. Needless to say, it took all day, and we were all very tired when we reached our respective homes. However, exciting tidbit: I met someone who spoke Spanish on the train! I was complaining to Clara about not knowing the word for “blanket” (wanting to request one from the conductor), and how I knew it in Spanish (whine, whine) – and the guy across from me must have understood some of what I said, because later he asked, in Spanish, if I spoke Spanish. I was so shocked and unprepared that, even after a few tortured seconds of thinking, I was only able to respond with “sí” and “entiendo” – “I understand” (which I did . . . I just couldn’t really respond). For basic words, my mind immediately goes to Ukrainian, but after a few minutes I was able to carry on a conversation with him, and learned that he’s been working construction in Barcelona for four years. So, my Spanish is not totally dead!

Back in Bratslav, Lyudmila and I continued with preparations for our seminars. That weekend, we went to the store and bought 140 juice boxes – individually. Not so many “in bulk” options in Ukraine. We were a sight to see.

On Monday, the seminars began! We invited (and confirmed the names of) five dedicated students and any interested teachers from our school, the technical college, School #1, and the orphanage – and that’s more or less who came. Unfortunately, the students and teacher from the orphanage never did show up – apparently there were various competitions to attend, which took priority. Sigh. By the end of the week, we had lots of new students, and very few who had actually attended all four days. So, the “before and after” tests we gave on Monday and Thursday have little to no statistical value, but whatever.

On the first day, Lyudmila and I went over the lesson plans I’ve been using to teach about HIV/AIDS here, which my campers had translated into Ukrainian for our seminar participants. Usually I don’t care too much about grammar when I speak Ukrainian during these lessons – I figure, if I can get the main point across, I’m good. But this time, I was speaking in front of my former Ukrainian tutor (the Ukrainian teacher at our school) and the vice-principal, in addition to other teachers and students who hadn’t heard me before, so I was a little nervous. I tried hard to use the right grammar, and people were very nice about complimenting me afterwards. We did the elephant and lion game, and I went over the true/false questions about how it’s possible to get HIV (sharing needles, yes; toothbrushes, no). I noticed that the vice principal had sort of a stern expression on her face, and I was nervous that she was offended, so I kept trying to smile and direct my lighter comments towards her. But afterwards, she came up to me, looking like she was about to cry, and thanked me and Lyudmila for the seminars – so I had no reason to worry, after all.

Lyudmila was very enthusiastic while explaining the lesson plans with me, and the first day was great. The second day, I wanted to show part of “A Closer Walk,” but, unfortunately, the CD I burned on my computer didn’t work with our new TV and DVD player, so I ran home to get my computer. A student claimed to be able to read the Russian subtitles from the back row of chairs, but he must have been lying: soon after starting the movie, I realized that most of the thirty-some people in attendance had no idea what was going on. I was panicking, but they came up with the solution of having someone in the first row read the subtitles out loud. Everyone was satisfied with this, and I was thrilled – an English teacher from School #1 and Lyudmila took turns reading, and it went very well. My former tutor told me afterwards about how she got our 80-year-old literature teacher to come see the movie: at first she wasn’t interested, after hearing what the subject matter was, but she came anyway, and later thanked my tutor for convincing her. It was wonderful to have such enthusiastic and appreciative participants, even though they didn’t all come every day. The whole point of the project was to encourage teachers and students to continue teaching about HIV after I leave, and to feel confident with the subject matter. So I was very, very happy with the reactions we got – I think we were successful!

On the third day, we invited two speakers from a nation-wide organization I had come across, named ACET (AIDS Care Education Training). They were great! The students and teachers loved them, and they covered everything in a straightforward way, with humor – really, I felt like I was in a “family life” class at home (yes, that’s what my crazy high school called it). My Ukrainian isn’t so good that I could understand all of the jokes, but I could see how much everyone was enjoying the presentation. The speakers were impressed with Lyudmila’s attitude and she with theirs, and they may come back to our school again!

On the final day, the different school groups were to plan their own projects (like at Camp HEAL, where campers sit with their Volunteers at the end of the week to plan something for their community). Unfortunately, as I said, many of the students hadn’t been there all week, or couldn’t come on the last day: there was some concert thing at the technical college, so they couldn’t come, and only four students came from School #1 (and not the ones who came before). Apparently there was some driving school thing on Thursdays that no one bothered to tell me about beforehand. But, it was an enthusiastic audience anyway, even if it didn’t have the sense of “closure” that I planned for.

Before the students started planning projects, Lyudmila taught an extra lesson on “healthy living,” which was a surprise to me. I was a little skeptical, since her preparation had including cutting out lots of pictures of cute, fluffy animals, and making flowers and grass from colored paper. [Side note: Ukrainians really like to make things pretty. Really. Students may not have any clue what the test in front of them is about, but they will have the white-out ready to be employed at a moment’s notice. Women might alternate between two sweaters all winter, but you had better believe that both will be covered in sequins and flair. If they have one pair of boots, you’d better believe they’ll be pointy stilettos – never mind that Bratslav’s uneven roads are hard on my feet even when wearing sneakers. It’s just a priority, here.] Lyudmila had the students make collages using the pretty pictures of nature and fluffy animals, and she posted them on the blackboard. She then said (and I’m paraphrasing, from what I understood of it) that these represented a nice, healthy life. She asked if the students had enjoyed making them – and, sure enough, they had. She then said: well, this is what happens to your life when you get sick (again, paraphrasing, she was probably more eloquent) – and she began ripping the pictures off the posters, and crossing out the flowers. The students cringed and caught their breath, but they smiled and understood the lesson. Then, she said that your friends and family might help you, take care of you, and take you to the hospital – and she began to glue some of the pictures back into place. But the damage was done, and she explained that life can’t be totally the same again, afterwards. Which is why we should live healthy lives. I was impressed!

So, the seminars went very well! I was especially pleased with the teachers’ reactions; they were really excited about the lessons. At my school, I’ve had very little contact with any adults besides Lyudmila – the teachers say Hi to me (sometimes), but that’s about it. So it was nice to have some of them there at the seminars, so that they could understand more about what I’ve been doing all this time. If these seminars are what I’m remembered for, then I’m happy!
I’ve finally started teaching regularly again, although I won’t be for much longer! It’s too bad that I won’t get to know my new students better. My new 5th graders – Lyudmila’s new class, now that her 11th graders are gone – are very, very cute. They’re very intent on translation: I can barely get out a sentence before a child shouts out what he or she thinks the Ukrainian is. There are a few enthusiastic new students in my other grades as well – including a girl who gave her name as “Meri,” in the 7th grade.

This year, we only have six 10th graders – a result of all the smart students (and some others) transferring to the technical college after 9th grade. But – it’s great! Because they’re all at the same level. This is very rare in my classes: I usually have four kids who understand everything I say, six kids who don’t have a clue, and about ten somewhere in between. It limits what I can do – especially what I can do for the kids who are behind. These six don’t have a high level of understanding at all, but I can go slowly enough that we’re all on the same page. They get tired of looking things up in the dictionary (as I repeatedly request that they do), but they’re actually engaged – not just staring off into space – so I’m happy.

One more story about teaching: the other day, I was teaching a text about trying to understand new words, for my 7th graders. The text suggested that we guess what part of speech the new word is, in order to understand it, and that we look at the context. So I decided to have them guess some words I knew they wouldn’t know. I used the sentence, “Mr. Brown has a new plant. It is a rhododendron. It is mauve.” I was trying to get them to guess that a rhododendron is a plant, and that mauve is a color (or at least an adjective). This led to the following exchange:

Virginia Robertivna: What’s a rhododendron?
Olha: [random Ukrainian word]
VR: I don’t know what that is.
Lyudmila: (laughs at VR)
VR: What?
L: She said “rhododendron.”

So clearly, Olha is too smart for her own good. But the class got the overall point, as well.

As I said, it’s gotten cold and rainy, and for most of September, Nina didn’t have the heat on. (It’s ok, I have a space heater.) Usually, I take cold/lukewarm “showers” (with water pressure that couldn’t drown a daddy-longlegs: I know – I’ve tried), but because of the weather, I finally considered an alternative. I had been wary of bucket baths because I was worried about running out of water mid-bath (my hair has gotten really long) and having to heat up more with wet, soapy hair. I did the bucket bath thing in Mozambique, and, sure enough, it took as much water as I could carry to get my hair clean. But what I realized – as a recent bucket-bath convert – is that, when in my own house with a bathtub inside (and not down a path, like in Mozambique), I don’t have to only use as much water as I can carry! So, now I’m a believer. It is so nice to wash my hair with warm water that I don’t even mind how much time it takes to boil it.

In other news, I’ve been baking a lot: I made brownies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate chip banana bread for the seminar participants. I think I’ll be doing a lot of baking in the next month or so, too – baked goods tend to be my default gift for Ukrainians, and I’ll need something to give all the people I have to say goodbye to. My Regional Manager, Natasha, came by this week, and while she was talking to Nina about how soon I’m leaving, Nina started to cry, and then Natasha started to cry . . . and oh man, this is 52 days from the finish line. Wish me luck.

Finally, thank you to Katie B. for another “time-capsule” card! I don’t mind – after all, my favorite movie (“The Muppets’ Christmas Carol”) urges us to make Christmas “last all year.”

I hope you’re all doing well!! Thanks for reading this very long post . . . see you relatively soon!

Love, Virginia

Seminars, COS conference, etc.

2008-09-05T07:53:00.008-04:00

Hello, again. 74 days left! Pretty crazy.

When I last wrote, I was relaxing at my site, and battling fleas in my room (fun). But I was soon on the road again, this time to help at a summer camp and a week of training seminars.

First, I visited Grant’s camp in Vinnytsia, to teach about HIV/AIDS. He had told me that his students knew everything on the subject, and were very smart, so I had nothing to worry about. So I was a little taken aback when I learned, shortly after I arrived there, that the campers were mostly in the 4th and 5th grades. Most of his regular students, it seems, were busy. I was in shock, but he kept saying “It’ll be fine, don’t worry.” I said “I know it will be fine – because I’m not going to teach the lesson I had planned . . .”

So, I focused on biology and stigma, rather than transmission, and – as Grant marveled afterwards – I didn’t say the word “sex” once, during the whole 45 minutes. It turns out that my cartoonish rendering of the immune system (the T4 cell is Superman) works well for 9-year-olds, and they really liked the lion and elephant game. (Have I described this game before? One person is the “baby elephant,” surrounded by “elephants” who link arms to protect the baby from the “lions.” After one trial attack, I tap several elephants on the shoulder, and send them back to their seats, leaving just two. After that, the lions have no problem getting to the baby. The message: the baby elephant is the body; the elephants are the immune system; the lions are germs like the flu or tuberculosis; and HIV is what reduces the immune system to the point where it can’t fight the germs.)

Grant asked them to make posters about what they had learned, and they did a really great job! One that I liked in particular had a group of people from different countries standing in a circle with linked arms around someone with HIV – saying that even though the person’s immune system couldn’t protect him, these people would. Aw.

From there, I went to Clara’s site to help with the teacher training seminars she was holding in honor of her new English resource center. Fourteen teachers from around her district came to learn about the communicative method, etc. Again, I taught about HIV, and passed out all of my lesson plans and materials for them to use if they wish. The teachers had varying levels of English, so I tried to go through my lesson plans in Ukrainian as quickly as I could, to fit it all into an hour and a half. As it turned out, I went too fast – and we finished a half hour early! Ukrainians don’t usually ask questions after presentations the way we Americans like to, so that was that.

A couple days later, it was time for me to leave for our group’s Close of Service conference (COS). In preparation for the long trip west, I stopped in Vinnytsia to buy new earphones. I don’t do much shopping here, but it seems that the following story is pretty standard. First, I had to put my luggage somewhere, and it wouldn’t fit in the lockers by the door, so I had to leave it by the stairs and trust the guards to keep an eye on it. I found someone to show me where the earphones were, and then had to find someone to cut the ones I wanted off of the display shelf, where they were tethered. This set off an alarm. Then they told me to go to the “kasa,” or counter, where I waited for a few minutes completely alone until a guard bothered to explain that I had to go to the kasa upstairs. This required going through a gate, which set off another alarm. Upstairs, I was given a receipt approximately twenty-five pages long, and returned downstairs, where I was told I couldn’t go through the most convenient gate, but had to go back around through the store to another one. Finally, I surrendered half of my massive receipt to the guard, collected my luggage, and was on my way . . . with a new pair of earphones.

On our way to the conference location in Slavske, outside of L’viv in the Carpathian mountains, my friend Clara and I went through Ivano Frankivsk, a city south of L’viv. It was very pretty, and a nice place to wander around and relax. There are several historic churches, and we ate in a Moroccan restaurant! The next day, continuing with the ethnic food theme, we met Brittany and her former training clustermates Angela and Diana for Japanese food in L’viv. Very fun. The following morning, Clara and I got up early for our train, and inadvertently caught part of Michelle Obama’s speech on BBC at our hotel! The hotel where we had our conference had BBC as well, and several of us woke up at 5 AM to see Barack Obama’s speech a few days later.

At the COS conference, Clara and I realized that we had both forgotten our bathing suits – and there was a pool there! So we walked down to the bazaar in town, and picked up matching tank-top and shorts sets that said “Sports Happy,” which did just fine as makeshift suits.

The conference was very nice! There were 82 of us, I think, out of the 84 remaining in Group 31. We were told that we’re the largest COS group ever, even though we weren’t the largest coming in! There were definitely several people I didn’t know at all, and another Volunteer and I spent the first dinner quizzing each other in lowered voices about the unfamiliar faces at the table.

We had several presentations on opportunities after PC, and learned about grad schools, teaching programs, the Foreign Service, and how to write a resume. That was all very interesting, but it was also nice to just sit around and catch up with people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in almost two years!

One of the highlights of the conference was the superlatives: “most likely to” etc. Grant and another Volunteer were in charge of these, so I had been hearing hints about mine for months. I had never had a superlative before (my high school stopped the practice because they were getting too mean), so I was pretty nervous. Well, the suspense is finally over: mine was “Most likely to COS early to strengthen the Obama presidential campaign.” Ha. See, a lot of my fellow Volunteers are from way out west, and different places like that (Montana or God knows where), and they’ve never really met anyone so plugged into politics before. So, I’m a bit of a novelty. I’ve tried to explain that I’ve never even worked for a campaign (and it’s not like I haven’t had opportunities in D.C.), but they just smile and shake their heads. I think I’ve said this in this blog before: I can’t always be “the cute one,” so I guess I’ll settle for being “the political one.”

Clara was the “most genuine,” and Brittany was the “nicest Volunteer.” Did we girls in Grant’s oblast get immunity or what? Overall, they were less harsh than I had feared.

I was afraid that we would spend the whole week at the hotel, and that I wouldn’t end up really seeing the Carpathian mountains, but I did! They paid for us to go on a chair-lift up into the mountains, where we had a beautiful view. It took a half-hour to get up there, and then again to get back down, so we were pretty far up.

On our second-to-last night, one of the Volunteers in our group organized an “open mike” event. Well, I had had the same song stuck in my head for three days . . . and I had always wanted to try performing at one of these things . . . so I signed up! I was plenty nervous, I can tell you. And drinking does bad things to my voice, so there was no liquid courage to be had. It made me feel better to see that other people performing were nervous too, and in the end I made it up there without collapsing. Somewhere in the middle of the second verse, I realized that I was singing. It went well!! It was sort of a melodramatic Appalachian song about saying goodbye, and allegedly I made people cry. (Not that I was lucid enough to notice at the time.) People were very sweet about complimenting me afterwards, and I’m glad I did it! It was fun.

The other performances were fun to watch (especially after mine was over)! We had a couple of sing-alongs, and some original poetry readings by the Volunteer who organized the night. Two Volunteers did a dramatic reading of a story from the 9th grade Plahotnik textbook – involving “the typhus” and a dead dog – complete with bongo drums! The Volunteer who had been voted “best storyteller” told about an interesting establishment where she used to work as a hostess, which was hilarious. And another Volunteer read a long, funny poem that ended up mentioning all 84 of us – though I had just left the room when he read the line about me! I think it was something like “Virginia endures life near Grant.” How true.

On the last night, we had a special dinner complete with live traditional Ukrainian music. The band later followed us to the outdoor bar, and we even did a traditional Ukrainian dance! (Mostly you dance around in a circle, so it wasn’t too difficult.)

I arrived home at the end of the week to discover that we have a new puppy! He’s very cute, black with tan spots, and his name is Zhuk – “bug,” in Ukrainian.

Back here at home, I continue to be very spoiled by Nina – she frequently brings me hot Ukrainian dishes like borsht or holubtsi (cabbage rolls), and it’s very nice. Before COS, I invited my Camp Heal girls over to work on our project, and Nina helped me peel fruit to make a dessert for them beforehand. It’s just very nice to have someone around to help me out when I need it!

Since COS, I’ve been running around: visiting the schools in Bratslav to tell them about the seminars that Lyudmila and I are having at the end of this month. It’s going to be a very busy fall, and I have a feeling that my teaching will be sporadic. At COS, we had several meetings about how to finish things up and say goodbye, and I felt like it was a little premature to be thrust into the “goodbye” mode when we still had a couple of months left. But now that I’m back at site, I’m thankful: I have a lot to do before I go, and it’s helpful to already be in that mindset!

One more thing: according to the Facebook version of the Myers Briggs test, my personality has changed in Peace Corps! I took the test twice! There’s no denying it. Instead of being an ENTJ (“The Executive”), I’m now an ESTJ (“The Guardian”). This shook me up quite a bit. I looked it up, and it seems that the difference between N and S is as follows: S, or Sensing people “like to take in information that is real and tangible – what is actually happening,” while N, or Intuition people see “the big picture.” N people “trust inspiration,” while we S folks “trust experience.” So, I suppose that’s not such a bizarre reaction to the Peace Corps experience, now that I think about it.

Thank you to Katie B., Melanie A., Steph and Kristen for their letter! It was like a time capsule! It took me a second to understand why Katie seemed to think I hadn’t met her fiancé yet – and then I saw the date on the letter. Haha. Better late than never!!

Hope all is going well at home! I was happy to see that Hurricane Gustav wasn’t as bad as people were afraid it’d be. Keep in touch – see you fairly soon!!

Love, Virginia

P.S. These last pictures are from the First Bell ceremony, a few days ago . . .

94 Days To Go

2008-08-16T03:29:00.007-04:00

Hello again! I don’t have much to report, but things have been going well. I’ve mostly been taking it easy and working on various projects (like Project: Research Grad Schools) . . . but somehow, I’ve made it past the 100-Day Mark! So, that’s exciting. It’s about the only exciting thing I have to say.

A few days after returning from Mozambique to visit my PC Twin, I went to our big city English club to show off pictures from the trip. They were well-received, and one of our club members told me a funny joke connected with the many students who come to Vinnytsia from warmer parts of the world (Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). The joke goes: an African student’s family asks him how the Ukrainian winter is. He writes back that the “green winter” isn’t that bad, but the “white winter” is deadly . . . haha.

Later that day, I went to buy train tickets with my fellow Volunteer Matt. He only had to buy a few, but waited patiently for me to buy thirty-two. See, in order to get to a summer camp across the country in Donetsk oblast, I was going to have to take two trains each way – and I was taking seven campers with me. It took me about an hour to buy them all . . .

My campers and I were bound for the same camp went to last summer: Camp HEAL. H.E.A.L. stands for “Human trafficking, Education, AIDS, and Leadership.” Last year I took three girls, and taught about HIV transmission and prevention; this year I worked the system in order to take seven, and taught about trafficking. One of my girls was a “junior counselor” this year, because she came with me last year, and had studied in

America

.

My group was composed of: two girls who were with me last year and are in university; two from School #2, one of whom is entering university this fall; two from the local technical college; and one whose mother used to teach at the technical college. What made things even more fun was the fact that I had three Yana’s and two Aliona’s . . . there are not enough Ukrainian first names, in my opinion. Keeping track of all seven throughout the various train rides was interesting – walking through the stations, it was like Make Way For Ducklings. It’s funny how, even though the girls probably understand transportation in Ukraine much better than I do, I was always the default leader because I’m older, and “the teacher.” I did okay, though. We even picked up an 8^th when we were nearly there – Olya, a girl who recognized me on the platform from camp last year! So, I was quite the mother hen/duck.

Camp was good! I met some new Volunteers; including the amazing Megan, who was in charge of organizing the camp this year. The only major drawback, for me, was the lack of an office where we could gather: last year, we were able to spend our free time together in a nice room with chairs and trashy teen magazines, but this year our office had no chairs and was half-flooded. Oh well.

One addition to the camp’s schedule this year was a talent show! One of my girls, it turns out, it a very talented hip-hop dancer. We began to refer to her as “Madonna.” Another one of my girls is also very talented at belly-dancing, but, unfortunately – due, perhaps, to the too loose knotting of a few scarves – her dancing was a little more exotic than I think she had planned. There was a bit of a wardrobe malfunction. Bless her heart, she kept a smile on her face – and another counselor pointed out later that if you’re going to be dancing in your underwear anywhere, it might as well be Ukraine. (Summer outfits here can get pretty skimpy . . . you can pretty much see most girls’ underwear all the time, whether they’re dancing or not.) Everything turned out fine, and I eventually recovered from the anxiety attack I suffered sitting in the audience . . .

On the last day, my girls and I took an excursion to a nearby monastery. It has caves – like the Pecherska Lavra in Kyiv – where monks are buried, but unfortunately everything but the museum was closed when we got there. The outside of the cathedral was pretty, anyhow, and we stuck our hands in the healing fountain. Then, I gathered my ducklings, and we began the long trip back to Vinnytsia.

Speaking of my oblast – there is a new Lonely Planet (tour book) out, that includes Vinnytska oblast! And, what’s more – it even includes my town, Bratslav!!! Yay!! Seriously: go check it out, in Barnes & Noble or something.

I’ve seen many funny t-shirts recently, but I can only remember the two I saw at the monastery: “I’m a Serious Guy” (red letters on the back of a black and white striped t-shirt), and “How Can I Be So Thirsty Today When I Drank So Much Last Night.”

The only new cooking adventure I’ve had was making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which I doled out to the various families I know here . . .

Thank you very much to Alyssa for her beautiful, artistic card, and to Gigi for the postcard! I’m working on sending out one last, massive batch of letters before I go . . .

So, that’s it! I hope everything’s going well at home. I miss you all, but I will see you relatively soon . . . keep in touch!

Love, Virginia

Miss Virginia in Africa

2008-07-15T06:52:00.027-04:00

(Disclaimer: this is really long. It’s ok to take breaks. Whatever you need.)

Hello again! I’m back from my trip, which was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to do in my life. I think I was in awe for the majority of the time I was there, trying to soak up as much information as I could. I’ll do my best to summarize . . .

First, some background: I call my friend Katie my PC Twin, because our service dates are almost identical. She left, I think, six days before I did, and we’ll both be getting home around November/December this fall.

These dates, however, are the only obvious similarities between our situations. As you know, I teach English in a secondary school in Ukraine (where it is now summer), and I speak very little Ukrainian in class. Katie teaches Biology in a secondary school in Mozambique (where it is now winter) – and she teaches in Portuguese! I was able to pick out other similarities between our worlds, but you have to be paying pretty close attention to find them . . .

After I arrived in Ukraine, I started thinking about how cool it would be to see what Katie’s life in Mozambique is like. Because of our respective service dates, my only chance to see her in action was during my service. I kept the idea on the back-burner of my mind for a while, and finally, with the help of my parents and frequent flyer miles, I made it!

The trip from Bratslav to Katie’s town took four days, which was a little intense. I spent one night in Kyiv, one night in Paris, and one night in Johannesburg. The only other people on the very small plane from Johannesburg to Vilanculos seemed to be South Africans on vacation. One asked me if I was going to the islands . . . I was like, There are islands? I was very ignorant, but ready to learn. Looking back at Katie’s old e-mails from twenty months ago, it makes me feel better to see her talking about the pet giraffe she assumed she’d acquire. (It turns out there isn’t actually much wildlife there, due to landmines and the civil war which lasted some twenty years after Mozambican independence in 1975.)

Vilanculos is a small city on the coast near where Katie is serving. As I entered the tiny airport, knowing I would have to buy a visa, I suddenly realized that I had assumed there would be an ATM, or someone who would accept a credit card. With a rising feeling of panic, I watched other tourists coolly hand over American dollars, and tried to think of a solution. My best options, I decided, were: to convince the man to accept the equivalent amount in Ukrainian hryven; to borrow money from a tourist in the hope that the adjoining room had an ATM which would allow me to pay him back five minutes later; or to find Katie. Just as I reached the front of the line and started trying to explain, to a man who didn’t really speak English, that I didn’t have dollars but that I could offer an alternative – Katie appeared out of nowhere, speaking rapid-fire Portuguese and saving my life. As soon as I registered who she was and what was going on, I gave her a hug and felt very relieved . . .

Katie had advised me to travel light, and thankfully I did: I had just my purse, backpack and a shoulder bag. She knew what she was talking about: it’s about a 3 km walk, I think, from the airport to the center of town. I started to notice a few similarities to Ukraine – like the goats tied up on the side of the road – but also, obviously, many differences as well. As we walked, kids called out to her – but not just the requisite “Good morning” we Americans hear in Ukraine (at all hours of the day). She explained that they were asking for money, or various other things. Her response, which appeared to be a reflex, was to demand money from them, or a trade: their t-shirt for money. Apparently a few kids have reacted to this offer by starting to strip – and she then has to say, Ok, I was just kidding. I heard her do this many times during the trip, and the kids (many of them her students) thought it was hilarious – a pretty effective response, I think!

We did eventually get to an ATM, and then caught the equivalent of a marshrutka (a mini-bus) back to her town. My Spanish was slightly helpful: for example, I understood whenever people asked Katie if I understood. Understanding was a lot easier than responding; I generally left that part to Katie. Although she lives 60 km from the city, the trip generally takes about 2 hours. I peppered her with questions about Mozambique and her life, and took in the scenery during a brief off-roading detour to deliver groceries to someone’s house.

Katie lives with another Volunteer, Lauren, who is an English teacher, and they have a site-mate who was on vacation. Their house is nicer than most, as it was built by a South African oil company, which also built their school. The third Volunteer teaches English at an orphanage run by an Italian Catholic mission. I was fascinated by how they had set up their house; it’s the fourth place Katie’s lived in so far, counting a hut she shared with a former Volunteer which was destroyed by the cyclone in February of 2007. I think it’s common in PC posts (other than Ukraine) to give Volunteers, especially girls, site-mates. This might be for security reasons, but Katie explained that it’s also to maintain sanity: I’m the only American in my town, but it’s easier for me to visit the Volunteers around me, and we get together fairly often. For Katie and her site-mates, traveling is more of a pain, and they try to avoid it.

The major difference between my set-up and theirs (besides the fact that I live with a baba) is the lack of running water there. (I think at least 60% of Volunteers in Ukraine have running water . . . but that’s a total guess.) However, they’ve set up what I think is an ingenious system with PC-provided water filters. They have more filters than the average Volunteer there: Katie assumed that hers had disappeared after the cyclone, and got new ones, but found the other two later. They have a faucet-less sink that drains, so they simply set up one of the filters on the edge – and it’s like having a real sink! The toilet was another story, but it was fairly nice for a latrine, and here’s the kicker: they have real toilet paper! Not, as my former cluster-mate Luke used to call it, “Cardstock.”

The first night, I lay awake listening to a bug buzz nearby me for a while, wondering which side of the mosquito netting it was on, but soon fell asleep. In the middle of the night, however, I was woken by the sound of shouting, singing and drums. I kid you not. I have no idea what the men were shouting and singing about, but it was pretty loud. Katie heard it too, and had no explanation for me. I often heard groups of people singing and chanting there, which could usually be explained by the many churches around town: everything from Catholic to Methodist and Jehovah’s Witness. It didn’t happen again, or else I slept through it the next time . . .

The next morning I slept late, and then fixed myself bread with garlic and butter. You see, I was determined to avoid mosquito bites, and mosquitoes usually love me (I still complain about the night of 42 bites, last summer). I had read that garlic and B-1 vitamins would help, so I brought both. I think the fact that it was technically winter helped more than anything; the temperatures where roughly where they are in Ukraine now, but there weren’t many mosquitoes out. I got just four bites – on my hand and elbow – which convinced me that Deet is still better than other remedies, since those are the places I probably missed when applying repellent.

I spent the morning looking around. Katie recently had a fence built around their yard for privacy, and I discovered that you can see bobbing water jugs pass by on the other side – but not the women’s heads beneath them. It’s pretty funny to watch the progress back and forth to the well.

Later, I visited Katie’s school and met some of the students. She was supervising a test, and had the same problems with rampant cheating that I encounter here. However, she has a few teachers at her school who feel the same way she does, and she was given license by that particular class’s teacher to be as strict as possible. So she went from desk to desk, finding cheat sheets in every possible location, including students’ pockets. The students just laughed genially – a reaction I found all too familiar.

I’ve decided that I’m grateful for my country’s Puritanical roots: say what you will about excessive guilt, but it saves a lot of time when it comes to things like test-taking. I know that cheating goes on in American schools too, but the difference is that I would have been devastated if a teacher caught me cheating (which, ahem, would never have happened, but still). As in Ukraine, the fear of grades being changed surreptitiously necessitates a strict no-mistake policy in the official grade registers. If something is crossed out, you have to rewrite the entire book. Volunteers in Ukraine deal with this by refusing to mark grades in the registers – but Katie and Lauren had to record their classes’ grades themselves, first carefully in pencil, and then in ink. (Another difference between the countries is that Katie and other Volunteers are put in charge of “termas,” or classes, like homeroom teachers – and I don’t think that ever happens here.)

So, I came during a very busy time in the school year: there was lots of test-taking and grading going on. I was happy, though, to just sit around and take in my surroundings. You can see the ocean from Katie’s backyard, and they keep the back door open all day, so I could feel I was enjoying the outdoors while remaining in the shade. Another big source of entertainment for me was Katie’s dog, Timanga (“peanut,” in the local language), and her six adorable puppies. That’s right, puppies. This was essentially the perfect vacation for me: sitting around and playing with puppies. Also, Katie got a bunch of mail delivered from their PC office, which included a letter I sent her in late March, and a lot of “People” magazines. So between the magazines and everything else, I felt pretty spoiled.

Because there is no running water at their house, they have to monitor how much water they have pretty closely. Katie used to get her own water at the well, and even learned how to balance the massive jugs on her head. She carries things balanced sideways on her head, using one hand, as opposed to the women and girls there who routinely walk around with massive things balanced upright on their heads, not using their hands at all. I don’t mean to criticize Katie’s abilities in any way – I found that I could not even lift those jugs, when full. Not even an inch off the ground. Now, they pay a student named Justina to get their water for them every day. Another girl, Alzira, maintains their yard and does odd jobs for them. Both girls were very funny and sweet, and were among the many students and others who regularly hang out at Katie’s house. “Miss Alzira” called me “Miss Virginia” (she learned this habit in English class), and was excited to tell me that her mother is also named Virginia. This means that I’m her mother’s “shara,” which essentially means “namesake” in Portuguese, but applies to all people who share a name.

An almost constant presence at Katie’s house is a thirteen-year-old boy named Pedro. He’s very quiet, and just sort of hangs out in the doorway, observing what goes on. He was very sweet about tolerating my pathetic attempts to speak Portuguese. Eventually he got more comfortable with me and tried out his English. Before the trip, I asked Katie if I could bring gifts for anyone, and she told me about Pedro: so I brought him a bright yellow t-shirt with a Cossack-style smiley face that says “Don’t Worry, Be Ukrainian.” Ha. My attempts to translate the shirt weren’t very successful, but he seemed to like it, and wore it several times before my departure.

We did a lot of cooking while I was there: I was impressed with how much they cook and bake (they have a small electric oven, as well as a gas stove top). One unfortunate aspect of life in Mozambique is that chocolate is rare and expensive. However, the girls have as much of a sweet tooth as I do, and were creative in making up for its absence. I contributed by making lemon squares and brownies, and Lauren made an amazing oatmeal cake with coconut.

Speaking of which: I learned how to shave coconut from its shell! Here in Ukraine, the must-have kitchen apparatus is the cabbage shredder. Down there, it’s the coconut shaver. You sit on a little bench, and use a ridged blade-like thing on one end to get the coconut out. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it (or wasn’t, on my first try) and gave myself a minor cut after finishing half a coconut. Luckily, one of the omnipresent students was able to take over for me, which he did with a smile.

Katie took me on a couple of long walks to get me out of the house, and I got to see the beach, and a lot of gorgeous scenery. Timanga joined us for some of the walking, which unnerved those around us – Mozambicans are not very fond of dogs. All of the students who passed us spoke to Katie, if only to address her, saying “Stora,” which is short for “profesora.” It was really cute. The biggest hit, though, was whenever she said one of the short phrases she’s learned in the local language (shitswa). People went nuts when she broke out one of those phrases; they just loved it.

One of the highlights of the trip was giving the puppies a bath. They were adorable, but covered in fleas. Katie had some anti-flea soap, so we stuck them in a little tub, two at a time. They were so curious and excited that some were trying to climb in before it was their turn; they were not happy when their turn came, though, and they realized what a bath involved. But in the end, they were much softer and fluffier, and had fewer fleas.

Another highlight was the acquisition of a chicken for our 4^th of July celebration. Frozen chicken is sometimes available at the store, and Katie has only made chicken the old-fashioned way two or three times, but they wanted me to have the experience, so we bought a live one from the school. I was all for it, and volunteered to kill it myself . . . but later, I was relieved that I didn’t have that job when I saw how long it took our handy-man, Pedro. When knives aren’t sharp, it’s a little more involved, to say the least. I did help pluck it though . . .

Another day, Katie and Lauren were curious to see what Ukrainian food was like. Clara sent the recipe for “holubtsi” (cabbage rolls) to me via text message, and I decided to make those and fried potatoes. Unfortunately, we didn’t have tomato juice to cook the rolls in, and tomato sauce didn’t turn out to be very effective as a substitute: they were pretty dry. However, they now have the recipe, and, given Lauren’s enthusiasm in the kitchen, I wouldn’t be surprised if she perfected it later. I also had real Ukrainian vodka for them: the morning I left, my coordinator’s daughter, Yana, arrived with mini-bottles of Nemiroff vodka for me (made just twenty minutes down the road)! I brought the original and cranberry flavors, and we toasted the dry holubtsi like real Ukrainians.

On Thursday night, I went to the Catholic service with Lauren, during which I understood hardly a word, though the music was very pretty. On a couple nights we went out to restaurants – of which there are several on the beach, because it’s a fairly touristy area. The second night I was there, we went out with two PC Mozambique staff members who were visiting the site, which was really interesting for me. One had been to D.C. for a PC training, and had visited Pentagon City (yay!). He had met members of the Ukraine staff, but no one I knew. They were fascinated by my PC ID badge, which, I must say, is pretty fancy. We’ve unfortunately switched to a cheaper version since my group came, but the two staffers were definitely intrigued, so maybe Mozambique Volunteers have fancier IDs in their future!

During the day, we took a lot of trips to the market, which was set up much like the bazaars we have here, except that people who sell things sit on the ground, instead of on chairs, and the only products that they weigh before selling are things like flour. The market is nearby their house, but Katie and Lauren have discovered how to take advantage of the students constantly hanging out in the yard. When they don’t feel like walking to the market or when it just seems too stressful (the way I feel about the bazaar here), they “mandar,” or send, a kid with some money. It’s pretty convenient! One morning, Katie and I were walking in the market, when she saw a few teachers drinking at one of the stands. They’d been drinking all night, and Katie didn’t want to deal with being asked to join in, so, with just a few yards to go, she grabbed a student and sent her with money to buy eggs at the stand. It was really funny. The student thought nothing of it, though she laughed when she came back to find Katie hiding behind another stand.

As you can see, I could go on and on, but I’ll try to wrap up this account. On Tuesday, we caught a ride from a transplanted South African to Vilanculos, to pick up Katie’s friend Eron, who was coming to visit for even longer than I had (I think she’ll be there for a month!). Katie and Eron and I went to stay at a hostel, which meant sleeping in bunk-beds with mosquito nets in a hut! There was a massive baobab tree out front, which I was excited about, because I’d been curious about what they look like ever since reading about Kenya in Barack Obama’s first book.

The next morning, we got up early to go see the sunrise on the beach, which I’d never gotten around to doing in Katie’s town (though I easily could have – she gets up at 5:30, most days). The fence gate was locked, so we climbed over it and sat down on the beach to watch. When it was pretty light outside, I went swimming! I didn’t like the idea of seeing a new ocean without getting in, so even though it wasn’t particularly warm outside and no one wanted to join me, I went in. It was really nice! As it got lighter, people began to walk by us. It was interesting: upon seeing Katie, most Mozambicans seem to assume that she’s a tourist or an ex-pat South African, and they pay her no mind. But as soon as she says “Bon dia” or “Boa tarde,” their faces just light up. Most people were extremely friendly to us. Not many more people seem to know what the PC is down there than do up here, but they get the gist. Katie explained to everyone that I was “mandar”-ed up near Russia, just like she was sent to Mozambique, and they all responded, Wow, that’s far away. I agreed.

That last morning was when I got my souvenirs: shells I found on the beach, and two “kapilanas” – the cloth that women wear like a sarong, carry their babies in, or fold underneath the various things they carry on their heads. They’re quite useful, and the markets sell them in many different patterns.

Another Volunteer was being given a ride to the airport in her school’s pick-up truck, and they stopped to pick us up along the way; I think it was the first time I’ve ever ridden in the back of a pick-up! I figured out all the stamps and fees required for me to leave the country, and said goodbye to my wonderful hostess and her new guest. The trip back was more direct, but tiring, as I had no break between the three flights. I got on a train to Vinnytsia, where I discovered that the following day was a holiday – and there were barely any buses. Luckily, I ran into an English teacher from the technical college, and we managed to find a bus to Nemirov, from which we took a taxi – and I finally got home about 10 pm.

Since then, I’ve been relaxing and doing laundry, and enjoying some real holubtsi, courtesy of Nina. The one exciting thing was when I laid out my sea shells the night I got back . . . and one of them moved. That’s right. I was half-asleep, but managed to think of throwing it in a zip-lock bag: whatever’s in there won’t last long. The next morning, I got up and examined the others, and they seemed to be fine and inanimate. Then I found one of them on the other side of the room. It, too, is now sitting in a plastic bag in my closet, where it won’t creep me out anymore. Never a dull moment.

I have a quiet couple of weeks ahead of me, but plenty of things to get done before my next excursion . . .

So, thank you so, so much to Katie for having me! It was really wonderful, and definitely a highlight of my PC experience. And thank you to my family who helped me get there!

Finally, thank you to Clarissa for the nice note! That’s about it. Hope you’re all doing well at home . . . keep in touch!

Love, Virginia

Paul McCartney, Summer Camp, and T-Shirts

2008-06-26T05:35:00.012-04:00

Hello, everyone! I hope that your summers are going well. Mine is extremely busy so far . . .

First, a few stories I forgot to tell about my uncle and aunt’s visit. Our second day in L’viv, we were walking around the city, and came across a strange statue by a café. It was a man dressed in 19^th century clothes, examining his gloves. Upon further examination, you notice that there are hands coming out of his jacket, and pants leg, etc. Very weird. Then my uncle noticed the accompanying plaque: birthplace of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. As in, masochism. As it dawned on us who this was, a waitress from the café walked out wearing a leather dog collar, and other leather accessories. I exclaimed, “Oh my God . . .” and she started laughing. Later, we ate there! The food was not bad. We ate outside, though, and mostly avoided the evocative interior decorating.

Later, on our first day in Odessa, we stopped at a café to have breakfast. I was very excited, because the Ukrainian menu had pictures of a full breakfast, including hash browns, and of a club sandwich with fries. Then I realized that the restaurant didn’t actually offer these meals . . . maybe they just thought the pictures were pretty. It would have been worse if the pictures had been in the strangely-worded English menu (“chicken hip”?), to trick the tourists, but this was bad enough, in my opinion.

Finally, on that same day, my aunt and I went to a Ukrainia sauna! It wasn’t quite as fun as the one I went to before, with a freezing-cold pool to jump into, but still good. (Really, jumping into freezing water can be fun!)

So, after my visit, I rested at home for a few days and did as much laundry as I could. That Friday, I met Clara and Cindy in Vinnytsia to get ready to go to Kyiv for the Paul McCartney concert!!! Yes, Paul McCartney came to Kyiv for a free concert, on June 14^th (his birthday!). We figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so, despite predictions of rain, we headed to Kyiv . . .

Two wonderful Volunteers had arranged for an apartment for several of us, right near where the concert was taking place in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). After a late lunch, Clara and her former cluster-mate Linda and I waited near the square to see how things were looking. The rain started around 4 pm, and didn’t really let up until 10:30 pm, about an hour after the concert had begun. For the first few hours, we waited under the awning of a nearby “Double Coffee.” I began remarking nervously on the design of the awning: it was made up of several inverted tents, which might be stylish, but seemed like a really bad idea in that kind of rain. Sure enough, the tent nearest me began to spurt water everywhere: waterfalls pouring onto the surrounding tables and splashing everything. We retreated to a safer distance, and watched the rain pour down for another hour or so.

Eventually, we decided to brave the crowds in order to claim our spot in the square. When they opened the gate and people started streaming in, I was actually worried about being trampled for a few moments. I don’t think I’ve been that nervous about being squashed in a crowd since sophomore year at W&M, when we went to see Prof. Whatsisname’s famous Blowout speech. (A big waste of time; he couldn’t be heard over the shouting, and the guy with a huge, strange, horn-like musical instrument . . .)

We waited in the pouring rain for an hour or so, soaking wet, while I tried to pretend that I had come to see a concert in a swimming pool. That would be fun, right? We stood under our umbrellas and, every now and then, said things like, “I’m so wet.”

A little before 9 pm, they started showing videos on the big screens, which we could see fairly well through the umbrellas. My favorite Ukrainian celebrity (not that I can understand a word he says) was there in the rain, on camera, singing “Happy Birthday” to Paul, which soon gave way to videos of the other nine Ukrainian celebrities waxing poetic on Paul and the history of the Beatles. We watched the videos for a while, and then, at about 9:40, Paul came on stage! He said “Privit, druzi” – hello, friends – and began to play “Drive My Car.”

During the first half he played a lot of new songs no one cares about – but soon he began to play things that we all knew. He introduced one by saying “Here’s one you may remember . . . I don’t.” When he spoke English (really only about half of the time!), the screen showed a translation in Ukrainian. He pronounced the Ukrainian phrases he had learned very well, and would say things like “Tsya pisnya dlya Johna” – this song is for John (“A Day In The Life”). Perfect grammar! (He also sang “My Love Makes It Good,” or whatever it’s called, for Linda, and “Something” for George. Very sweet.)

It was a really good concert, and well worth the wait (few things would be). He played til midnight! One of his favorite things to do was to repeat “Spa-cee-ba! Dya-koo-yoo!” (“thank you” in Russian and Ukrainian, only slightly mispronounced) rhythmically, over and over.

My favorite was “Live and Let Die,” because there were fireworks! Very fun. Other crowd favorites were “Birthday,” and, obviously, “Back In The U.S.S.R.” Before he sang “Blackbird,” he said, “The blue and yellow bird flies high over the Black Sea tonight!” Aw. There were two encores – and for one he emerged waving a Ukrainian flag. At that point, the crowd was chanting “Yes-ter-day! Yes-ter-day!” They are obsessed with that song here. It is sung at almost every special occasion; by which I mean that various random syllables are sung to that tune, after the initial word, “Yesterday . . .” He did finally play it, and everyone was very happy.

After that, we found our way back to the apartment and slept soundly. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get all the way home that night, because a holiday on Monday (not sure which) changed the bus schedules. So, I ended up having only about twenty-four hours at home before my next excursion . . .

On Tuesday, I arrived in Kyiv again for a meeting of the SPA grant review committee. There were the requisite English resource center grants, but also some unusual ones; including a health information center, complete with a team of students to promote its use! I served as the “scribe,” which meant that I typed up summaries and funding decisions, and tried to keep everything organized. That was probably my last SPA meeting . . . I really enjoyed being on the committee; it was nice to do something involving “concrete” results, as the Peace Corps experience on the whole is notoriously difficult to define.

While in Kyiv, I got to meet a friend of my friend Louisa’s sister (still with me?), who was traveling in Eastern Europe; and I also saw my former Ukrainian teacher, Yulia, for dinner. Yulia and I went to “Belfast Café,” the first Irish pub I’ve been to in Ukraine! It was all very fun.

After that, it was on to my friend Clara’s summer camp at her school. Different Volunteers taught about culture, peer pressure, leadership and healthy living. On Saturday, I taught a lesson in English mixed with Tarzan-esque Ukrainian on HIV/AIDS, and the students were very good and attentive. Later that day, before a lesson they were teaching on South America, Grant and Keith asked the campers to guess different things about the Volunteers. I was voted most likely to have adopted a dog in Ukraine, to enjoy riding horses, and to have the worst Ukrainian! Sigh. My fellow Volunteers were very sweet, and comforted me after this blow. The first thing was really Keith, and the last two were Grant; mine was “who here lives with a babusya (grandma)?” That’s me!

We all had a lot of fun, and enjoyed seeing Clara’s site. The boys liked tossing a football around during their free time, and while I watched (I’m not very sporty), I decided to program the Ukrainian national anthem onto my phone, note by note. Ah, the things we have time to do during Peace Corps. Once I had perfected it, it was a hit; and is now the ring tone of a few Volunteers’ phones! Sure to raise some eyebrows on the trolley . . .

One sad moment was when we and several students came across a burlap sack that someone had thrown from a moving car onto the sidewalk – with a dog and a kitten trapped inside. All I had were nail clippers, but we soon found scissors and were able to let them out. They were soaking wet, and so may have been thrown into the lake before that. The stray animal situation here is very depressing, and we’re reminded of it every day.

A nicer moment was visiting Clara’s host grandmother, who wanted to give her a bucket’s worth of fresh strawberries. While we were visiting, she insisted on feeding us varenyky (dumplings) with potatoes, and borsht. Visits like those are definitely something I’ll miss after leaving Ukraine . . .

I left Clara’s camp a little early in order to make it home for graduation. The ceremony was much like it was last year – girls in ball gowns, and boys in shiny suits. The monument visiting was thankfully cut short because of the rain, and we paraded almost directly from the school to the café, followed by a three-man band – all of whom, at some point, found it necessary to try to fit under my umbrella. Ha ha. Oh, the Amerikanka: endless source of amusement . . .

Well, what has been making me laugh recently is the unusually high number of ridiculous English t-shirts I’ve been seeing around. I started a list of my favorites – here they are:

In Gothic, white letters, against black, on the back of a t-shirt: “Whith all it’s shame drudgery / and broken dreams / it’s still A Beautiful world / be cheerful strive to be happy”

In Gothic letters, under an orange cobra coiled with barbed wire: “Don’t tread on me”

“Some days it’s not even worth chewing through the restraints” (I swear.)

“You can’t stop the music” (Don’t even try.)

“When I dance I am even more beautiful”

A combination of mangled lyrics from an awful James Blunt song – such as “Because I’ll never you” – and text from a customer service document asking for positive or negative feedback on a product.

In gold, sparkly letters against brown, on a large man: “Only Good Can Judge Me”

In Gothic, black letters against white: “One Jesus / One Revival / Faithfully / Punk”

On a sleeve on the metro, gold on black: “Warrors Peacemarker Soldiers Freedom”

On the metro, with pot leaves: “They say I was in Amsterdam but I don’t remember”

“Bar Girl”

And finally, in sequins, “I (heart) UGIRL”

Thank you so much to Kristen for the hilarious letter, to Aunt Mary for the pretty postcard, and to Gigi for the long-awaited, occasionally difficult-to-hear video! (Still not sure what Marc said in Russian – it’s possible that even he doesn’t know.)

Well, that’s about it. In a few days, I am off on another adventure – to visit my PCV Twin Katie on another continent! More on that next time! Keep in touch . . .

Love, Virginia

Family Visit!

2008-06-13T09:17:00.009-04:00

Hello again! I’m back from my traveling, but will leave again very soon. When you consider how soon I’ll be packing to go home, it seems that I have a very full schedule for the next six months . . . but mostly fun stuff, so it’s ok!

As promised, my Uncle Jack and Aunt Archer came to Ukraine to visit me a little over two weeks ago! I went to meet their plane and shepherd them back here to Bratslav. Not surprisingly, my energetic uncle began trying to read Cyrillic signs right away, and wanted to tell our taxi cab driver jokes about Monica Lewinsky. To the extent that I was able to translate, I did (and to the extent that I was able to stall and change the subject, I also did).

My latest cooking adventure was learning how to make pizza dough, so I had a pizza waiting for us when we got back. I was almost totally prepared for my guests – except that I forgot about coffee, having never been a coffee-drinker myself. Luckily, Nina had some instant coffee available in the morning, and later, a trip to the “Ukrainian Walmart” down the street remedied the situation.

On Thursday, I left my guests at home to rest (though I think they rose with the sun – around 5 AM here, now that it’s summertime), and went to teach my 5th graders. We read a few fables, and learned that the word “moral” is the same in both Ukrainian and English. Cognates: when you least expect them . . . they’re there. Later, as I said, we visited “Ukrainian Walmart,” where my uncle volunteered his services as a “beast of burden” so that we could buy big 5-liter jugs of water. (I’m afraid I’m very environmentally insensitive – I usually buy water in 1.5 liter bottles, because I carry it with the rest of my groceries and can’t be bothered to attempt anything heavier.)

Archer and Jack seemed to enjoy meeting Nina, who immediately began to fill them with Ukrainian delicacies such as green borsht and potato varenyky (dumplings). After one meal, I found them sitting in their room staring at the walls, and asked if they were “detoxing” – they nodded grimly. They also learned how to take what Jack calls “Dolly Parton” showers; and if you’d like the story behind that, you’ll just have to ask him yourself. There was a moment early in the visit when I was afraid we’d be without running water, but it came back on – I think that this house has better plumbing than my old apartment, where I had water for just a couple hours at the beginning and end of each day in the summer.

On Friday, we went to the “Last Bell” ceremony, celebrating the end of the school year. I found that I understood much more of what was being said than I did last year. The teachers wrote poetry about all of the graduating 11th graders, which was recited by the little kids starting 1st grade next fall. The poetry was really cute, like: “Roma drives a motorcycle and is really cool . . . Vira is so helpful and very good at math” (except that it rhymed). Archer and Jack met the 11th graders afterwards, and they showed about as much enthusiasm for speaking English as they usually do in class (i.e., none), but Lyudmila offered to translate their questions, and things picked up after that. I was eager to show off my younger, more fluent students, and made sure that Archer and Jack met Diana, my superstar 5th grader, who told them with typical composure about her stamp and coin collections. My students were very sweet, and gave us armloads of flowers: all three of us had our hands full, it was crazy. They filled five vases when we got home.

After the ceremony, we went with other teachers to visit the school director, who’s unfortunately laid up with a broken hip. That morning, he had listened from his balcony to his daughter’s graduation at School #1, near their apartment. We gave him flowers too, and then headed home.

The next day, I led Archer and Jack to the old Jewish cemetery overlooking the river; I now know where the stairs are, so they didn’t have to rough it like my parents and sister did last year. My uncle and aunt are fascinated by nature, and were constantly stopping to examine various plants and bugs. It made me feel like a good hostess to have such easily entertained guests – all that was required was a trip outside (though there are a few moths and things inside as well). Afterwards, we took Nina to a café for more varenyky, and beer, which was fun, but left my uncle and aunt craving more healthful fare. Luckily, we had bought a lot of fruit for the get-together I had arranged for that evening.

I thought it was going to be a small event, and had planned to make apple pie and chocolate-chip banana bread to serve with some fruit. However, my coordinator Lyudmila and my host mom Svetlana showed up with wine, vodka, sausage, chocolate and bread; and Nina made holubtsi (stuffed cabbage rolls)!! I’m thankful they did, because my little desserts would have barely satisfied the twelve people around the table; and this way, my uncle and aunt got to experience a Real Ukrainian Party, complete with nine million toasts.

My old neighbors Lyuba and Mikola came, along with Svetlana, her husband and son (my 6th grader, Roma), and Lyudmila, her husband, and their daughter Yana. It was great! I hadn’t seen my host dad in over a year, and definitely don’t see my neighbors as much as I should. It was a really good excuse to get everyone together. Lyudmila and Yana (who spent a year studying in America) discovered the dangers of offering to translate for my uncle – but, smart ladies that they are, they soon resorted to claiming (with nearly straight faces) that he was simply complimenting the banana bread, and making other innocuous statements. It was very fun, and I hope I’ll have a few more get-togethers like that with everyone before I leave.

The next day, we said goodbye to Nina and caught a marshrutka to Vinnytsia. Our first stop was the Piragova Museum, located in the former mansion of the famous Dr. Piragova, who invented anesthesia when he began using ether on patients during surgery. It was very interesting, but I think Archer and Jack, both science enthusiasts, were more interested than I was. Afterwards, we walked to the chapel where his body is perfectly preserved – he is one of three such preserved mummies in the world! The other two are Lenin and Mao.

We met up with my fellow Volunteers Clara, Cindy, Jessica and Linda (visiting from another oblast) for lunch at an Italian restaurant, where my uncle and aunt were finally able to eat salad. We were planning on taking a boat tour, but it started to rain; so instead we retreated to the Window on America library to watch a movie. It was fun to introduce my uncle and aunt to everyone, and we all had a good time watching “Dave.” That night, we had to wait for a 1 AM train to L’viv, so Grant and Joyce graciously entertained us at Edelweiss, a local bar. Grant and Jack tried to drink each other under the table: I won’t say who won, but Grant was not walking in a straight line when we went back to his apartment.

The next morning we arrived in L’viv, which was fun for me to see for a second time. We visited the souvenir bazaar, and ate in a Greek restaurant where my uncle was finally freed from my translation censorship, and able to speak to the waitress in German. The next day, I attempted to take them to High Castle Hill, but the taxi driver left us at a different hill instead. I thought it was maybe just another, less manicured path up the same hill, until I reached the top (marked by a cross and a shaky looking platform), from which I could see the hill that I had intended for us to visit. It was interesting . . . but in the end we made it to the right hill.

On our last day in L’viv, we visited Lychakivska Cemetery, and its many pretty monuments. After lunch at the Japanese restaurant (I appreciate ethnic food so much more, since joining PC), we caught a train down to Odessa. I was less familiar with Odessa, having only spent an hour there before, but we soon found the famous Potemkin Steps, and the port. There aren’t as many sights to see in Odessa as there are in L’viv, but it was nice to walk around and see the city. We also went to see two performances at the opera house! The first was a concert by the local orchestra and choir, with opera singers performing familiar solos, which was really great. The next night, we saw “Madame Butterfly,” and unfortunately – unlike the L’viv Opera House – there were no subtitles, even in Ukrainian, so I had very little idea of what was going on. But it was pretty!

The last morning, we visited the creepy catacombs under Odessa with an English-speaking guide. The catacombs, it seems, were first dug under the city when they were mining limestone for building construction, about two hundred years ago. Because of the cheap, duty-free imports coming into the city, the catacombs soon became storage places for organized criminals smuggling goods through the black market. Finally, when the Nazis occupied Odessa during World War II, the catacombs were used as the headquarters of the partisan resistance movement. We saw a recreation of the cave-like rooms where over fifty Soviet partisans, including women, hid for over two years and plotted against the Germans. There are electric lights now, but the guide told us about how they lived in complete darkness and silence, which could cause hallucinations. The villagers above ground provided them with food, information and ammunition; and they forced the Nazis to keep more troops in the area until their eventual defeat.

The next day, my uncle and aunt left for Prague, and I met up with Clara – who was visiting with a teacher from her school – and caught a bus back to our oblast. It was a long ride back to Clara’s town, and I didn’t get back to my house til the next day. (I had an unfortunate surprise upon my arrival: as I had requested, Nina used a lot of the food we left sitting in the fridge. However, I discovered the food she hadn’t used sitting outside the fridge – on the front porch, in the hot sun. The food had reacted as perishable products are wont to do, which wasn’t pleasant. Oh well. It was soon disposed of, including the fermented apple juice.) I’ve mostly been resting for the past few days.

The next month is going to be a little crazy: a lot of traveling, a lot running around. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to update next, but I promise I’ll have a lot to tell!!

On the mail front – thank you very much to Annie for the card, and Aunt Mary for the package! Also, I don’t think I’ve thanked Sandy J. yet for her letter, but now the more pressing need is to say Congratulations on the arrival of baby Siobhan!!!

Speaking of arrivals, I was thrilled to discover that my kids’ pen-pal letters have arrived safely at Katie M.’s door, after I thought they were lost forever. I think perhaps the Ukrainian flag I included in the package was mistaken for contraband: something caused an awfully long delay.

I hope you’re all doing well; and if the little boat on the top of this blog is to be trusted, I’ll see you all fairly soon. And finally, thank you to my aunt and uncle for a wonderful visit, it was great to have you here!!!

Love, Virginia

Nearing the End of the School Year

2008-05-24T03:39:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone! How are you? Summer is here, and it’s pretty hot outside. We’re also having thunderstorms fairly often – much like last year. A sign that soon I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands . . .

Soon after I last wrote, the girls in our oblast got together for a Jane Austen movie fest. I invited the boys too, with the following text message: “We girls are having a Jane Austen movie party on Friday! Boys are welcome, but be advised: we shan’t be persuaded from our chosen genre. So if you want blood and gore, stay away.” None of them responded, shockingly.

Our fellow PCV Cindy has several Jane Austen movies, including the recent “Becoming Jane,” which I was eager to see. I thought it was interesting, sort of “Shakespeare In Love”-ish. We also watched “Sense and Sensibility,” which was amazing, of course. The last time I saw it (in high school) was before I fell in love with Hugh Laurie, so at the time I did not appreciate that he has the best line in the whole movie: one word, “Try.” (Rent it and see!)

Back in Bratslav, I had my last English club of the year, for younger students. I decided to talk to them about how to introduce yourself and others, in person and on the phone. I taught them “So-and-so residence, So-and-so speaking” even though I’ve never used that phrase myself, and the phrase “This is he/she,” which I have. I also used Bridget Jones’s advice for introducing people with interesting details, such as “Tom, this is Mary. Mary plays the piano. Mary, this is Tom. Tom is a gourmet cook.” So they had fun with that . . .

In the big city, one of our English club members requested a discussion on the American Civil War. Brittany and I split the topic up, and did our best to research it. I borrowed a CD-ROM on the subject from the Window on America library, but unfortunately it was about 10 years old, and made my computer freeze every five minutes. So I was forced to turn to Wikipedia, in the end. I had a few notes left from writing my senior thesis on Civil War-era literature, but they have little to do with battles and dates: I’m so clueless about the latter that I actually remember having to ask my roommate, at one point, which side wore which color.

We showed a few scenes from “Gone With the Wind” and “Glory,” and Grant told a family story relating to Sherman’s march to the sea. It seems one of his ancestors carried the flag for General Sherman, and was given the flag afterwards. Unfortunately, other members of the family came up with the idea of using the flag for target practice in the barn – so Grant is now the proud owner of some very tattered remains. When I couldn’t think of anything else interesting to say, I showed off pictures of Mev’s and my visit to the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, on our way back from college after graduation. We’d been driving by that highway sign for years, and I had read about it in Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates in the Attic” (which I highly, highly recommend), and we just couldn’t resist finally seeing it for ourselves. I also told the story of my tour-guide in Beauford, SC, whose grandmother, after taking the tour, admonished her sternly for referring to “the Civil War.” “That war wasn’t civil,” she pointed out – she preferred “The war of Northern aggression,” or even “the recent troubles.”

In other news, my toilet took a three week sabbatical from flushing unaided. It’s ok; it’s working again. The repair-man took a while to come because everyone is extremely busy working in their gardens and fields lately, mostly planting potatoes. So you can see how that need might take precedence over functional plumbing. After many fields – including the one behind our house – had been planted, he arrived to save the day.

My classes on HIV/AIDS and human trafficking have continued, though slightly hampered by the spring-time activities I just mentioned. After school, students have to stay and work on beautifying the school yard; and that’s if their parents even allow them to come to school at all, considering all the yard-work to be done at home. So it seemed that offering my classes after school was not going to work. Instead, I just turned all of the English classes for the week (for grades 8 through 11) at my school into HIV/AIDS lessons. It worked out very well, and allowed me to reach many more students than I would have if the lessons had been optional and after school.

It was the first time that Lyudmila, my coordinator, had seen me teach about HIV/AIDS, and she was very excited and helpful. She’s a great translator, so the kids who couldn’t understand my broken Ukrainian had nothing to fear. I tend to speak in strings of nouns during these lessons, but, much like Tarzan, I get my point across. Also like Tarzan, I use lots of gestures: my favorite is when I pantomime being pregnant (it is a sex-ed class, after all). Everyone’s usually very sweet about my Ukrainian, though. When I explained that I would be showing them a movie about human trafficking in Ukrainian, a student asked how I would be able to understand it, and Lyudmila asserted that I speak Ukrainian better than I do English. Thankfully, this is not true (though I’m sure my English has suffered some here), and to answer the student’s question: I don’t understand the movie, hardly at all. I look at the pictures, and take the rest on faith.

This past week, I taught the same lessons at the orphanage. The kids remembered my shtick from last fall, which is good, but it made them a little blasé about having to revisit it. I told them that I learned these things over and over at school in America, and so they were going to have to, too. Unfortunately, it’s a busy time of year for them as well, so I was only able to give two after-school lessons. I ended up giving the English teacher copies of the two movies, so that she can show them some other time.

Whenever I go to the orphanage and wait to meet her, kids always walk by me and say hello, which tends to stress me out a little because I feel like they’re testing me to see how bad my accent is. (This is why I prefer nodding and smiling.) One day this week, though, a small crowd of younger students gathered around me and started asking questions. They wanted to know if I was from England or America, and if I had bought a house here, etc. The younger students, apparently, visit Italy every summer and stay with families there, so they tried unsuccessfully to speak with me in Italian. It was really cute, until one of the boys started to – literally – play with matches. I was sort of astonished, but I didn’t feel that I had enough authority to intervene, so I just watched nervously. He stuck lit matches into his mouth, and waved them at other kids while my eyes got slowly bigger, but eventually he calmed down and we focused on discussing such things as the English words for “match,” cigarette,” and “pasta” (which they were happy to find is the same as in Italian).

Well, that’s about it! I’m mostly focusing on getting my Partnership project in gear, and getting a PEPFAR grant off the ground. I’m also preparing for a trip to Kyiv this Tuesday, where I will meet my Aunt Archer and Uncle Jack! They’re coming to visit me for about a week and a half, and they’ll get to see the Last Bell ceremony this Friday, like my parents and sister did last year. (And thank you to Archer for the nice card!)

Hope you’re all doing well! Enjoy the beginning of summer, when, for those of you in offices, you’ll get to alternate “code red” 100 degree weather outside with 60 degree air conditioning at work. I’ve just finished watching the third season of “The Office” (amazing), and I feel for you all . . .

Love, Virginia

Pictures!

2008-05-10T04:51:00.009-04:00

Easter Redux

2008-04-29T00:00:00.001-04:00

Hello again! How’s America? Ukraine is good.

The past two weeks, as I said I would, I’ve been teaching lessons on HIV/AIDS and human trafficking after school. The first week, I went to School #1 and taught a section of the 9th grade there. I’d like to reach more students, but I’ll take what I can get for now: the plan is to have a big training seminar next September so that local students and teachers can get the resources to teach these lessons themselves after I’ve left.

On the third day, I showed the movie “Svetlana’s Life” on my laptop – a short movie in Russian that I think I’ve mentioned here before. It’s just text and pictures, with classical music playing in the background, contrasting the history of AIDS in the world with the life of a Ukrainian woman who becomes infected with HIV. When she learns that she is HIV+, the music cuts off abruptly and a black bar appears over her eyes, and those of other HIV+ people. As she becomes more involved with HIV education, etc., the music rises again and the black bars disappear. It’s in Russian, so I’m not too clear on the specifics, but I can always tell how effective the movie is at the point when the music suddenly cuts off: because there’s no dialogue in the movie, some students will invariably whisper a little during the beginning, but by the time the music stops, the room is dead-silent.

Things were slightly more comic for me on the second day, when I arrived at the school over an hour early. After waiting in the teachers’ lounge for a while, I asked an English teacher where the bathroom was. Now, Peace Corps Volunteers in Ukraine quickly become experts in where the nearest bathrooms to any given location are, and the quality of same often informs our daily decisions, like where to have lunch. However, I was not familiar with the facilities at School #1. The teacher stood to leave the room – to show me where to go, I thought – so I started to follow her. She told me to sit and wait, and she left. Several minutes passed. I started to wonder if there was some special teachers’ bathroom (these things exist) that she was getting permission for me to use. Then she appeared at the door with the other English teacher, and beckoned for me to come. Now I started to panic: thinking, Oh no, maybe the building doesn’t have a bathroom and now they don’t know what to do with me, I’ve embarrassed them, etc. I walked over to them, and they indicated the classroom across the hall, where I had taught on the first day. Before my mind could begin to process what this might mean, one of the teachers explained that they had gathered the students, and were now ready for my lesson. They thought I had been asking to start my lesson early. I’m not sure why – maybe I mumbled and they thought they understood but didn’t . . . oh well. I just got my things together and went ahead and taught my lesson.

Back at School #2, my students have been good. My 5th graders have been getting pretty hyper, maybe because of summer approaching, or because I’m fairly lax with my groupies. It’s been taking them longer than usual to grasp new vocabulary – but they’re still energetic. An example:

Virginia Robertivna: What does “free” mean?
Groupies: Tre!!!
VR: No, not three . . . free!
G: Derevo!!!
VR: . . . no, not tree . . .

My 6th graders are split into two groups, and at the beginning of the year, one of these groups was significantly quicker than the other. I always got at least a page’s worth of material farther with the first group, every time. Well, strangely enough, by this point in the year they’ve switched places! It’s good news – the first group hasn’t gotten too much worse, it’s mostly the second group improving.

However, this Monday the second group was gutted because the teacher down the hall had claimed the best students to show off in her demo lesson that period. I was left with the students who never spoke at all. We went ahead with the story of King Arthur as a boy anyhow, and, with a lot of acting out and translation, we got through a good part of it. They’re well-behaved students, just not good in English, and unfortunately it’s almost impossible to catch them up when most of the class is so far ahead. A lot of students here seem to be passed from each grade to the next as a matter of course, like the students in America who end up in middle school without knowing how to read. I wish I had more time with them alone, but there’s only so much I can do. I’m not very knowledgeable in education theory (to say the least), but it seems to me that the perfect secondary school would have lots of kids, almost as many teachers, and very small classes. Lots of kids to help keep a claustrophobic clique atmosphere from developing (so, more like college), and lots of teachers so that there could be lots of clubs and activities (again, like college) and tiny, tiny classes. That’s my totally uninformed theory, and it would probably cost an obscene amount of money and be impossible. Unless it had the same tuition fees as a college would, too.

The week of after-school lessons at the Technicum went well, though several students insisted on speaking German to me (a foreigner is a foreigner, I guess).

On Thursday, I decided to plan something special for my 8th graders. They had recently studied “cosmonauts” (and “astronautics”), and all the jargon made me think of the skit from The Muppet Show, “Pigs in Space.” I happen to have one episode, in audio form, on my iPod, so I decided to bring it in. I typed out the dialogue for them, and attempted to explain the humor behind the characters’ introductions: “featuring . . . the redundant Captain Link Hogthrob, the arbitrary First Mate Miss Piggy, and the ubiquitous Dr. Julius Strangepork.” The scene centers on Miss Piggy asking to perform the “electrifying mid-course correction,” a procedure she studied for eleven years. Captain Hogthrob is reluctant to let her, because she’s “a woman,” and in the end his mistrust wins out and he pushes the button himself – but pushes the wrong one. The students thought the dialogue was funny after just reading it by themselves; but when I played the clips and they got to hear the characters’ voices, they went nuts.

On Saturday, I went to the store to find egg dye like the kind I bought last year. I bought ten eggs to dye, and Nina gave me four more of her own. She then stuck around to watch me, and pointed out everything I was doing wrong for about twenty minutes. (This is, I guess, what having a mother-in-law is like?) She couldn’t read the instructions on the packet because the text was too small, so she had to trust my version of them, which I guess she didn’t. [Which reminds me of a funny story about life with Nina. Once, I tried to force some food remains down the drain that did not want to go, and so, clogged the drain. I bought Meester Muskle to unclog it, but couldn’t understand the instructions at all, because they were in Russian. She couldn’t read them because they were too small, so I read them to her and we figured it out together.] She then borrowed the green dye and made four pretty green eggs of her own in the outdoor kitchen. We ended up with eighteen eggs of various colors, plus a few that she dyed somehow with an onion, according to an old Ukrainian tradition. I’ll put pictures of the eggs up soon . . .

Sunday was Orthodox Easter, so Happy Easter again! I started the day with Nina and her family, and didn’t have a break from eating from then on. My coordinator Lyudmila’s daughter Yana came over with more eggs, chocolate and a pretty cloth depicting a Ukrainian Easter scene. After that, my friend Ira and her husband picked me up to join their family. They had me over for Easter last year as well. She’s my age (with a three-year-old son), and used to be an English teacher at the orphanage, but now teaches at the Technicum.

We went to her aunt’s house and ate a lot of food, and then to her parents’ house where, thankfully, most of the food had been eaten. Taking advantage of the lull in eating, Ira decided to do my make-up. I insisted that I had put on make-up that morning, but no one believed me; I tried to explain my subtle technique, but it was no use. She took out a big compact filled with different shades of eye shadow, and asked what color my eyes were. Maybe she meant what color I wanted my lids to be . . . but in any case, she used green, and a lot of it. I was a little shocked by my brief glance in the mirror, but looking at the picture I took of us together afterwards, I see she actually did a nice job! Maybe a little more lipstick than I would use, but for green eye shadow, it doesn’t look bad (again, pictures soon). So, I spent the rest of Easter as a painted lady.

Ira and her husband then collected the extra food from her parents’ house, and we went to meet their friends for a picnic. There were seven of us: Ira and her husband, me, Ira’s brother and his girlfriend, and the godmother and godfather of Ira’s son. They actually refer to the godparents as “Godmother” and “Godfather” in conversation – or, “Kum” and “Kuma.” It’s pretty cute. Everyone had a few questions for me about America, and Kum brought up the approaching election. I was trying to explain that it wouldn’t be a choice between Hillary, Barack and McCain, but between two of those, and they got stuck on Barack’s name. They thought it was funny – though I’m not sure why any one non-Slavic name would appear stranger to them than another. Surely, McCain sounds a little weird to them too, lacking v’s as it does. I attempted to make him more than just a funny name to them by telling them about his trip to Ukraine a few years ago, and his encounter with the traditional Ukrainian dish “holodets” (an example of which we had jiggling on the blanket). He referred to it, I think, as “a questionable meat-jell-o dish” (it’s in his second book, look it up!). So, they thought that was funny . . .

At one point, when I was speaking Ukrainian, Kuma said that I sounded like Mrs. Yushenko. I laughed, but I think it’s a compliment! She’s the First Lady, and a Ukrainian-American by birth. The picnic was very nice, though I found out that Ukrainians my age are just as insistent on making me eat as their elders are. Kum actually took my fork and put food on it for me.

The night ended, as you might expect, with gunfire. Well, it did. As the sun was setting, I looked up to see Kum holding a gun. I was pretty freaked out, but it turned out to be a bee bee gun, and I calmed down when I heard the tiny noise it made when it fired. The men took turns aiming at a cup and an empty plastic bottle, without much apparent success. I guess my experience in Ukraine would not have been complete without some time spent watching a man gesture expressively with a gun while drinking vodka.

In other news, I’ve just about finished watching the last of the DVDs of TV series that my family and friends generously sent me two Christmases ago. See how I’ve made them last? To be fair, I have watched a few of them multiple times, and on several occasions when I would have moved on to a new one, I found I had lent it out. So, on my own behalf and that of all the Volunteers in my oblast who’ve enjoyed them, thank you again for the DVDs!

Finally, thank you to Kristen for the very cute letter! That’s about it. I hope that you’re all doing well. I miss you, and am looking forward to seeing you in roughly six and a half months.

Love, Virginia

Spring is Here

2008-04-12T03:19:00.001-04:00

Hello again. How are you all? Things here are going well, we’re nearly done with Spring semester . . . and I’m about to embark on more HIV/AIDS and trafficking lessons at the schools in my town. Before we know it, it will be summer . . .

Spring Break was good; I went down to Trostyanets for a few days to visit Clara, and got to see her host family, which was very nice. Friday morning at 4 a.m. we caught a bus to Kyiv with her little host sister, Tanya (who was visiting family there), and then made our way to the new PC office! It’s nice, although there’s no elevator to take us to the Volunteers’ lounge on the 4th floor (come summer, that will be fun). I proceeded to print out reams of paper about grad school options, and got to catch up with the other Volunteers there, which was fun. Fellow Vinnytska oblast Volunteer Grant was there, waiting to meet Laura Bush on that Tuesday! That’s right, the Bushes were in Ukraine. Grant was among the few tapped to meet Mrs. Bush, which he enjoyed, and he also sang the praises of Mrs. Yushenko (the First Lady here).

We stayed for part of a Group 32 party – the group after ours, celebrating their one-year anniversary – which was interesting. Then, after a horrific train ride, involving obnoxious teenage boys hell-bent on playing the music on their cell phones at top volume all night, no matter who threatened them, we finally got back to Vinnytsia around 3 a.m. (Kids, and really people in general here, love that they can put songs on their cell phones. It’s like when people used to walk around with boom boxes on their shoulders – you often pass people walking down the street to their own personal soundtrack, obnoxious music blaring from their pockets.)

The next day, poor Clara was very sick, so I went by myself to do English club. Inspired by my favorite writer’s recent “chat” about Tom Lehrer on washingtonpost.com (Gene Weingarten, for anyone who doesn’t actually know me), I decided to play a few Tom Lehrer songs for the group. I found annotated lyrics online, which were very useful. I chose the following to play for them: “National Brotherhood Week,” “MLF,” “Pollution,” “New Math,” “Who’s Next?” and “Wernher Von Braun.” They really liked them! I passed out the lyrics, so everyone could read along. The songs touched on a lot of themes we’d been discussing recently, so they seemed appropriate.

The next day, I woke up at 12:30 a.m. with what Clara had had the day before (which kept her stuck on Lee’s couch all that weekend). So, I missed a few days of school again, but felt completely better by Wednesday. In the process of that adventure, I acquired a mercury thermometer, which I’ve been advised by PC never to touch again. They won’t even try to explain to me how to “zero” it . . . they’re just scared I’m going to drop it and spill mercury all over the place, so I’ve put it away somewhere safe.

Funny story that I’ve forgotten to tell here before – my faithful space heater has a new purpose, besides keeping me warm. Nina has put it to work making “kefir.” My dictionary defines kefir as “yoghurt,” but I’m not sure if that’s quite accurate. The best way I can explain it is to tell you how she’s making it – she leaves a big jug of milk right next to the heater for a few days . . . and it becomes kefir. Yep. At first, when I saw she had left milk there, my natural instinct was to move it far away. Well, I was wrong. I’m glad that my inability to handle Ukrainian temperatures can serve to aid a practical purpose.

On the funny English t-shirt front: one of my 9th graders likes to wear a blue shirt with the words “Blues heroes exclusive offer for milk.” Another came to school one day with a gray sweatshirt that said “Bright pearls” in white letters. And the best, recently, was a 5th grader’s purple shirt-dress with a big picture of Beyonce, and text about her written all over it.

Last Saturday, I had a big lunch for nearby Volunteers at my house, which was really great. I used the lunch as a ploy to draw people in and distribute lesson plans about HIV/AIDS and human trafficking, which the PC HIV/AIDS working group had asked me to do. I also gave out DVDs with various short movies on the topics. Clara and Cindy came the day before to help me cook, and it was a big success. I made pumpkin pie (with one of the cans I brought over from America last fall), Cindy made croutons for a chicken Caesar salad, and Clara and I made tortilla chips from scratch. Lettuce is hard to come by here, so it was a special treat that Clara was able to find some in her town for the salad. I made the PC cookbook’s recipe for Caesar dressing, but either I screwed it up or you just can’t make that dressing without anchovies . . . it didn’t taste right, so I used some Ranch dressing mix that the dear Jacobs left me instead.

Everyone but three people were able to make it, and it was really fun to show off my house. Everyone loved Sharik, the dog, and the cats were certainly happy to have attention all afternoon. And everyone enjoyed meeting Nina, who got to know several of them from their various smoke breaks outside, during which she told them that Sharik understands English (I taught him). Grant’s girlfriend Joyce made a massive amount of very spicy salsa, which we all enjoyed with the chips as an appetizer. After we finished everything, there was still a lot of salad left, so I made everyone little to-go bags of lettuce, chicken, croutons and cheese. Matt from Nemirov brought American candy his mom had sent, which was very good. All in all it was a fun time – a good excuse to get together.

On Tuesday, I had the last school English club I’ll be having for a while, because of the lessons I’ll be doing around town in the coming weeks. I made them Mad Libs, which were a big success, especially the one that ended up telling the story of Masha, the red-eyed, black-haired girl who would only eat pizza and drink Fanta, and who met Shakira in Kyiv.

Warm weather has finally arrived, and suddenly. In the past week, I’ve put away my long underwear, and traded my big puffy coat and boots for a spring jacket and sneakers. If this summer is anything like the last, I’m going to have to figure out a way to put screens in my windows soon . . .

Thank you very much to Mev for the wonderful package!! And to Kristen for the epic letter!

And thank you to everyone who donated to my project, once again. We have officially over-funded – which means more money for the PC Global Fund, and other Volunteers’ projects around the world!

That’s about it – I miss you all, and hope you are enjoying warm weather where you are too!!

Love, Virginia

Pen-pals, Wikipedia, and Happy Easter!

2008-03-24T05:34:00.011-04:00

Hello again!

First – thank you so, so much to everyone who has donated to my Pipe Dream project online. You are wonderful, and I adore you (always have, but this gives me the excuse to say so). PC says that I’m raising money at quite a fast clip – and everything’s going well!! Thanks to you! This project is sort of on the down-low in my town right now . . . but I will let you know all about the reaction this summer when we get things started!

As I said, we finished our big city English club series on religion with Islam and Orthodox Christianity. I did my best with Islam, answering a lot of “Aren’t they all [like this]” or “Don’t they all hate [this group of people]?” questions. When one member said that their attitude towards women was “ugly,” I pointed out that plenty of religions have specific roles for men and women to play, like Catholics allowing only men to be priests – so are those religions ugly too? In the end, I found myself quoting the West Wing episode aired after Sept. 11^th, called “Isaac and Ishmael,” so we decided to show it for the next time and just let Aaron Sorkin explain it all. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it! Season 3. We showed it last week at club, and they liked it a lot. It covers an absurd amount of material – questions of fundamentalism vs. the mainstream, terrorism’s success rate, racial profiling, etc., etc. The club members told us a little about Orthodox Christianity, and how it makes Catholicism look hip and modern. For example, you don’t sit during Orthodox services – you stand the whole time. They also had several stories about saints, and a flame in an Orthodox church in Jerusalem that never goes out (anyone ever heard of it?).

Back at school, I’ve been tutoring an 11^th former who wants to study English at university, and the other week we worked on a sample test she had on the use of articles. You may recall that I made a couple of posters for my classroom on the subject last fall – and I really thought I had it down. Well, I don’t. How do you explain the difference between “Some girls” and “Some of the girls”? Or why someone is more likely to say “I saw a man pass the house” instead of “I saw a man pass a house.” (I tried to explain that you might say “the man” and “the house” if you had a specific man and house in mind . . . but if you are in a stationary position, you’re more likely to say “the house” – while if you are the man, walking, then you would say “I passed a house” . . . ugh.) This is all especially difficult because Ukrainian and Russian have no equivalent to “the,” “a” and “an.” She had no frame of reference for what I was babbling about. What finally seemed to make sense to both of us was the idea that when we are thinking of something specific, we say “the.” “A book on the table” and “the book on the table” are both correct, but we would use the latter if we had a specific book in mind. This might sound obvious to you all – but when it was no longer just a matter of explaining why we don’t say “the New York City,” it was hard to get my bearing.

March 8^th was International Women’s Day . . . what, didn’t you celebrate it? Hallmark needs to get its act together with this one. Flowers and candy just for being alive and having two x chromosomes – way better than Valentine’s Day. I made lots of baked goods for the women I know here – chocolate chip cookies for baba Nina and my former neighbor, Lyuba. Chocolate chip brownies for the teachers, and the women who work in the school kitchen. And chocolate-chip banana bread to bring to Clara’s house – where we had a party with other Volunteers for my birthday, the day before Women’s Day!

My birthday was very fun, and it’s especially nice to have it combined with Women’s Day, because I don’t even need to tell people it’s my birthday to get presents! People knew, however, and I got loaded down with Ukrainian treasures just as I did last year. Nina gave me an orange stuffed cat, a fifth grader gave me a dish shaped like a cow, Lyudmila’s daughter Yana sent me a beautiful Ukrainian doll, and students gave me wonderful, elaborate, hand-made cards. I have to say, though, the most excited present was waking up that morning to the news that the Partnership Grant I wrote for my school had been officially approved, one day after I submitted it! (See previous blog entry.) So that was especially nice, and good news to bring to Lyudmila and the school director.

As I said, I went to Trostyanets to visit Clara and have a big party – for which we made great food. We made fajitas, using the salsa I made last summer, and she even had lettuce! We also made a yellow cake, though I wasn’t paying attention and put way too much butter in; everyone swore it tasted fine anyway, and Clara’s cat, Vanilla, seemed to like it, too.

Another highlight of the past few weeks has been my pen-pal project! My friend Katie M teaches the 4^th grade back in Newport News, and we arranged for our students to become pen-pals this spring. Well, their letters finally arrived right after Women’s Day, and they were fantastic. It seemed that every kid was from a different place – New York, Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Hawaii – so different from here, where people rarely move more than ten miles in their lifetime. They had great questions for my kids, including “Will you write back in Ukrainian or English?” I distributed the letters among the 45 or so kids in Bratslav who had signed up for the project, from all four schools. This past week I collected the replies, and they are many and colorful. Lots of pictures, stickers, drawings, questions, and, of course, the ever-popular phrase “As for me.” I hope the 4^th graders enjoy their replies, and can figure out how to respond to such queries as “Do you go in for sports?”

The fifth graders are still my groupies. I was three minutes late to class the other day, and the moment I opened the door, they swarmed me – they ran from their desks to hug me, and pinned me against the door. Very, very cute . . . though it makes me worry about the looming goodbyes next fall!

It’s now Spring Break, and the end of another quarter. Because most of my classes were running out of texts to discuss in their books, I decided to try something different for the last two weeks of lessons. I had recently looked up Ukraine on Wikipedia (try it! - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine), and realized that a lot ofthe entry is similar to the texts they read in their Plahotnyk textbooks, only more . . . accurate. Not so much with the “and then the Americans stole our space secrets.” So I printed out the first few pages, and taught the opening summary to my older kids (9^th through 11^th) for a week. Even though the entry uses lots of big, unfamiliar words, it wasn’t very hard for them to understand because the material itself is so familiar. It went well, and it was a nice break from those textbooks.

For my younger classes (5^th through 8^th), I borrowed books from the little English library we created from the donations some of you sent me last summer, and Xeroxed stories for each grade. The 5^th graders read The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes, by Phyllis Krasilovsky; the 6^th graders read Jim Meets The Thing, by Miriam Cohen; the 7^th graders read Cowardly Clyde, by Bill Peet; and the 8^th graders read the first chapter of Pleasing the Ghost, by Sharon Creech. It was really fun – they loved the pictures and the stories, learned new vocabulary, and did very well reading out loud.
Unfortunately, my experiment was cut short a little bit before Spring Break started, because a week ago I came down with a cold. I made it to school on Tuesday, though, to show “The Princess Bride” for English club. There was a core group of about five devotees that stayed for the whole movie, though at its largest the audience swelled to about fifteen. There was enough physical comedy to keep them entertained when the dialogue was too complicated, but the more advanced students laughed at some of the jokes, like when Fezzik points out that he is pulling three extra people up the Cliffs of Insanity, while the Man in Black has only himself. I explained the story as the movie went on, but they seemed to understand it well enough on their own, and they really liked it.

Besides that, I’ve been recovering at home all week. Nina knew that I was interested in going to the Catholic service for Easter morning, yesterday, so she arranged for her Catholic neighbor, Rosa, to take me. I’m glad she arranged it – I was feeling too lazy to find out anything about the service on my own, and would have definitely stayed home and slept. Rosa insisted on leaving at 5:30, which wasn’t entirely necessary, but we were not the first ones there for the 7 am service. The service began, finally, with a procession around the building (built in 1884). The congregation sang and chanted as they processed three times around, holding banners and carrying a small, tent-like structure. I didn’t understand much of the service or the sermon, but it was interesting. The music was very pretty, and a few women, including nuns, chanted what I assume were prayers. For communion, the congregation lined the aisle, and the priest and the altar boys went to them. Towards the end of the two-hour service, the younger children went to the front of the church to recite poetry and sing. After that, the babas in attendance (and maybe others, I’m not sure) lined the aisle with Easter baskets – filled with sausage, painted eggs, and traditional Easter dishes, including cake with white frosting and sprinkles. The same food is traditional here for Orthodox Easter. They placed white candles in the cakes and lit them, so the aisle was filled with candlelight while the priest went up and down, splashing holy water on everyone (he got me right in the eyes . . . not used to that tradition). It was very nice, and I’m glad that I went, though it was good to get home afterwards and sleep for a long time.

I’ve gotten some wonderful mail in the past few weeks! Thank you very much to the Landrums, Grandma, Kristen, Clarissa, and Aunt Mary for their colorful and thoughtful cards and letters!! (Hope I didn’t leave anyone out!) They decorate my desk, and I am very appreciative. And Gigi has outdone herself again, with a grand total of three letters and another video! Thank you to the “stars” of the video – Gigi, of course, Kristen, Susan, Marc, Renata and Ethan (whom I’ve never met, but now I feel like I know . . . ok not really). It was adorable, and quite high-tech, and I am planning an in-kind response as we speak.

I hope everything’s going well at home. Thank you again to everyone who has donated . . . miss you all, take care!

Love, Virginia

My Pipe Dream

2008-03-10T05:02:00.003-04:00

Hello again!

I’m writing today to tell you about the biggest project of my Peace Corps service here in Ukraine, and to ask for your help. The goal of my project is getting running water for my school.

(First plug for the grant website: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=343-117)

I’ve written a Peace Corps Partnership Grant with the school director and my coordinator for the installation of eight sinks in our school. There is currently no place for the children, ages 5 through 17, to wash their hands all day. Only about 20% of our students have plumbing in their homes. During the flu season, it generally takes just ten days for an infection to spread from a few students to 30% of them, at which point the school is required to close down for a week and a half.

We want to install three sinks in the school building for older children, three in the building for younger, and two in the building where they eat breakfast and lunch every day. The cost of this project is $9,628. School community members, local organizations and the district methodological center have agreed to contribute $4,454 – nearly half the cost of the project – including in-kind donations of materials and transportation.

The grant has been approved by Peace Corps Washington, and there is now a website set up to accept tax-deductible donations. A PC Water & Sanitation Fund, created for projects like mine, will provide $1,500 to the project. That leaves $3,674 to raise in order for the project to be completed.

This would be the first major repair our hundred-year-old school has received in over twenty years. It would make an enormous difference in the lives of the children and teachers there now, and in the lives of those who will come after.

Any help that you can give us, even a donation of 10 or 20 dollars, would be greatly appreciated! Please visit the grant website (again, at: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=343-117) to check it out, and if you have friends or family members who might be interested in helping as well, please let them know about it!

Members of our school community are incredulous that American organizations and individuals they’ve never met would donate money to help create a better learning environment for their children, improving their lives. This project would provide a memorable legacy for Peace Corps' presence in the village, and for the generosity of Americans in general. I also hope that my grant will inspire other PC Volunteers in Ukraine to attempt similar projects, because despite the need in many Ukrainian schools, the grant I’ve written is the first of its kind for PC Ukraine.

This blog is usually for cute stories about my zany life here in Ukraine, so I hope you’ll forgive the serious digression. Even if you’ve never met me, and have just come across my blog by chance, I hope you’ll consider donating! (And thanks for reading!)

Thank you for any help that you can give us! I miss you all, and hope you’re doing well . . .

Love, Virginia

P.S. Here are some pictures: my 5^th graders, and other students at “Last Bell,” the ceremony for the last day of school . . .

Grants, Surveys & Questionnaires

2008-02-29T10:39:00.001-05:00

Oh, guys. I am so boring. Don’t be upset that I haven’t written in more than a month . . . you haven’t missed all that much. It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing – I’ve been crazy busy – just nothing very blog-worthy. Basically, I’ve been reviewing grants, learning how to write grants, and writing grants. Who knew I would leave Peace Corps with a bankable skill?

Soon after my last entry, I went to Kyiv for a SPA meeting, and my mid-service medical exam. There were some very interesting grants, including one involving scientific experiments on a boat! I got to see my cluster-mate Jasmin for the first time since training, since she was there for a meeting of her own, and we went to TGIF’s – which unfortunately has the same prices as it does in America (keep in mind that it’s five hryven to the dollar).

That weekend we started a series of big city English clubs about world religions, which we have yet to complete. This was inspired by questions our club members had about Mormonism, after visiting the Mormon missionaries’ English club in town. So Cindy, Clara and I decided to split up the major religions we could think of, and do a little Wikipedia research. I was in charge of Roman Catholicism, Judaism and Islam; Cindy took Protestantism; Clara took Mormonism; and Lee visited the first Saturday to hold forth on Buddhism and Hinduism. You may recall that our club members can be extraordinarily opinionated, and this is a subject that inspires a lot of random conversational tangents, among Americans as well as Ukrainians. I tried my best to keep the train on the tracks in terms of allotting twenty minutes or so per religion, but the conversation has nevertheless lasted a month and a half. It’s a process that makes me recall a phrase I first heard from my cousin, when I visited home, last October: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” Well, we’ve had plenty of both, to be sure. I had fun discussing Judaism two weeks ago, because I got to reminisce about a class I took in high school about Jewish holidays, nicknamed “Happy Hebrew Holidays.” Tomorrow we are due to wrap up Islam, and we’ll hear from our club members about Orthodox Christianity, something I’m very ignorant about.

The following week, I went to Kyiv again, this time for PEPFAR training. PEPFAR, as you may have heard, is the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief. PC Ukraine receives some funds from PEPFAR for projects our Volunteers do, and we hold periodic trainings on how to write PEPFAR grants. I went with my coordinator, Lyudmila; it was nice to travel with a Ukrainian so I didn’t have to worry so much about hearing the train information correctly from the announcer (you have to listen to know whether the train is numbered from the back or the front, so you know which direction to run to get your train car). The train ride was interesting – I slept most of the time, but could hear my neighbors discussing me and the fact that they had heard me speaking English. I opened my eyes at one point just in time to see the guy sitting across from me throw a blanket on top of me, which was a little startling. Nice that he wanted me to have a blanket, but still. I talked with them when I woke up, and they were very nice, just curious about a foreigner.

We stayed at a sanitarium outside of Kyiv, which was nice, and I saw my other cluster-mate, Katie, for the first time since July. For the most part, we split into two groups: Americans and Ukrainians, so we didn’t have to wait for every statement to be translated. We had trainers from a Ukrainian organization, the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS. The trainers were really amazing – the discussion of the biology of AIDS and its treatment was the most in-depth I had ever had, and I learned a lot. On the second day, we met with our coordinators to plan projects, and Lyudmila had a lot of ideas. She was really excited by the training, and we planned what I think is a very good project. Because of all that I’m doing now, related to another grant I’m writing, we won’t start this one for a couple months. The next day we all presented our project plans to the group, and Lyudmila was the only coordinator who presented in English – they had to translate for her, it was funny. (Ok, maybe you had to be there.)

Here are some other stories from the past month, in no particular order . . .

A student of mine has taken to wearing a pale pink turtleneck sweater, with the word “Yacht” written in pink, cursive letters, accented with rhinestones . . .

As I was leaving school one afternoon, a man I didn’t know passed me on the street and said “Good morning,” in English. This isn’t unusual, and I kept walking, only to hear him continue: “I’m sorry I am late . . . may I sit down?” . . .

My fellow Volunteer Clara had a problem with a student of hers who liked to curse in English, during class. He’s very smart, but she couldn’t get him to stop showing off his extensive knowledge of English curse words. I suggested she teach him some old-fashioned, silly exclamations to say instead, like “fiddlesticks.” She liked the idea, but called me later because she couldn’t think of any more. Suddenly I was in the zone, and rattled off about forty, including “good grief,” “oh my stars and garters,” “for the love of Pete,” “horse-hockey,” “fudge,” “sugar,” “son of a gun,” and “holy Toledo.” More proof that I am secretly 80 years old . . .

For my last English club at school, I decided to teach the kids a game I used to play when I was little called “Miss Mary Mack.” It’s one of those hand-slapping routines girls do that involves a song that makes no sense but has rhyming lyrics. I still remember it quite well, so I taught them the lyrics, and then the hand motions (they apparently have their own hand-slapping games here, so they were familiar with the concept). It was really fun, and even the boys tried to keep up, while everyone sang along about Miss Mary, her fifteen cents, and the elephants she went to go see jump the fence . . .

In other news, teaching is still going fairly well. My fifth graders are still my groupies, and they frequently gather around me to ask questions about what I’m reading, what we’ll do in class, and various things about my family. They remember my answers, too, and during a class discussion about hobbies, my student Diana pointed out excitedly that my dad plays tennis, and my sister was on the swim team! I was like . . . yes, that’s true, thank you. Very funny.

My older students are doing well too, although I recently had to lecture my ninth graders on the concept of understanding what they are saying. They were reciting memorized facts about Washington, D.C., but the problem with trying to memorize something you don’t understand is that it will likely come out completely wrong. For example: “Ze Library of Congress . . . is all books America.” So we had a little talk, and they seemed to understand that it helps to know what a library is if you’re going to talk about the Library of Congress. I also gave a lecture to my seventh graders about doing original work, since they routinely show me identical homework . . . they have promised to do better, we’ll see.

Although we members of Group 31 are nearing the 2/3rds mark of our service, we just recently filled out our one-year survey for PC. The results were returned to us, including many of the comments we all made – anonymously, of course. It’s sort of like postsecret.com for Group 31, though less scandalous. I thought I’d share some of the more memorable lines – some made me laugh, some made me nod solemnly, and some were so easy to identify with that I had to think hard to remember whether or not I had written it myself:

“Dear [PC], a drunken bum was mean to me on the street… again :(“

“At the rural posts in Africa, you expect the mud hut, but here you are given an apartment and it ends up being like a mud hut (to put it bluntly).”

“Could be worse.”

“Winter in the village is cold, dark and lonely. Not sure what Peace Corps could do to change that, but, you know, whatever.”

I filled out another questionnaire recently, at the request of the director of www.culturecrossing.net – I’ll include some of the questions and my answers at the end of this entry.

Recently I’ve been spending my time writing a grant for my school, and enjoying the arrival of warmer weather. It may or may not stick around – but it’s nice in the meantime! 45 degrees Fahrenheit seems summery to me now.

Thank you so much to Ellen, Mel B, and Gigi for their wonderful letters!!! I may no longer have my act together with regard to writing letters home to you all . . . but I do think about you every day, and I’ll try to do better!

And finally: some of you may have seen my note on Facebook, requesting opinions on whether or not I speak with a Southern accent. I have been hearing my own accent more and more, and I don’t know whether this is something I’ve always had, and just never noticed, or whether I’ve developed it here in Ukraine out of sheer boredom. Katie, my cluster-mate, claims that I speak the same way I have since the first day of training, and Mary swore she didn’t notice a difference, when we met in Germany. Paige R. suggested that it may have been accentuated by having to speak slower for Ukrainians. I’m still not sure what to think – I need more help! Think back to the last time you heard me speak, and answer as honestly as you can . . .

Hope you are all well, keep in touch, and I promise to write more often!

Love, Virginia

Questionnaire Excerpts:

What are the most common forms of greetings in Ukraine? For example: a handshake, a bow, a nod etc.

For men greeting men – Men shake each other’s hands every time they see each other

For women greeting women – Women don’t shake hands

For meetings between men and women – Men don’t shake women’s hands

What is the most common communication style among in people in Ukraine? Do they tend to be direct and say exactly what they mean, or take a more indirect path when communicating, requiring creative speaking and listening techniques. Or somewhere in between.

People can be direct, but no rarely means no, and they will assume that your “no”s don’t mean no as well. If they say no when you offer them food, they expect to be offered it again and again, and vice versa. They sometimes have trouble getting to the point, especially if it’s a difficult or uncomfortable topic, and will try not to tell you things if they’re afraid they will upset you.

What is generally considered the appropriate amount of touching when speaking? For example during conversations is touching on the arm, shoulders, hands, elbows, leg, etc. very common? How much is too much? How is this different when interacting with family, members of the opposite sex, or business colleagues?

They’re not too touchy-feely, as far as I’ve noticed. A man wishing to send a woman (perhaps a foreign woman sitting next to him on a bus) a certain signal might start touching her – this is not just normal, he’s thinking he’s going to get somewhere, it is bad.

How do you view time in Ukraine? What are the expectations about being on time? Is it rude to be late? Do services like trains, buses, etc run on time? Is punctuality valued? Do people covet their time or give it freely? Does this change when doing business vs. social situations?

People are late a lot, punctuality isn’t exactly stressed – at wedding receptions, the guests wait for the couple to arrive after taking pictures by every local monument they can find, this process can take hours. Trains tend to run on time, buses do as well, but vans (“marshrutkas”) and such are sort of on their own schedule, could be early, could be late. People don’t covet their time too much. Meetings can go on for quite a while if the person in charge feels like talking. Similarly, if you’re in a post office or a store, the clerk frequently enjoys a power trip by making you wait incredibly long periods of time, even if you’re the only customer there – also, buying train tickets, etc.

What are some common gestures? What are their meanings? For example, how do you point to something? One finger? Whole hand? How do you beckon someone?

I think you’re not supposed to point with one finger. Flicking your neck means you want a drink. Sticking your thumb between your first two fingers (pointer and middle), like the sign language “t,” is very rude, it means something like, “no more for you.”

What are the generally accepted and expected roles of women in society? What behavior/activities tend to be unacceptable for women? Is this true for foreign women as well?

Women basically run the show behind the scenes. It is accepted for women to do manual labor into their old age, and to do all the cooking and the cleaning. Women are not supposed to have a man in their house, not even a friend, or to be at a bar or café (especially drinking) alone. Instead of drinking shots of vodka at a party, women often drink shots of (homemade) wine instead, but it’s not required. With foreign women, I’m sure this can vary. However, despite this conservative view of gender roles, the Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, is viewed as intelligent and capable, and never dismissed as a ditz or as being overly ambitious.

What is the legal drinking age? Is it enforced? What about smoking age? Is it enforced? What are the penalties for possession of illegal drugs? Are they heavily enforced? What other laws are strongly enforced?

I think the smoking and drinking ages are around 18 . . . they are rarely enforced. It is common to see preteens, and even younger children, drinking alcoholic drinks, and beer is not generally considered to be worse for you than water. Same with smoking, and it’s not very taboo for young girls to smoke as well. I think that illegal drugs have stricter consequences, but Ukraine does have a fairly serious drug use problem – injecting drug use accounts for roughly half of all HIV infections in the country.

What are the most common titles used when meeting people in a business setting in? Mr.? Mrs.? Doctor? Lawyer?

People tend to use patronymics – the person’s father’s name added on to the end of their name, as in: Irina Mikhailovna, or Dmitro Andreyovitch.

The end! Learned anything new? You’re welcome.

Love, VA

Back to School; and, A Day in the Life

2008-01-25T14:33:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone! Sorry to write so seldom, but the problem I was having before – not being able to think of anything interesting to write about – continues. Honestly, I think I’m getting so used to things here that I don’t notice what’s interesting anymore.

An example of my obliviousness: when I was in Germany with Mary, I emptied out my purse to show her my cool PC identification badge, and crazy-looking Ukrainian money. I also pulled some hard candy out of my wallet. She asked why I had hard candy, and I explained that when clerks at stores don’t have enough change, they will occasionally give you candy, or a stick of gum or a box of matches, as a substitute. She could not believe this – and I guess I never mentioned it here before. Hard candy is, as a matter of fact, accepted as currency. Seriously – Volunteers who are short of change have discovered that hard candy is accepted in its stead. So it goes both ways. This is normal for most Ukrainian stores. Mary declared that that was the weirdest thing I had ever told her about Ukraine, and that I should write about it here – so there you are.

Around the time I last wrote, we had another big city English club, and that week I was inspired to discuss the American election process. I researched caucus and primary procedures, which I had not really understood before – man, caucuses are weird! People literally stand in a room, grouped by allegiance, and try to convince each other to change sides (at least, they do for the Iowa Democratic Caucus . . . Republicans get blank slips of paper, apparently)! Bizarre.

I’m back at school, and it’s business as usual. My new strategy for dealing with my silent 9th and 11th graders is to make each student say something during class, usually by going around the room as we go over vocabulary lists. So, instead of me saying a word and having everyone repeat it, I have a student say the word before everyone repeats it and I explain what it means, and then another student says the next word, etc. Ok, it’s not rocket science, but this way I do hear voices I literally haven’t heard before, and it cuts down on chatter when students realize they might be called on.

I don’t know what to expect with my jaded 11th graders, but my silent 9th graders promised me that they’d do better this semester: I gave them a lecture on my last day last fall about participation. They have a habit of whispering amongst themselves whenever I ask them a question – and even though they’re discussing the question, it doesn’t really help me, because without outside intervention they will continue whispering in panicked tones until the end of class. Even if the question is as simple as “What do we buy at the store?” they respond with deer-in-the-headlights faces and frantic whispering. In order to encourage them to address me directly more often, I gave a short multiple choice test on the chalkboard, with questions like “Why am I here? a) to listen to you talk, b) vacation, c) to teach you English” and “How long will I be here? a) forever, b) two years, c) until next fall.” Once they were clear on the answers (for those two, both “c”), they were slightly chastened, and so far they’re doing pretty well with speaking at normal volume.

My first English club of the semester, for the younger kids, was about tongue-twisters. There were only a couple of girls from the 5th grade (my groupies), and one from the 7th, but they had fun. I taught them “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” “Peter Piper,” and “How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck?” I ended with some silly enunciation aides like “unique New York” (but decided to omit the “Anchorman” classics: “The arsonist has oddly-shaped feet” and “The human torch was denied a bank loan.”) They did well, and later asked me to write them down so they could study them further.

Last weekend, I was invited to Kyiv to join another grant review committee; this one for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief. It’s a newish group, so I wasn’t the only one slightly unclear on the rules. It’s different from the other group I’m in, SPA, in that the wording of the grant is much more important. That makes sense, I guess, because PEPFAR money is for a very specific goal, with specific guidelines. Most of the grants are for AIDS education and trainings, but some go further; one for this round even included plans for a television ad, which I thought was nice.

This is the time of year when Ukrainian priests go from house to house to bless each one with holy water (you may remember me mentioning this last year). Nina was very worried that the house be in order for the blessing, but they didn’t show up until last night, when neither of us were prepared. I had planned to turn on a tape recorder to catch the beautiful singing – so when I heard them, I turned off the stove where I was making dinner and ran across the house, back to my room to get it. I ended up catching some of the singing, as well as the subsequent conversation in Ukrainian between me and the priest about whether I liked Ukrainian men, and my plans for the future. Glad to have that saved for posterity.

That’s about all that’s happened to me. But I thought I’d offer you something different, this entry. A few PC Volunteers I know will occasionally include an entry or two from their personal journal in their blog, when they don’t have time to write an entry, or just want to give their readers a taste of A Day in the Life. I’m always amazed at how nice and civil their journal entries are; there’s really no difference in tone between their regular blog and the journal excerpts. You see, I save all civility, and cute, amusing stories for my blog; my journal is for venting frustration, or for tedious rambling about my schedule and all the things I have to do.

So with that being said, because I have nothing more interesting to write, here’s an excerpt from today (with some bracketed clarifications), when I was trying to decide what to do about an electrical problem:

“Friday, January 25, 2008
Electricity is going haywire. My outlet, my one stupid outlet, is not happy with me for running my water heater [electric kettle] in here. Yesterday and today it stopped working after I boiled water, and recently it was making angry sparky noises because of the space heater. I might buy a new adapter when I’m in Vinnytsia tomorrow, but regardless I think I will not use the water heater here again. Blaaah [the space heater] isn’t working now. And winter isn’t over yet. No way am I giving up my heater. Stupid piece of junk.

Am tired. Going to Vinnytsia tomorrow to buy train ticket to Kyiv on Monday, and visit [English club members], which should be interesting. Just read book about teaching, from an insanely dedicated teacher, it was good, looots of food for thought. [Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire by Rafe Esquith – for a list of everything I’ve been reading, check my blog profile!] Stupid **** heater. I’m fruuuuustrated.

Need to work on grants. Need to write people. Only feel like reading and watching movie I got from [Window on America library] a while ago. And am cold. . . . . .

Ok, there, just e-mailed [various people about grants I’m writing]. Ha. Still cold. Cat came in to sit on my lap, but felt the need to dig claws into me repeatedly, and I’m wearing the fleece I usually stick under her as a buffer, so I threw her out – I’m just not a cat person, can only take so much of that. Stupid ******* electricity. It’s on now, but I’ve only plugged in laptop, not sure what to do, am giving it a break before trying the heater. **** stupid piece of ****. Blaaaah. Am going to [Ukrainians’ house] at 1 . . . want to eat something beforehand so don’t have to mooch or starve . . [Rambling about plans] . . . . There, I just switched on the heater, and the electricity for the whole power strip immediately died. I’m going to kill someone. What do I do? The other adapter just doesn’t work. I’m going to call Clara and ask her. . . . Ok, I did, and she doesn’t know either. Now I have it back on, working with the computer. Blaaaah I don’t know what to do. Cold. Stupid **** awful electricity. Ok, now turned heater on, and nothing happened. I don’t care what noises the adapter makes. . . . Maybe I won’t buy anything new, maybe if I just never use the water heater again . . . as a spark flashes from the outlet. ******. Just texted Grant and Jasmin to see if they are willing to advise me. Bleeeeh.

Isn’t making noise now.

How long do I have left? For goodness’ sake. Less than ten months – in ten months it will be the end of November. Still a pregnancy’s worth of time. I should write my blog, tomorrow it will have been three weeks. Can think of nothing interesting to say. Maybe if I write it tomorrow, I’ll post it then?. . . . I will risk a fire starting while I’m away to go to the bathroom . . . No fire started.”

There, you see? You see how boring my life is? I’m not going to lie – there are many days like this in Peace Corps. If you’re considering doing Peace Corps, then you might as well know. But we get through them, and having a journal to vent in helps. And I got advice about the electrical problem from my uncle – I think it will be ok . . .

Thank you so much to Karin for the lovely Christmas card, and thank you to the wonderful, talented Gigi, who sent me a fabulous package which included hand-made original Gigi-stationery, which is so pretty I’m afraid to touch it. Seriously.

That’s it. Keep in touch!!!

Love, Virginia

Christmastime for Virginia in Germany

2008-01-05T07:05:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season . . .

. . . I got to go to Germany for mine!

I’ve always associated Christmas with Germany: a lot of my family’s Christmas decorations are German; the Germans wrote “O Tannenbaum”; it’s snowy and pretty there, etc. I’ve always wanted to see Germany at Christmastime, and to pick up some pretty Christmas decorations for myself, and I decided that living in Eastern Europe was the perfect excuse to go! My friend Mary from home agreed to meet me there, to stay in Heidelberg for a week.

Traveling there, I only experienced one crisis – in the Zurich airport, searching for my connecting flight. I followed the crowd to the security gate for Terminal B, even though my flight wasn’t on the screen, thinking (perhaps with a Ukrainian mentality) that it would appear on the screen at the last minute, so I might as well go now. I couldn’t see a screen for any another terminal, so I assumed I was with everyone else. The wait to go through the metal detector was very long, and I didn’t realize I was in the wrong place until my flight was boarding. Turns out, I was supposed to divine the presence of another screen, down the hall in the other direction, where my flight’s information waited for me. It was the first time I’ve ever had to run through an airport to catch a flight, but I made it (even though I had to go through security again) . . .

When I got to Frankfurt, I felt like I had pressed the magic Easy Button from Staples (or Office Depot, or wherever). Everything made sense. I didn’t even have to leave the airport to get a train – they were downstairs. After Kyiv, where it took Clara and me the better part of a day just to drop our bags off at our hotel, Western Europe seemed pretty nice. I had another moment of mild panic when I missed my connecting train to Heidelberg, only to be told that it didn’t matter – I could just get on the next one, with the same ticket. No problem.

It helped that most people spoke English – because I hardly speak a word of German. Here’s evidence of how clueless I am: when I thought I was approaching the “Neckar,” my hotel, I was disappointed to see a sign for “Eingang Hotel” instead. It turns out “eingang” means “lobby.”

The next day, I caught a train to Stuttgart, to go to the Christmas market there. This is where my ignorance of German, and complete lack of any sense of direction, caught up with me. It may be the most lost I’ve ever gotten myself . . . and it was bad enough that I’ve sworn never to trust myself with directions again, ever, and to take taxis whenever I’m not one hundred percent sure where I’m going, always, and I ask you all to help hold me to that promise in the future . . .

Once I had found my way out of the train station (harder than you might think), I didn’t know how to find the Christmas market. I asked a taxi driver, and he wouldn’t drive me – he said it was just a five minute walk “that way.” At least, that’s what I think he said. Yes, I was attempting to understand German: mistake number one. I understood “funf minut,” but I must have missed something crucial, afterwards. I was supposed to meet Mary at the station later in the day, so I thought it would be smart to figure out how to walk to the market and back. He pointed, and I followed, and soon realized that there was no obvious path to walk on, that would take me in the direction I wanted to go. There was only a tunnel, for cars. There was a sidewalk for pedestrians inside the tunnel, so I decided to go ahead and take that. Mistake number two. Walking through the dark tunnel, with cars speeding by, I was starting to get nervous, but there were reassuring green signs every couple yards that told me how many meters were left to walk. At least, that’s what I thought they were telling me. Turns out they were counting down the 300 meters to a door, where another set of signs began. I didn’t want to be in the dark tunnel anymore, so I chose the door. Mistake number three. I saw something about an alarm written on a sign, but I took a chance, and no alarm went off. However, the door did not open onto daylight, as I had hoped.

It opened to a dark stairwell with a large green light flashing above yet another door. I decided to go for it, and ran for the door, hoping not to set off the alarm. On the other side of that door, was a white cement tunnel, lit by fluorescent lights, with a dead-end to my left and no visible end to my right. It was then that I started to feel like a victim in a horror movie, or suspense thriller. Yelling “No!” didn’t help any more than it does in the movies, so I turned right and started walking quickly, with rising panic. Thankfully, there were more little green signs telling me how far I had to walk – without those signs I really might have lost it. I finally reached the end, and daylight, but I was pretty traumatized.

It didn’t get worse after that, but it didn’t get much better. It seemed like I was approaching the old part of town, because of how pretty and traditional the buildings looked. Trusting appearances (or my ability to judge them): mistake number four. When I realized that I had gone way more than five minutes in the wrong direction, there were no taxis, so I kept walking. It was pretty deserted, most of the shops were closed, and I walked for about an hour. Finally someone helped me to a bus stop where I caught a bus right back to where I had started. I went back to the line of taxis and asked again for the Christmas market. When the taxi driver started to point in the direction I should go, I refused, and sat down in the backseat, planning to tell Mary to just catch a cab when she came.

My day improved after that! I had some glühwein right away, and started looking around the market. There was an ice skating rink, and some rides for kids, and many many stands, stretching through the center. Each stand had a tent with a display on the top: a big nativity scene, or Santa in his sled, or angels, etc. There were organ grinders, and people playing Christmas carols on trumpets and flutes. There was also a lot of food: crepes with nutella; waffles with everything; sausages; various kinds of “wurst”; gingerbread; candy and caramel apples; nuts; etc. etc. It was pretty great. I shopped for ornaments all day, going up and down the stands to see where the prettiest things were. I realized that not just some of my family’s Christmas decorations come from Germany . . . but almost all. Everything I saw there I recognized, which was nice, and made me less inclined to buy absolutely everything in sight – not only do I have it at home, but I have first-hand experience in how tiring it can be to glue the little man back onto the rocking horse for the millionth time, so I decided I only needed so many little wooden ornaments.

By mid-afternoon, I hadn’t heard from Mary and her supposedly international phone, so I decided to return to the train station. This time, a man showed me how to take the metro – literally one stop away. Sigh. It took me a little longer to find the central part of the train station – I swear, I don’t know why Stuttgart confused me so much – but I did, and got a ticket back to Heidelberg. I was wasting time before catching my train, when my phone rang (programmed to “Good King Wenceslaus” . . . yes, I win at Christmas spirit). It was Mary’s step-dad, calling to tell me that she was at The Body Shop in the station! Her plane was delayed and her phone hadn’t worked, so she called my sister to tell her where she was, accidentally calling collect and subsequently identifying herself as “Dammit, dammit, not collect.” I found her, we got another ticket, and we were on our way!

The next day we went to the Christmas market in Nuremburg! It was very nice, and the selection was even better than Stuttgart’s. Mev got to experience the fabulous market food, and I took off on a mission to find a nativity set. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with nativity sets, and ours at home is German, so I thought I’d get one of my own. I finally found a stand with beautiful sets, and in a corner I found one as pretty as the one we have, hand-carved, etc. Turns out – nice sets like that now cost over 1,000 euros!!! It took me a second to snap out of my Ukrainian mindset where 1,000 isn’t all that much ($1 = 5 UAH, one euro is a little more), but I came to my senses. Later, I found out that my grandparents bought ours in East Germany – before the wall fell. Yeah, not going to find that price again. However, with five minutes to go before the market closed at 2, I did buy a nice, simpler set, substantially cheaper – the figures are hand-carved, but not painted, just blonde wood.

That day was Christmas Eve, and I was worried about finding a place to eat when we got back to Heidelberg. We wanted to go to the old town, so we could find the candlelit Jesuit service a friend of Mary’s told her about. For some reason, I led the way, and we crossed the bridge into what we thought was old town. I know, I hadn’t quite learned my lesson. However, this time, even though we weren’t where we wanted to be, it worked out in our favor! We walked by a very nice restaurant, poked our heads in, and there was one table left for two people! Afterwards we found a church having a candlelit service, though not the one we were looking for, and we sat in the back and sang “Stille Nacht.” When it was over, someone told us we were on the wrong side of the river, and we found a taxi back . . .

We got to see two more services, including one in the Jesuit church. German churches are beautiful at Christmas: they have enormous Christmas trees in the front, by the altar, usually decorated just with white lights and hand-made straw ornaments. There were simple Christmas trees like that everywhere: in squares, restaurants, everywhere you looked. (There was even an advent wreath in the Hard Rock Café.) I loved it, but, as I told Mary, I didn’t really feel surprised at how many decorations there were, because my holiday-obsessed brain registered it as the way things ought to be.

On Christmas Day, I was nervous again that nothing would be open. Again, I was wrong! There were cafes open, and in Karlsplatz there was a little ice skating rink, with stands selling hot chocolate, crepes, etc.! We went skating and I found out how bad I am at skating in “ice hockey skates.” Afterwards, we decided to walk up Philosofenwegen, a path that crisscrosses up a steep hill across the river from the old town, at the top of which is a beautiful view of Heidelberg. It was a fairly difficult hike, at least for us, but it was fun to see everything from up high.

The next day we stayed in Heidelberg to see the castle, which you must ride a funicular to get to. It was snowing, and very pretty, though there’s not much left of the castle. The castle boasts a massive wine barrel – as in, it takes up a very large, two-story room built specifically to house it. We also found the footprint outside that Mary’s friend told her to look for – legend has it that a knight leapt from a high window to save a princess when the building was on fire, and the stone was so hot that his foot left a dent. We then took the funicular to the top of the mountain, where we hiked around more, and had a pretty view of Heidelberg in the snow.

The day after that, we took a train to Cologne, or Köln, to see the pretty cathedral. It was indeed very pretty, and difficult to fit into one shot when taking a picture. We saw the Rheine, and discovered that there was a chocolate museum nearby, which, of course, we went to. It was sort of like the tours I took of the Guinness and Jameson factories while studying in Ireland – lots of detailed explanation of how the product is made, all of which went over my head, and a free sample at the end. Still not clear on whether cocoa beans are fermented or not, and why.

Funny note on “German English”: I thought I had left the land of strange translations, but there are some to be found in Germany as well. Trains instruct you to “alight in the direction of travel."

Our last day in Germany, we traveled all the way down near the Swiss border to Neuschwanstein, or, the “Disney castle.” It’s the castle that the Disney castle is based on! Whee!! It’s beautiful, especially when everything’s covered in snow. Neuschwanstein (which I slowly learned to pronounce “noi-shvan-shtine,” with Mary’s help) means New Swan Stone, and was built by Ludwig Something, a few meters away from his parents’ castle, Hohenschwangau, overlooking Swan Lake. We got a package tour of both castles, which were very interesting. The castles were used recently enough to have plumbing and heating systems, albeit primitive ones (though I’m certainly not in any position to judge, right now). It took Ludwig seventeen years to finish Neuschwanstein, and he lived in it only a few months before mysteriously drowning. It was open to the public as a museum within a year.

So, that was my last day in Germany! Very early the next morning, I shouldered my souvenirs and started the all-day trip back to Bratslav, where I arrived around 9:30 that night. It was a wonderful, wonderful trip, fulfilling a life-long dream to see Germany at Christmastime, and it was especially great to see Mary! So thank you to Mary for coming, and thank you to my family for helping to send me there!!

I’ve been taking it easy here in Ukraine, where the holiday season has just begun. On the day before New Year’s Eve, my baba Nina took me to the square in Bratslav to see the New Year’s shindig there. There was a tree, and what appeared to be traveling entertainers who performed various songs, and played games with the kids. They had dance contests, etc., and Did Moroz (Father Frost) and his granddaughter passed out prizes. And what would a New Year’s celebration be without a celebrity cross-dresser impersonator? Vira Seduchka is a popular singer, and one of the 10 Ukrainian celebrities that you see on TV for every single thing that ever happens. He/she also did well in this year’s Eurovision contest, I hear. Anyhow, the impersonator pranced and sang, and shrieked “Bratslav! Ah!!” every five seconds, to everyone’s delight (men dressed as women is big humor here).

For New Year’s Eve, I was wined and dined at three different houses, which ended up being way too much food, but I made it through. When I went to drop off a gift with my old neighbors, they insisted I stay for vodka and dinner, after which I came home to holubtsi (cabbage rolls) with Nina. At 10:30, my coordinator, Lyudmila, and her husband and daughter, Yana, came to pick me up for the party at their house. There was a large spread of food, as well as wine and champagne, and I quickly began to feel so full I could barely move. The TV was on, showcasing the aforementioned 10 celebrities and various others, who performed songs and skits to celebrate New Year’s. The strangest part was when a man and woman sang Gershwin’s “Summertime” . . . except not. The man, a large guy with white hair in a pony-tail, walked on stage and sang “Summertiiiime . . . I’m a super-heroooo,” and was then joined by a tiny, glittery woman who sang that she was “a beautiful lady.” They would occasionally get close to the original lyrics – “So hush, little baby” – but then go back to singing bizarre nonsense – “And come kiss me now!” Very, very strange. Lyudmila decided that we should go to a café for ice cream, at 3:30 in the morning, but I convinced her that I really was full, and managed to make it home without exploding.

That’s about it! Thank you very much to Kristen, Aunt Archer, Dan S., Aunt Mary, Rebecca B. and Mrs. Keeley for their wonderful Christmas cards! They’re decorating my desk now. Thanks again to my family for the wonderful Christmas trip, and to my travel-buddy Mary. She pointed out that every time she’s come to visit me somewhere, it’s been freezing cold. She’s right. So, if anyone wants to invite us someplace really warm, it would be appreciated . . .

Happy 2008 to everyone, and keep in touch!!

Love, Virginia

Snow and Ice; or, “Virginia Robertivna, the devil is coming!”

2007-12-21T03:48:00.000-05:00

Hello again. The Peace Corps gospel about the second year going faster than the first must be true – I communicate with the outside world much less than I did before (when I wrote mountains of letters home regularly) – and I barely notice . . . but then I remember, and feel guilty. Sorry! I also feel like I have fewer interesting things to say – the things that used to seem like something to write home about now seem normal to me.

In my last real entry, I even forgot to say that I went to a wedding (vice-principal’s daughter) – it just didn’t come up in my mind when I was trying to think of things that had happened recently. In any case, I did go – I brought an odd number of flowers (even is for funerals) that weren’t yellow (yellow is for death or saying goodbye) and some money (also a traditional wedding gift). I was nervous about the yellow tones on the backs of the rose petals . . . but I was assured they weren’t too yellow. I and the other teachers who came to the reception waited for about an hour and a half for the couple to return from taking pictures, and then we ate a lot of food. Besides the general things about Ukrainian weddings that get on my nerves (you see brides every Saturday in every city, so you have plenty of opportunities to critique the wedding gown styles . . . and to get tired of the dove-releasing routine), it was cute. They played a game where the bride and groom stood back to back with two flowers each – one color representing the bride and one the groom. Then they were asked questions about who would be in charge of various things in their future life – cleaning, raising children, cooking, etc. It was funny to see the differences in their answers, or when they agreed. The groom was willing to help with a lot of traditionally female jobs, and lots of times they raised both flowers – but not when they were asked who would get to count the money they got that night. Speaking of money, the guests raised more with the game of stealing one of the bride’s stiletto shoes and holding it for ransom. I left with my coordinator and her husband before the all-night dancing in the freezing cold outside the café began . . .

To finish off the semester, I gave my 6th through 11th graders a writing assignment. Some of them even did it! In their defense – writing papers just doesn’t seem to be part of the routine in schools here, if by “writing” you don’t mean “copying a text from some book.” I tried to make it difficult to plagiarize by writing lots of different questions that focused on what they thought or felt about certain things (mundane things, don’t worry, I didn’t get political). But of course, as I discovered with a few of the papers, where there’s a will, there’s a way. My questions ranged from “Do you think it’s important for someone to decide what they want to be early in life?” to “If you could have a super-power, what would it be and why?” After introducing the idea of an opinion paper and, for the older students, a thesis (and where to put it), I crumpled up slips of paper with the questions written on them and let each student pick one. Even the kids who don’t understand a word of English were excited about that part (though I’m sure the discovery that the paper just held more unintelligible words did something to dampen that enthusiasm). Everyone was looking at each other’s – though I made sure to go over the question, Why did I give you different papers? They knew the answer – they know I don’t like the days when I see the same homework answer in everyone’s copy book – but that doesn’t mean they all care.

I also tried to introduce the idea of a first draft and a final draft. It seems I mostly got either one or the other, but not both. For me, it’s enough to have just introduced the idea – next time (and there will be a next time) it will be easier, hopefully. After my semi-successful attempts to collect the first draft, I sort of let the idea of a due date go for this time. However, a few dedicated students didn’t forget – and even without begging, I will occasionally look down at my desk and find a paper about someone’s favorite movie or opinion on whether pets should be kept outside. They often label their “thesis” statement (or, for the 6th graders, “theziz”), but it can show up at any given point on the page, top, bottom, middle, or back. Overall, I got about 4 or 5 per class (out of 20something). The ones I got mostly turned out to be great! An 11th grader who never speaks in class wrote that she’d like to be telepathic (fitting, now that I think of it); a 10th grader would like to change the way young children are taught English, and to incorporate more games and pictures into their classes; a 9th grader likes “The Last of the Mohicans” and wanted to be an Indian when he was little, etc. etc. Only one, that I could tell, was straight from a textbook, and there were only two instances of multiple people (two or three) turning in the same thing. So, I hope to build on that next spring!

As I wrote before, I showed “A Christmas Story” to our big city English club. I forgot how wordy the narration is – how they sort of play off the simplicity of the story by making the narration dramatic and full of five-dollar words – but they seemed to get the gist fine. None had heard of Little Orphan Annie before, or “hip shots,” etc., but nothing crucial was missed. I showed it later that week at my school, and I’m sure that much more of the dialogue went over their heads – but there’s so much visual humor (the tongue on the telephone pole, the lamp) that they were all laughing anyway (and looking back at me to make sure I was laughing too). So, thank you to Kimmy for sending it to me!

In the past few weeks, the snow has really arrived. It was pretty, and then people walked on it and it froze, so now it’s just sort of treacherous. However, I have my Yax Trax grips for my boots, so I’m not afraid. Last year I only really needed them for two days (and only had them ready for one), but this year I’m erring on the side of caution. Plus, it’s nice to keep my trek to school only a half-hour long. Also, after finally deciding that I could not live at the temperatures my baba housemate, Nina, does, I have broken out my PC space heater. I think I waited so long because I was scared of having to make a Plan B – what if this dinky little heater wasn’t enough for my high-ceilinged room, or only heated a four-inch radius around itself? But it’s great! At medium setting, it makes things comfortable enough that I no longer live in my fleece jacket, or overtly dread emerging from the covers in the morning.

You may be wondering about the title for this entry – well, the other day, as I walked out of school, one of my 6th graders said the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me in Ukrainian: “Virginia Robertivna, the devil is coming!” When you hear that, you really can’t ignore it, so I looked around the corner and saw that one of the 11th graders had a crazy Halloween-style demon mask on. Not earth-shaking, but worth it for the quote.

My younger students continue to be wonderful and enthusiastic, my older students (9th through 11th) not so much. I’m working on it. The 5th graders are addicted to hangman, and almost all of them have asked to have my phone number. Occasionally one will come by the classroom and give me candy or a little gift, very cute. With my 8th graders, for the last couple of weeks, I taught O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” which I read in 8th grade (albeit much faster)! They understood it very well, and were appropriately giddy when they realized what had happened at the end. Did any of you ever see the SNL parody, with the Trumps? So funny. Donald sold a yacht to buy Ivana a gold-encrusted door for a mansion . . . but she sold the mansion to buy him an anchor for the yacht . . . and then they realize they can just buy more stuff.
My plan for the 8th grade was interrupted by a scheduled “open lesson” – the circus-like affair when teachers and administrators visit your class, and the students show off. They prepared for days with my coordinator, memorizing questions and answers, routines for activities and “games” (is it a game if you know how it’s going to end before you play??), etc. etc. etc. The theme was authors’ lives, so they all claimed to be devoted to Rudyard Kipling or Alan Marshall (whom they have admitted to me that they never heard of outside of their textbook, and neither have I), and have mock conversations in which they frenetically rattle off dates and facts about the authors’ lives and upbringing, in the presence of visitors who don’t understand a word they’re saying. I was allowed ten minutes to show off, myself (though I didn’t rehearse with them beforehand), so I taught about O. Henry’s life: how he was accused of embezzlement, ran to Honduras, returned because of his ailing wife and subsequently served five years in prison, where he worked at the pharmacy! Who knew?! (Wikipedia knew.) So that was a little something different for them . . .

My last fun story about school is the English club I did this past Tuesday on “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Six of my hard-core devotees from the 5th and 6th grades attended, and they were a very good audience. I passed out the poem and read it, having the group translate as we went along, with the help of colorful pictures I had drawn. Then, I played an MP3 I have of Art Carney reading the poem to a jazz beat (don’t ask why I have this . . . I have a lot of Christmas music), which they thought was funny, and they read along with him. Then I explained the phenomenon of “a cappella” groups at colleges, and played the Gentlemen of the College singing “Merry Christmas Chopsticks” – the poem, sung to the tune of “Chopsticks,” very funny. I made my coordinator a CD of Christmas music so she can repeat the activity, if she wishes, with the same pictures next year . . .

Speaking of which, I will indeed be home in less than a year, now! This means a couple things. One: you have less than a year left to visit me. Seriously. Ever wanted to see Ukraine . . . with a free translator/guide??? Two: you have less than a year to take advantage of my poetry for news exchange (see previous posts).

And, in the meantime, I’ll be trying to get my act together and figure out some projects I’ve dreamed up. Attention: if you know of a person or organization that might be interested in supporting (monetarily) a Peace Corps grant project in Ukraine involving either public health and education, or the preservation of Jewish heritage and history – please, please let me know. Thank you!!!

Merry merry Christmas, I miss you all and hope that you’re having a wonderful holiday season. I get to see one of you this week, though! Mary E. is meeting me in Germany for my vacation and much needed switch back to the Gregorian calendar (e.g., Christmas on the day it should be). Enjoy yourselves, eat lots, keep in touch and I’ll write again soon!

Love, Virginia

P.S. If you didn't notice, am taking advantage of fast internet in Kyiv to put huge pictures up . . . (the cat is Clara's)

Some Pictures . . .

2007-12-08T03:51:00.000-05:00

I'm currently showing "A Christmas Story" to English club, so I'll use this opportunity to post some pictures for you all . . .

Seminars, and Thanksgiving

2007-12-01T17:13:00.000-05:00

Hello again! Still here. Happy late Thanksgiving, and happy general holidays!

I’ve been so busy that I only just now finished writing about my trip home in my journal (of course, anyone who’s ever seen me try to keep a journal knows that my compulsion to record every detail of everything makes journals sort of a tricky thing with me . . . the answer is to type it, which makes being compulsive less time-consuming) . . . however, I’m officially done with my month of seminars, so hopefully I’ll have time to breathe now.

The first seminar, about human trafficking, went well, as I said. The next day, I went up to my big city English club to talk about Saturday Night Live. I think it’s an interesting part of American culture . . . but most people outside of America aren’t aware of it, even if they’ve seen dozens of movies starring SNL alums and based on SNL skits. Luckily, I have several “Best of” SNL DVDs, and had a variety of skits to show. I started with two old ones – Gilda Radner opening the show by answering “audience questions” off the top of her head, very cute, and later, dancing dramatically but awkwardly with equally clumsy Steve Martin, parodying Fred and Ginger. I also had Christopher Walken singing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” but only singing “pot-ay-to” and “tom-ay-to” instead of alternating, which they thought was funny (several club members are convinced he is British, despite my efforts to claim him for our own. I know he talks weird, but come on). Also had “The Continental” (ironically, a parody of Eastern Europeans), and Chris Farley’s awkward interviews with Jeff Daniels, Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney on The Chris Farley Show. (“Remember . . . when you were in the Beatles?”)

That weekend I attended a birthday party for my former neighbors’ grandson. I brought the grandkids toys from America, and everyone’s very enamored with the interactive baby doll I was asked to get for the grand-daughter – she cries when you lay her down, but then when you give her a pacifier, she sleeps. One of the guests, a teacher at my school, said we should give them to the 11th graders for practice. (Which made me wonder . . . did anyone ever really have to take care of an egg to learn responsibility, like Sam did on “Clarissa Explains It All” . . . or was that only high schoolers on TV?)

The next week I taught HIV/AIDS lessons after school in preparation for our seminar that Friday. They went really well! I’m thankful that I never spoke Ukrainian in class before this, if only because the announcement that I would teach these classes in Ukrainian was enough to attract lots of students. Students who never spoke much to me before were full of questions – I guess they only just realized that I could answer them in Ukrainian. I was going to have a girl from the local Technical college translate, but she could only come once for part of one lesson, so I was on my own. However, the students were patient and forgiving of my Ukrainian, and we got along fine. The first day, we talked about biology, and I explained, with ridiculous drawings of B-cells and T4-cells, how HIV works (ridiculous because science has always been my worst subject . . . oh well, they got the point). The next day, it was just 11th graders for “Transmission and Prevention,” and even though they never speak much in English class, they were all ears for what was essentially a sex-ed class. Ha. All week, the students were wonderful – participating in the activities, playing the games, listening to me and even occasionally writing things down. On Wednesday, we did “Stigma and Discrimination,” and on Thursday, I gave them testimonies written by Ukrainians living with HIV, and they made posters telling the stories.

The only crises for the seminar that week were finding a room with curtains to show the film (yes, I’ve been planning this for four months . . . but it turns out things are never fully arranged until they’re fully arranged, I guess), and the fact that I had to point the projector at the wall from an angle (where I had it plugged in), so the all-text movie (“Svetlana’s Life”) was slightly hard for them to read. Anyway, I succeeded in delivering another mini-speech in Ukrainian (which the girls who went to Camp Heal with me translated from English), a local doctor spoke, and we watched the movie. Everything went well, and the next week my coordinator told me that the kids asked for me to do more AIDS lessons in December! We agreed to hold off until the spring, but it was nice that they enjoyed it so much; they do AIDS Day (Dec. 1st) every year, but many said that they hadn’t understood much of what it was about until now.

That Saturday, I got to meet some newbies!! Yes, Vinnytska oblast is due to receive four new Volunteers in December. Clara and I were very excited, and went to meet the two who will be nearest to us – only twenty minutes each in either direction from me! They were both very nice, and it turns out that one, Matt, also lives a short drive away from me in Virginia. And, on top of that, my neighbor was his high school history teacher. More proof that I know everyone in Peace Corps (also referred to as “Six Degrees of Virginia”).

The next week, as you may know, was Thanksgiving. I headed to Vinnytsia on Wednesday, armed with my cookbook and a can of pumpkin from America! I had big plans, and we managed just about everything. Rather than search for a turkey that might have required any number of things (plucking? who knows), our hostess, Lee, made her famous chicken marsala, and I did my best to fill the table with traditional sides. Clara made apple pie and I made pumpkin pie (first time for me – crazy crust process), stuffing, and glazed carrots (with cinnamon, nutmeg, honey, etc.) We also had mashed potatoes and corn, and for appetizers, Clara made tortilla chips (made them!) and bean dip to go with the salsa I canned last summer. Overall, way too much food, but very, very good. It was just the girls of the oblast, and we even felt festive enough to put on my Christmas music playlist (well, for a while . . . the whole thing is nine and a half hours long).

Friday, I traveled back to Bratslav with Clara and Larissa #2 (another Larissa who works with Lee and was willing to help with my trafficking seminar). This time I made sure we were early, since two weeks before, Larissa #1 and I had to run halfway across town with a laptop, projector and speakers in order to make it in time. However, this meant that people had time to wine and dine us: Nina fed us leftovers from her birthday (on Thanksgiving, so I missed it), and what good are leftovers without wine (seriously), and on top of that, we were served tea and cookies when we got to School #1. When we were finally allowed to begin, we had a few false starts (mostly due to well-meaning helpers accidentally flipping the switch that controlled the room’s electricity . . . twice), but after that, things went well. I made it through another spiel in Ukrainian, and everyone paid attention to the movie and to Larissa’s talk afterwards (25 to 30 students and teachers came).

After that, we jet-setted back to Vinnytsia (to the extent that one can on an hour and fifteen minute-long bus ride), to enjoy T-Day leftovers, and English club. For that meeting, we discussed discrimination, which was interesting, to say the least. It’s a country without much (readily apparent) diversity, so what generally comes to people’s minds when someone says “discrimination” appears to be the divide between Ukrainian and Russian speakers. People were slightly less enthusiastic about discussing other divides in society . . . but it was interesting . . .

This past week I taught more AIDS lessons, at the local orphanage. About forty students (from grades 8 through 11, as was the case for all the seminars) showed up for each lesson, so it was pretty crazy, but despite having to raise my voice a little to be heard, it all went well! The English teacher helped translate a little (the kids had less English than my students had for me to work with), and we made it through fine. Like my students, they were delighted to hear me ramble on in Ukrainian. In the middle of my “Transmission” lesson, one boy blurted out “Where did she learn to talk like that?!?” I think it was a success: during the first lesson, when I asked what we could do about the epidemic, one student suggested we isolate people who have HIV/AIDS . . . by the third lesson, we had moved on to the point where they understood that it’s not dangerous to be near people with AIDS, etc., and they advocated understanding and education instead of quarantining. On Thursday, I showed them the first half-hour of “A Closer Walk,” including the segment on the spread of HIV in Ukraine. Unfortunately, the projector would only show the first line of the Russian subtitles, so whenever the subtitles went over one line, they were in the dark as to what was being said. They tried to fix it, but then watched patiently despite it, which I appreciated. I’ve seen the movie a couple of times, and watched the subtitles to make sure they didn’t miss anything major, and I don’t think they did; I left the movie there, in any case, so they can give it another try. It was really great to finally do a project at the orphanage, the kids were wonderful and really enthusiastic, and I hope to do another project there soon.

After that last seminar, I went up to Kyiv for a day with three others from my oblast – to get flu shots, etc., and do some Christmas shopping. I saw the new PC office for the first time, and climbed the winding street where the Andrivsky market is held every day (despite the cold and snow) to get lots of pretty souvenirs to send home.

So – I hope everything’s going well at home! Now that I’m done with these seminars, I swear I’ll get to writing letters again. Enjoy what I bitterly assume is comparatively warm weather (for most of you), and keep in touch!!

Love, Virginia

Back from Murka

2007-11-10T03:27:00.000-05:00

Well, I’m back in Ukraine, and things are going full-speed again. It’s strange how my life is moving faster in a village of 3,000 than it did at home . . . but then, I purposefully made my trip low-key . . .

My trip home was very, very good. Turns out – America is really nice! Who knew. As I wrote to one of my former clustermates: in a year, all that will be ours. I told my mom that it was probably better than most two-week periods I’d had there before . . . it was nice to do a “greatest hits” trip. But I’ll discuss that a little more later – first, I want to write about a few things that, in my pre-trip frenzy, I forgot to mention earlier.

As I’ve said, I now live in a house, with a “baba” (or grandma) named Nina, who’s very nice. I didn’t think that I would really enjoy living with someone, but everything’s going well! We get along great, and I get to practice Ukrainian now that I’m not just talking to myself anymore (though I still do that, too). One small problem, though, was that she doesn’t have a kitchen sink, so it took me a while to figure out where to wash my dishes; I didn’t want to let her do them, and I didn’t want to wash them outside like she does (in the “summer kitchen”). I decided to wash them in the bathtub – and strangely enough, I felt relieved to be washing dishes again. That’s how domestic I’ve become.

The day after I moved in, I went to the big city for our English club, where we talked about haikus. Brittany taught our members how to write a haiku, and offered a few examples. My favorite was from a Facebook group she found on the subject: “Haikus are easy / But sometimes they don’t make sense / Refrigerator.”

A little while later, while shilling for my seminars, I was invited to visit an English class at the local technical college, where I hadn’t really spent much time before. I was thinking recently about how my students would fit in really well in 1980s America: the girls especially, with their layered, brightly colored tops that fall off the shoulder, and big, sequined scrunchies in their hair. At the Technicum, however, I felt like I’d walked into a 70s movie, set on a college campus. I can’t quite put my finger on the reason, but the girls have teased hair, and both girls and boys wear tight-ish jeans and jean jackets. It just seems right. They asked me questions about America and my likes and dislikes, how we celebrate “the Halloween,” and whether I listen to Ukrainian music (I don’t – I just can’t take that much Ukrainian, I need a break).

Afterwards, the English teachers (including my friend Ira, who recently got a job there) served me tea, and one of them excitedly explained that she frequently prints out English poems from the internet. However, when she showed me her binder full of poetry, I realized they were all song lyrics. Carole King, Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, etc. I broke the news to her gently. I happen to have several of the songs on my computer, so I was inspired to make a CD for the English teachers in my town. I picked twelve songs that I thought were appropriate, and which had lyrics that were easy to hear, and then typed out the words for them. I included Carole King and Billy Joel, but also Ben Harper, Frank Sinatra, ABBA and even some Appalachian music. I did not include the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” since people here already have an unhealthy obsession with that song. To top off the “leaving on a good note” packages, I also baked chocolate chip cookies for them. Nina had never seen chocolate chip cookies before (not surprisingly), so it was fun to show her why they need to be spaced out – since they go outwards, not upwards – and to give her a sample.

I taught a couple of interesting lessons before I left. I don’t have the 8th graders’ book, so I borrow one at the beginning of each lesson and teach off the cuff. (Wish I could say I had recently planned for my other classes’ lessons . . . that’s just the only class I have an excuse for.) They had been reading texts about celebrating Victory Day – singing the national anthem, etc. – but had run out of texts for the quarter, so I decided to teach them the American national anthem. I didn’t sing it, but I wrote out the lyrics on the board and explained the story behind it . . .

The second interesting lesson was for the 10th grade. They were reading about how Ukraine joined the European Council, and how one of the conditions for joining was establishing legal protection of minority rights (the text assured us that Ukraine is very progressive in that area, and has perfect, free elections to boot). I was explaining what a minority and majority are, and trying to get the students to name some minority groups in Ukraine. They understood that immigrants, like Georgians and Belarussians, are in the minority, but were having more trouble with my questions about religious groups. I explained that while Orthodox Christianity is the majority here, it’s a minority in America. I asked about other minority religions, and they were stumped; so, thinking I was making things easy for them, I drew the Star of David. No response, and even when I said “Judaism” in Ukrainian they were lost. They said that they had heard the word, but didn’t know what it meant. I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, but they definitely didn’t know much (they got the basic questions totally wrong, like: Do they believe in Jesus Christ? Go to church on Sundays?). I was sort of taken aback, and so the next lesson I taught them was an overview of Judaism: the history, famous Jews, etc. The only names they recognized were Einstein and Steven Spielberg, though one girl knew Adam Sandler (whose “Hanukkah” song was running through my head – but most of the really well known people he mentions in the song are people he proudly explains are not Jewish, such as O.J. Simpson). It was a pretty good lesson, and I’ll probably revisit the topic in the future . . .

One more story that I forgot to mention before: I went to a Ukrainian sauna! There was a sauna at the hotel we stayed in for our yoga weekend, so a group of us went. It was my first time in a sauna, and I really enjoyed it! Several people had been with their host families, so they knew the routine: you lay in the unbelievably, inconceivably hot room until you can’t stand it anymore; then someone (in our case, fellow Volunteer Simone, who had been trained by her community for just such an occasion) swats you with a leafy broom, to exfoliate; and then you jump into freezing cold water. It may sound crazy, but it’s great! We had a nice sauna with a little pool; some Ukrainians go to saunas in the summer and just jump in a nearby river. Ukrainians will spend the whole day there, taking breaks to eat and drink (vodka). I think it’s very fun, and hope to go again.

Post-Murka, I’ve been slowly getting back into the swing of things. Jet lag coming to this country is like nothing I’ve ever had before – I don’t know why it gets me so badly. I finally made it back, after traveling for hours on a plane, a van, a train and a bus, and went right to sleep even though it was around 8 o’clock. I slept for a while, and thought I was going to be fine, but then couldn’t sleep for more than three hours the next night. Bleh.

I think the people who were most excited to see me again were my groupie 5th graders, who continue to be adorable and very good students. They literally huddle around me before class begins, asking me questions, or just standing there smiling at me. Very funny. Thursday, they invited me to their Fall celebration, so I stayed late at school to watch. It turned out to be a “Miss Fall” competition, with contestants from the 5th grade, both halves of the 6th, and from the 7th and 8th. The girls wore fancy dresses (one decorated with fall leaves), and competed in several areas. They recited poetry, made artwork using leaves, sang songs, and danced. It was pretty impressive, and their classmates sometimes helped, singing back-up or joining in the dance routine. They all did really well, and the 7th grade girl won by a hair.

Yesterday, I finally had my first seminar. Everything went well! It was at the technical college, and focused on human trafficking. I gave a little speech in Ukrainian, which one of my girls had translated for me (and which I practiced for Nina the night before), and I managed to pronounce everything. Afterwards, we showed a movie, produced by the International Organization for Migration, about human trafficking in Ukraine, and my new Ukrainian contact Larissa (Lee’s coordinator) spoke. There were forty students (though some left early for a school celebration, which was inexplicably changed from 4 to 3:30), and they all paid attention and behaved. So, one down, and three to go!

I’m glad to be continuing in my various projects here in Ukraine, but it was nice to visit home. My dogs remembered me immediately, although a few other people had trouble recognizing me (aren’t you supposed to be in Eastern Europe?). I made a list of things to do while I was there, and did just about everything! I shopped at Target, sat on the couch and watched “10 Years Younger” (while drinking Diet Coke with Splenda), and ate ethnic food of every type. I went to a movie in a movie theater, ordered pizza, and saw family and friends from all over. I carved a pumpkin, and passed out candy to trick-or-treaters. My only real culture shock seemed to be my inability to keep my shoes on inside of a house – my feet felt heavy, it was bizarre. I had a wonderful visit; rest assured, no matter how much of a wild and crazy time I’m having here, I still like America, and will be coming back when this is all over. Thank you to everyone who came to visit me, even just to drive somewhere and catch up (cousin!) . . . my friends here listen to me talk about you all the time, and now they’ll have updated information.

So, keep in touch, and I’ll do the same. Hope everything’s going well, and I’ll write again soon!

Love, Virginia

P.S. Two days after I got back, it started snowing

P.P.S. I was a Ukrainian for Halloween: rhinestone bedecked jeans, a shirt that says "High Society School for Privileged Girls" in Gothic letters with more rhinestones, and ridiculous, sequined, red and gold stilettos.

Happy Anniversary To Me

2007-10-13T03:44:00.000-04:00

Hello again! It’s been a long time . . . as I said in a previous post, my life has recently begun moving in fast forward, so I’m sorry that I can’t seem to sit still long enough to write a blog entry. I will attempt to remember any interesting things that have happened to me in the last few weeks . . .

For a week or so in September, I felt like all I was doing was sitting in my apartment waiting to move – waiting for someone to come take the bookcase or wardrobe away, or the desk or kitchen table, and then leave me with an increasingly empty apartment. I refused to clean since I was leaving so soon, and as the furniture I borrowed last spring slowly disappeared, I was more and more aware of the dust bunnies. Dust in Ukraine is no joke. (Which is why I can’t understand why people hang Oriental rugs on the walls, here. You’re just moving the dust-absorbing mass closer to your lungs.) I took a break from that excitement to go to Vinnytsia to advise fellow Volunteer Lee on a SPA grant, which was very fun. I got to eat a gourmet meal she made for me and the two women she works with, who are great, and I got to play with her cat! I did a lot of typing while they were figuring out the details of their project, and had quite a scare when something I did (which would have been innocuous on any other computer but an evil Mac) made the document disappear. For several hours I had been typing the budget and attempting to do math – to see it all disappear was pretty horrifying. Thankfully we found the rescued document, and I managed to put it back into the right format. I know many of you probably like Macs, and think that whatever happened was my fault; however, you are wrong, and we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Hmm, I’m reading through my journal to see what all I’ve been doing recently that’s interesting . . . I’m afraid there’s not a lot. Fast forward, for me, has meant a lot of worrying and planning, packing, unpacking, being anxious, running from school to school to re-check details on my upcoming seminars, and worrying. On the up side, if I make it through Peace Corps (I don’t mean that to sound fatalistic, I’m just saying), I will be living proof that Type-A personalities can survive in an organization that tends to limit its instructions to variations of “be flexible” and “leave your expectations at the door.”

But, things are happening! This might be a good time to mention that I’ve officially been here for over a year. According to Peace Corps gospel, this is the point at which everything begins to make sense. It might be psychosomatic, but I’m beginning to believe it . . . the seminars are falling into place, secondary projects have sprung up where there were none before, my English clubs are multiplying, and even the language is seeming easier. I’m booked just about every day until New Year’s, and my to-do lists are growing as fast or faster than I can get through them.

I may just be feeling easier because of the resolution of two crises that arose at the end of August: the loss of both my apartment and my classroom. I was so preoccupied with finding an apartment that I didn’t really register the second problem until more recently. It turns out that that was the last empty classroom available; now that the 6th grade has split into two classes to accommodate its size, and taken my room, we can no longer divide the classes to teach them individually. I wasn’t sure what to do until my Regional Manager came to visit, to watch me teach, visit my new place, and see how things were going. She confirmed that my co-teaching ten or eleven hours a week was not ok, and the solution was to just give those classes to me!

I am now the main English teacher at our school – I teach 17 hours a week, not counting my English clubs, which leaves my coordinator with fewer than 10. This is not an unheard of situation among TEFL Volunteers at smaller sites (and it is legal, my RM assured us) – in order for me to get (close to) the 18 hours I’m supposed to have, I have to take over. During negotiations, I offered to begin grading, for the first time since I came here. I was wary of the system before: daily grades for each lesson, frantic grade grubbing and mysterious school politics that I wasn’t in a position to understand all made me want to run in the other direction. Lyudmila, my coordinator, was over the moon – it was like she had been holding her breath since I gently declined to grade last spring. She had never nagged me, but she is very happy that I’ve changed my mind. So, now I have my own grading book, and borrowed a system that fellow Volunteer Clara implemented this fall. Having all of your materials gets you 1 point, homework adds 3, participation is 6, and showing creativity (or any real interest) gives you 2 more, making a total of 12 (in accordance with the Ukrainian system). So far it’s going well, and I’m finding that feeling more in charge and responsible actually makes things easier. I’m no longer as worried about making a mistake regarding the national curriculum or something else I’m not familiar with – I figure now I’m in charge whether I screw up or not, so I may as well act confident. And the threat of grades does seem to perk students up . . .

Speaking of students, my 5th graders continue to be stars, and the 6th graders are great as well. That, on its own, is a cheerful fact – but it’s a little depressing to realize that the same question that silences my older students will get an immediate response, or at least a real effort, from the 10 year olds. The younger students adapt to me quickly – they now answer questions off the cuff, instead of just searching the text for the right line to quote. They’re also really enthusiastic, and don’t have the whole adolescent attitude issue. But the other students are improving in their way. I think some of the older kids are a little nonplussed, though, at the way the 5th graders react to me – they’re my groupies. They want to know what I’m doing, what I’m reading about, and what my phone number is. It’s very cute, and it’s about time I was treated like a rock star (the reaction that some, but not all PCVs receive).

The big move finally happened two weeks ago, after several false starts – I would wait at home for the school bus, only to hear that it had been called away to another town. Or it got a flat tire. Or it was somewhere unknown . . . oh well. I ended up moving on that Friday night with the help of my coordinator and her husband, with a car he borrowed from his job. Unfortunately, he only had about ten minutes to help me before he had to go catch a bus to visit their daughter at university, so they arrived at my door and said Ok, what do you really need? My big priority in packing had been fitting everything into something (most of the kitchen went into plastic grocery bags), not grouping things according to their importance, so I was a little panicked. However, we got the most important bags into the car, and then he drove a half block away to my new house. My neighbors ran around helping us carry things, and everything worked out well – I even got to walk back to the mostly empty apartment afterwards and finish the dinner I had been starting when they suddenly showed up.

My housemate, Nina, is incredibly nice, and we get along very well. She’s easy to understand, and has complimented my Ukrainian. She couldn’t believe how many things I had for the kitchen – pots and pans, flour and spices, and that I cooked for myself. This seems logical to me, since I was both sole resident and cook in my apartment, but she still shakes her head when she sees me working in the kitchen and says “hazaika” – which apparently means something like “she does it all.” I’ve insisted on cooking for myself, which she has grudgingly accepted, because I know that if I don’t start out strong, and consistently decline her borshch and potatoes early on in the game, it will be a slippery slope.

She spends a lot of time outside in the outdoor kitchen, making grape juice and, more recently, canning mushrooms (she spent the past few days gathering them in the forest – an annual affair in Ukraine). Outside with her are a cat and some very small, very cute kittens, and a puppy named Sharik, who loves me. Sharik goes nuts whenever he sees me, and it’s really fun to have a puppy. Unfortunately, he has some bare patches without fur that seemed irritated, and we don’t know where they came from, but we teamed up to medicate him. I held him while Nina spread some concoction on the patches; Shari yelped and cried horribly, but loved us again the second we let go. (And he seems better now.)

As I said, I’ve continued shilling for the seminars, re-checking things, finding people to speak, movies to show, and projectors on which to show them. You might wonder what I have to talk about with everyone, going back over and over again, but you’d be surprised. I basically show up and say, “Hey, remember my seminar? Is that still ok?” And they either say “Yeah, sure” or “Hmm, I never told the director about that. Could be a problem.” Then it’s my turn to say, “Ok . . . could we maybe do that . . . now?” It’s a process.

I took a short break to go down to Koblevo, a town near Odessa, for a yoga weekend that yoga enthusiast Lee organized. It was fun to see people, and I’m sure that I’m more mellow now than I would otherwise be – but I’m afraid I’m still lacking a lot in the way of inner calm. Also, I discovered that real yoga is much harder than the “beginner yoga” on my DVD.

So, I’m just getting used to my new place, and beginning to figure out which Vova is which for grading purposes – and I’m about to pick up and go. Just for two weeks, though – I’m taking advantage of the school’s fall break to visit home! I will miss a little school (more than I had thought – apparently “the last week in October” means different things to different people), but it’s for a good cause. I can’t wait to see everyone I will see – and thank you to everyone who’s rearranging crazy schedules to come by! If you can’t make it to where I am, don’t worry. I have a bit more than a year left, and after that (if you’re nice), I’ll come to wherever you are and visit.

Thank you to Archer for the card, and to Mary for the nice, long letter, and if I’m forgetting anyone else in my slightly frantic state then I’m sorry! I am also sorry about not writing many letters recently: during the summer I was never in one place long enough, at the end of the summer I was staring at my apartment walls and couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, and then by the time interesting things started happening again I was too busy to say anything, and also began to think that any letters I started wouldn’t beat me home, so what’s the point. Anyway, that’s my excuse, but I’ll get back on track.

See some of you soon, the rest of you I hope are doing well; stop by if you can when I’m there in a week!

Love, Virginia

My Life Would Be Easier If Next Year Weren't a Leap Year: or, "I Feel Like I'm Taking Crazy Pills"

2007-09-21T08:08:00.001-04:00

Hi everyone, how are you? I’m in the midst of moving again and things are crazy – but I found a good place, although life will be a bit different . . .

When I last wrote, I was in Vinnytsia to “help” with testing for the FLEX Program, which sends high schoolers to study abroad in the U.S. (like my coordinator’s daughter did in Mississippi). There wasn’t really a lot for us Volunteers to do: we essentially watched the kids take forty-five minutes to fill out a half-page form asking things like their name and address. I get the feeling that American kids like me are just far more used to filling out lots and lots of forms. Three of the Volunteers in our oblast are getting ready to COS (close of service – in other words, leave) in November, so I got to hear a lot about flight arrangements, what to do with clothing they don’t want, or the cat they adopted, etc., which made me feel like I still have a long way to go. But I have been here a long time!! In about nine days I will have been here a year. When it’s just us Group 31ers hanging out, we pat ourselves on the back about that, and don’t feel so insecure.

That Monday, I became fully absorbed in the search for an apartment or house to live in. The previous week, I had been shown a nice house with all of the amenities a person could want, but three things that I particularly didn’t – three male roommates. The students at the technical school in town (sort of like a college) often rent rooms or places nearby, and these were three of those students. I was assured that they didn’t drink or smoke, and that their parents are good people. How nice for them, but I didn’t take the room. So, with that beginning, I was a little nervous about this search. I saw four houses on Monday, and my coordinator saw a fifth that didn’t have gas heating (i.e. it had a coal burning stove. Only one of the Volunteers I know has that, and his town doesn’t have gas yet). In two of the houses, I would have lived with “babas” (or grandmothers), one of whom would have slept on the couch in the front hall. No indoor plumbing, and probably little patience with my trying to take over the kitchen to cook things in less than a liter of oil. The second baba asked, What, are there no more jobs in America? I didn’t really take to those places either, and was getting more nervous. The other two houses I saw had no indoor toilets or showers, but did have sinks with running water and no babas. In the first one, I would live alone, and in the second I would have five roommates from the technical school (though female). I was leaning towards the one where I’d live alone, which my coordinator couldn’t quite understand because the girl-filled home was newer. What difference that makes when there’s still no shower, etc., I don’t know. (The first house actually had an outdoor shower, or “summer shower.” Why would you build a beach-house shower in Ukraine? You may well ask.)

I was continuing to feel nervous, and every other option that arose didn’t work – usually because it turned out people lived there and weren’t renting (not sure why these were ever considered options, but they were mentioned to me). We thought of trying to convince the woman renting to the boys to rent the house to just me instead, but that didn’t seem like it would work, because she was planning on getting eight to ten boys at 100 hryven each per month, adding up to about three times what I pay for my apartment, and more than I can.

After knocking on a few more doors where the potential landlords weren’t home, I resolved to recruit my neighbors to help, which I probably should have done earlier. But just as I was walking up to them to ask, they said, Virginia, come here, a woman wants to rent you a room, and she’s coming in an hour. So, my neighbors and coordinator and I went to see her – it turns out she lives across the street and down half a block, towards my Ukrainian Walmart. This was good news to me, since a lot of my angst at moving had concerned leaving my neighbors, and being somewhere in the center of town, far from my Walmart and post office. My location now is perfect because it forces me to walk a mile to school and get exercise – and it would be depressing to reverse that routine and walk a mile to the post office every day when I wouldn’t always have mail, and although I would willingly walk the distance to my store, I probably couldn’t lug groceries that far going back. Still, after the places I had been seeing, I didn’t expect much. But the place was nice! It’s fairly big (three rooms, a kitchen and bathroom), with amenities, and it seems new. I would have my pick between a bedroom and a larger room with a bed/divan. Not too many Oriental rugs on the walls, or other Ukrainian decorating customs I’m not fond of. She was in the process of having her “summer kitchen” (a separate building, and not just used in the summer) moved inside. She seems very nice, and we all sat down to talk about me – it was really funny, listening to my coordinator and neighbors go on and on describing me. “She’s really quiet, she doesn’t watch TV, she just sits there at her computer and she has all these books and we try to listen to catch when she goes out and comes back but sometimes we can’t hear her and we try to listen to hear the TV but we can’t, she’s too quiet.” It was pretty funny (and I don’t have a TV, but I don’t really like TV here so it’s not a problem).

So, it seemed the problem was solved, and everyone was happy. Then, the next day, when I was in the middle of teaching my 6th graders, my coordinator came in and announced that my neighbors had found an apartment next door, in the same building (different entrance). So I visited that place, and it was good, but to make a long story short, the woman changed her mind two days later. Luckily, the woman across the street in the house was still interested in renting to me. The whole week was pretty stressful – with lots of running around and changing of plans – and I’m sure it showed on me, but the woman was very sweet and assured me that she had two little fridges and three stoves, and that it would be alright. So! Now that I’ve adjusted to the idea again (and I think this is the end of it), I’m calmer, though it will be a change living with someone else. My Ukrainian might have to improve, when I had pretty much accepted the so-so level it was at. There are other things I’m nervous about, but the main thing is that it’s a nice place, in a good location, and she has a puppy and a cat running around outside, which I’m excited about.

By the way, it turns out that part of the reason my current landlords are rushing to get their son and daughter-in-law moved in, is that next year is a leap year. And, apparently, it’s bad luck to do something like buy a house, especially when you’re newlyweds, during a leap year. Or something. This was explained to me when my Regional Manager came to visit (in the midst of my search), and she and my coordinator laughed and shook their heads over the superstition, while I stared in disbelief . . .

Last week, I took the children’s books that have been accumulating on my floor, divided them into appropriate age levels, and divvied them up between my school, School #1 and the orphanage here in Bratslav. My coordinator arranged to have three 11th grade boys come to get the boxes and deliver them to the schools, and when only two came I decided to take the third to my school a little later. It had been raining off and on all week, and was raining that morning too. Well, when I got to school with the box, the books for the other schools were everywhere, boxes gone, and kids looking through them with interest. The boys had decided (despite the other schools being closer to my apartment) to leave them there, and they were allowed to go home for being wet and tired. Anyway. I divvied them up again, they’ve now reached their destinations, and everyone’s happy. Thank you so much to everyone who sent me books!! My coordinator arranged a little lending library in our classroom, and kids have already begun borrowing and reading the books.

Inspired by all the books I had been rereading (before I gave them away), we made children’s literature the theme for last week’s big city English club. Clara read “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,” and the hungry caterpillar book, and I read “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” and went on about the history of children’s and young adult literature (as told by Wikipedia), and told my favorite story about Beatrix Potter and the word “soporific.” It was Vinnytsia Day, so we got to watch a parade, and then one of our club goers joined us at the bazaar in my search for the perfect Halloween costume. I won’t give details now, but we found it.

The only new recipe adventure I’ve had recently was making sweet and sour sauce. It tastes good, but is thinner than I expected (maybe it’s supposed to be?), and while trying to transfer it from the frying pan to a glass jar, it went all over my kitchen. Not really a problem, as I still have a jarful, I no longer need an oilcloth for a table (am moving someplace furnished), and I only have this floor for another week. So, to be more specific, it’s not my problem.

Thank you to Gigi and Melissa for wonderful mail!! (And congratulations to Melissa on her imminent COS!)

Hope you’re all doing well. When I write again, hopefully I’ll be settled in a new place, though just a half-block away . . .

Love, Virginia

Bratslav Day and more

2007-09-07T07:55:00.001-04:00

Hello! Ok, there is a lot to tell, and I’m not sure I’ll remember everything. My fall is packed very tightly, and life is already starting to speed up considerably (as in, I sat down to write this and the room spun, ever so slightly).

When I last wrote, I was shilling for my seminars this fall, for our Camp HEAL project. Shilling continues, and the planning is going well! I took a break about three weeks ago to go to Vinnytsia for Lee’s birthday party (Lee is one of our oblast’s new Volunteers). She made us chicken marsala, it was very good, and I got to meet some of the Ukrainians she works with as a business Volunteer. They’re involved in a lot of really great projects, one of which is art therapy for survivors and the children of survivors of human trafficking (more shilling: look at the website! http://www.madebysurvivors.com/). I left early the next morning to get back to Bratslav in time for “Bratslav Day,” an annual celebration in the park. I had attempted to attend Bratslav Day the day before, and arrived at the park to find it empty. This theory (that Bratslav Day was Saturday, not Sunday) was based on silly things like multiple people telling me that it was on Saturday, and then, on Friday, saying things like “See you tomorrow!” after discussing it. Oh well. It was very festive: there was music and shashlik (Ukrainian shish-kebob), special bread (paska) with roses sculpted in the crust, local artwork, and musical performances. The mayor spoke, several choirs sang, there were dancers, and, I’ve come to realize, no celebration is complete until someone sings “Yesterday.” The performance was very cute, but most of the syllables that came out of the girl’s mouth bore little, if any, resemblance to the actual lyrics.

About two weeks ago, I went to pay a visit to fellow Volunteer Clara, at her site, Trostyanets. It was nice to get out (in between shilling trips, I was sort of staring at the wall), and we got to have dinner with her host family, for her host brother’s birthday. They were happy to have us because, as Americans, we could show them the correct way to take tequila shots. Clara’s family came to visit Ukraine this summer, and they brought her host family some tequila (and limes) back from their visit to Hungary. I had actually only observed tequila shots before (Clara, from Los Angeles, found this difficult to believe – I attempted to explain to her host family in Ukrainian that Virginians are just different), but knew the drill well enough to show off, and I even knew the right Spanish toast! It sounds less cool in Ukrainian, but the original is “Arriba, abajo, al centro, al dentro” – “Up, down, to the middle, down the hatch” essentially.

I returned from my fun visit to some unpleasant news: I’m being kicked out of my apartment. I knew that, at some point, my landlords wanted to give this apartment to their son after he got married. Apparently that has happened ahead of schedule (for some reason . . . if you get my drift), and I need to be out by October. I had been planning on using the fall as my apartment searching time, but that period has been shortened to just September. So the last week has been taken up with frantic searching, and listening to my coordinator dramatically explaining my plight to potential landlords over the phone: She is a teacher, a good person, very quiet and calm, she just wants a quiet place to work, etc., etc. Despite the various problems I’ve had with this apartment (like mold), it was a good apartment – and mostly I’ll miss my neighbors, who’ve been like the ideal host family, just next door. I’ll still visit, but it will be sad not to have them sitting on the bench outside interrogating me about where I’m going, why, with whom, and when I’ll be back (and, even if they don’t catch me on my way, still knowing where I’ve gone and what I’ve done, somehow).

Last Saturday, we had “The Day of Knowledge,” which is exactly like the “Last Bell” at the end of the school year, but with the opposite purpose. Maybe if I could understand more of the speeches, or the endless amounts of poetry recited by six-year-olds in unison, I would be able to differentiate between the two celebrations more, but as it is, I didn’t even feel the need to take pictures: same little tiny kids lined up, same massive white bows in the girls’ hair, same dramatic raising of the flag, etc.

As you may have noticed from my recent entries, I’ve done a lot of traveling this summer, and I think everything, combined with various stressful issues like apartment searching, sort of hit me on Sunday, and I got sick. I swear it wasn’t a last-ditch effort to avoid the first real day of school, and I even got a fever to prove it (very unusual for me!). But, although the cold hit me fairly quickly, it seems to be going away quickly too, and I made it back to school on Wednesday with some new posters about the use of articles! (One of the more common mistakes students make here is to drop or add articles unnecessarily, such as “I have dog, and he lives in doghouse.” or “I would like to see the New York City.” Ukrainian and Russian don’t have these tiny little articles to trip you up.)

I left school early on Wednesday, however, because I needed to explore: a man writing a travel book about Ukraine ran into Lee, and was interested in hearing about sites in Vinnytska Oblast, especially those involving Jewish heritage, that had been overlooked in the book’s previous editions. So, I suggested the Jewish cemetery in my town that I knew had something to do with Hassidism, though I didn’t know exactly what. Lee agreed to meet me to check it out on Thursday, and I spent the week attempting to research and prepare. Turns out there is a lot of information about Bratslav online! Seriously!! I just about fell over from shock, but it’s true: we even have a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratslav. Most of the information deals with the history of Hassidism in the area, and how the Breslov sect of Hassidism (named after Bratslav), was founded by Rebbe Nachman here in 1802. (Nachman is the great-grandson of the founder of Hassidism, Baal Shem Tov.) He is buried in Uman, a city not too far away, and apparently around 20,000 people make a pilgrimage to his gravesite every year, at Rosh Hashana. One of his closest disciples, from Nemirov, and that man’s grandson, are the two buried in the mausoleum in Bratslav, in the graveyard I visited with my family when they came in June! At the time, we didn’t know any of these details, and the cemetery’s caretaker wasn’t around, so we simply enjoyed the beautiful view of the river from the ridge, and left.

No one seemed to be able to tell me how to get back there (if you recall, we were led by two students in a roundabout path up steep hills, through trees, across fields and past irritated goats, and I knew I’d never be able to replicate the route alone), and no one I spoke to had even been there, though they knew about it. I knew it was right on the river, and remembered that you could see a large building that looked like a former factory, so I decided that, instead of trekking through the woods, I would walk by the river until I could see what I saw from the ridge, and then see how to get up from there. I had no idea what I was doing. I found a road that went down by the river, and followed it and followed it and walked and walked and was losing faith in my vague idea of where this place was geographically, when I finally saw the old factory! Now, I thought, I just have to climb the ridge. I was still getting over my cold, and wasn’t really excited about climbing, but as I turned the corner I saw a little white building, with a red roof (like the building up on the ridge, the mausoleum), with signs written in Hebrew! Two men were standing outside, one with a Star of David necklace, so I walked up and introduced myself, and tried to explain why I was there. The man was very nice, and showed me to a staircase a little further down the road. A staircase. We completely didn’t notice the stairs before, having come from the opposite direction, but now I understand how one of the students was able to scramble down the ridge so quickly to check for the caretaker – he took the stairs. They’re not too steep, they just wind around up to the cemetery, where the man (Yefim) showed me the mausoleum, and explained all of the history, and I did my best to understand. He’s written a book, and knows everything about Bratslav’s history – and even told me about the days, centuries ago, when there was a castle on the opposite bank of the river (you can still see the place where it stood, though no stones are left, it’s just slightly raised).

Bratslav, essentially, used to be a really big deal. Up until about a hundred years ago it still was, but after being left out of the railroad fun, it sort of fell off the map. And here we are! Who knew. I did not . . . but this week I learned a lot. When Lee came Thursday, he showed us old pictures of Bratslav (compared with more recent photographs of the same views, very different – no more synagogue, the Catholic church used to have two tall bell towers but no longer does, there used to be more houses, etc.), and lots of pictures of the visitors who’ve come from all around the world to visit the gravesite here. There were Hassidic pilgrims from India, Ethiopia, France, Israel, and America, really amazing. (Speaking of France, at one point, Lee and Yefim realized they both spoke French – well – and started chattering away! I was impressed, and very confused until forgotten vocabulary words would force them back to Ukrainian.) In a week or so, I may well see more pilgrims for myself, on Rosh Hashana. We talked to him for a long time, and Lee and I decided that we smell a project there. I’ll let you all know what develops, but for the time being we don’t want to jinx it . . .

Somewhere in there, I had my first class with my new 5th graders, whom I’d never taught before. They were adorable. I’m sure the novelty of me will wear off, blah blah, but they were so cute and enthusiastic, and seemed to understand a lot of what I said, even. I almost never speak Ukrainian when I teach, and when I do it’s just to translate vocabulary words when needed, and that method has worked well so far. Every TEFL Volunteer teaches differently (and obviously we all have very different schools), and when I’ve talked to others about what I do, I’ve said that I never really decided to not speak Ukrainian, it just happened. It’s sort of fun to shock them when I know a word (I don’t know how they think I survive outside of English class, but they really don’t think I speak anything else), and it’s definitely a plus to not worry about my awful accent. But I realized this week that I was also influenced by my coordinator – despite being Ukrainian, obviously, she never speaks Ukrainian in her English classes, even with really young kids (like 2nd graders). So it’s immersion, even without a native English speaker! I think it works really well, and it’s definitely a huge help to have that precedent set for me.

Thank you as always for the wonderful mail, I hope in my frazzled state I don’t forget anyone: thank you Lauren L. for the update on the rainy season in PC Cameroon, and thank you Brian I. for the pithy report from Nevada.

Ok, that’s all. I hope you’re all doing well at home, or wherever it is that you are – please keep in touch and tell me what you’re doing! I may not be staring at walls any more, but I still want to hear gossip, as well as legitimate news . . .

Love, Virginia