I am very fortunate in my housing accommodations.  While at the swearing-in conference last week, my counterpart, Serge, told me my apartment would be thirty minutes commute from downtown.  But when we arrived at the train station Friday morning, the men who met us there informed me something had happened with the original place, and as a consequence, they found me an apartment five minutes from the city center, Lenin Square.  Not by bus either, by foot!  I’m so close, it’s hard to believe it’s real!  My apartment isn’t fancy or large–it’s only one room plus a kitchen and bathroom–but it’s really nice.  (I could live in a shithole and be happy if it was in the same location.)

I work at the Donetsk Institute of Tourist Business, founded in 1992, and I work with some really great people.  There are three guys in their mid-to late 20s who help me out a lot.  My first night here, they took me around town, showed me a few important places, and bought me pizza and a beer.  One of them, Ruslan, is a former counterpart and has been a huge help with Peace Corps things.  And all three have provided tremendous help in navigating the institute.

All the teachers there have been very friendly.  I really think it will be a great working environment.  My first day though was a bit rough because I felt like livestock at an auction.  I was on display for all the school to see, so many classes to go to, so many people to meet.  But I can’t blame them because I’m sure it’s a great source of pride to have a native speaker teaching English.  (I think most of my friends have gotten the same treatment at their sites as well.)

The institute is about a forty minute walk from my apartment, so I try to walk at least one way, sometimes both ways, but it really depends on the weather.  I’m walking everywhere, which I am happy about.  The city’s very pedestrian friendly, but the public transportation is very convenient as well.  You can take a trolley bus for 1 грн, which is about 12 cents.

Of course, it is only three days until Christmas, but I would not know it besides the date.  There is no Christmas feel despite the outward signs of the season.  Ukrainians use Christmas trees to note the season; a huge tree stands in the center of Lenin Square.  But the holiday season usually brings a feeling that seems to hang heavily in the air.  I feel none of that this year.  I suppose being away from my family for the first time has a lot to do with that.  Christmas has always meant home and Mom and Dad and Max, with the house decorated with the tree, the garland and the nutcrackers.  There is none of that this year.  I think too that the absence of a Christmas break also affects the seasonal feel.  For the first time in 19 years no end of semester break marked the season’s arrival.  Maybe that is part of what Christmas has always meant.  But I’m not certain.

I am certain, however, that Christmas will still be great.  There are a lot of volunteers around who are wonderful people, so we’ll be spending Christmas together.  I feel very lucky to have the two sitemates I have, and I feel even luckier to have some of my best friends so close by to celebrate with.

Honestly, I feel lucky in general because I believe I have one of the best, if not the best, site placements in all of Peace Corps Ukraine.  Who gets to be 24 or 25 and live in a major foreign city, in an incredible apartment, only a five minute walk from the city’s heart?  I am very grateful.

And with that, Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family in America!  I hope it’s a wonderful holiday season.

Last Friday, when my week of purgatory (definitely wasn’t hell. Could have been much worse!) finally ended, I vowed that this week would be better.

So far, so good!

I went to bed early(ish) last night, woke up early and got a shower. Usually I go almost all week without showering, because I have to wake up so early if I want to shower and I’m usually too lazy to shower in the evening. So I started off on a nice, clean, high note. And as an added bonus, it finally snowed last night! It was beautiful this morning on my walk to school — one or two inches of snow were on the ground and it was still falling from the sky.

When I got to school, I began my first lesson as usual. My third-year students (with whome I’ve been working since they were little first-year kiddos!) have been studying Ukraine all semester, and I got it in my head at the beginning of the school-year that I’d have them make travel guides about Ukraine. In September, they each chose a place of interest in Ukraine to write about.

Their first drafts were a spectacular failure. Nearly every single student (not all of them, but just about!) copied their information directly from the internet. Now, that’s not all that surprising…but these students had fairly recently completed a one-week intensive writing course with me, in which they learned all about how not to plagiarise. So they had no real excuse.

Needless to say, I was pretty irritated with them. So they wrote it again, and then I read them and gave feedback. They revised their second drafts (which were really their first drafts), and then revised their third drafts one final time. Then they typed their information, a few of them added pictures, and we had, as a class, 21 unique descriptions of places of interest all around Ukraine (mostly in the west). Throughout the course of the semester, they’ve also been writing and conducting interviews, paraphrasing homework assignments, and working on various other activities all about Ukraine (my favorite assignments: write an interview with an alien who has recently landed in Ternopil and has no idea where he is. Tell him everything he needs to know about his new home; and write a children’s story about the history of Kyiv [a very mythical story in the first place]). As the semester progressed, I updated the “Table of Contents” that would go in the front of their travel guide and gave them various other assignments to put into their book.

This is all a long, roundabout story to get at what happened in my first lesson:  I had made copies of all 21 places of interest compositions and was preparing to distribute them to the groups. I’d also printed up the final table of contents, a cover sheet, and a few other odds and ends that the students would need to complete their books. I was also getting ready to hand back a million different other homework assignments that I’d collected the previous week.

The bell rang and I got started, explaining what we were going to do. Suddenly, the entire group stood up. This isn’t all that unusual, students are expected to stand when a teacher walks in the room or when a lesson begins. My students are generally in the habit of sitting, as I usually make them sit as soon as they’ve stood (makes me feel uncomfortable when they all stand up for me). So I thought at first that they were just standing up because the lesson began. So I told them to sit down. But they remained standing.

“Is today a holiday?” I asked. It’s also customary for students to stand and “congratulate” a teacher on a holiday or a birthday. “No,” they said. “If we are not mistaken, today is your two-year anniversary at our school!”

I had completely forgotten that I’ve now been at my site for two years! The first year felt like a real milestone and I noticed it when the date rolled around. Plus, tons of other volunteers were around to notice and comment about it on Facebook. But now most of my friends from Group 37 are gone and I’m just so busy with all my various projects and assignments that the date had slipped right by!

So my students continued to stand as they told me how happy they were that I had come to work with them. They told me that I made their lives brighter, funnier, and more interesting. I don’t remember everything else they said, but it was an incredibly sweet little speech.

Then they presented me with a portrait of me! One of the girls is a great artist and she’d drawn a sketch of me. And it actually looks like me! Nobody’s ever drawn my portrait before!

So after I said thanks, we got back to work. They looked through all the different descriptions of places around Ukraine, written by their classmates. The students are split into two subgroups, and within those subgroups there are three “travel guide groups,” so while some of them have seen a few of the other places of interest, they haven’t seem them all put together in one place yet. Watching them look through all the documents, this “book” that they’ve created, was a true pleasure. Of course I, as the teacher, was excited about the project the whole time. I had the feeling that when they saw it all put together, they’d be pleased with themselves. But of course they, as students, weren’t quite so excited about it throughout the semester. Each time I asked them to revise again, they groaned. And all semester long I was a bit paranoid that it wouldn’t work…that we’d somehow get side-tracked or the schedule wouldn’t allow us to finish. So when they were flipping through the pages and looking at everything they’d done, and I could see that some of them were genuinely excited, I had one of those “I’m going to be a teacher forever!” moments.

So with all those things combined — my two-year anniversary at my school, and the successful, almost-completion of my students’ travel guide project, my day was off to a pretty good start!

The rest of my classes went well, we played a fun game with comparatives and superlatives in my lessons with the first-year students, and some of the very quiet kids were really enthusastic and did quite well. Then we listened to a song in my lessons with the second-year students, and I got a big kick out of watching them start to sing along when they’d heard it a few times. When I was in high school, I don’t think anyone in my Spanish classes ever enjoyed learning songs in class. We were all way too cool for school. And that’s one thing I love about my kids here — they love singing, they have no shame, and they’re perfectly willing to enjoy things that American students would roll their eyes at.

My day wasn’t entirely perfect, though, unfortunately. After my lessons, I walked to the post office to mail my Christmas cards which, at this point, are very obviously going to be pretty late. By 2:30, al the beautiful snow that had fallen overnight and this morning had turned to slippery mush. Snow is one thing and rain is another…but the slippery mush stuff has got to be my absolute least favorite weather. Mainly becaue it’s so hard to walk on. My town is paved mostly with slick old cobblestones and cracked, uneven sidewalks. They’re hard enough to walk on when it’s not wet. But add water to the mix and you’ve got puddles galore. And add a little bit of ice to that and you’ve got puddles, patches of ice, and a nasty slippery mixture of snow, ice, and water that’s absolute hell to walk on, expecially going uphill or downhill.

So I sloshed uphill all the way to the post office. I picked up a package (yay!) and paid the annual fee for my mailbox. I then stepped to the next counter to buy envelopes and stamps so I could send home my very-late Christmas cards. Unfortunately, I was 16 UAH (two dollars) short. So I ventured back out into the streets to get some money from an ATM. I tried one ATM, but was told that my card wasn’t valid. So I slid down the hill to another ATM, only to find that my card wouldn’t work there either! I recently got a new bank card, so I suspected that it didn’t work because it hadn’t been activited. A simple phone call to the bank would have taken care of that problem, but I had no money on my phone to make said phone call!

So, instead of sending my Christmas cards today, I slogged my way back home, rather disappointed because now my Christmas cards will be even later and because now I have to go the post office again tomorrow! I don’t like going to the post office normally, but when the sidewalks are covered in icy mush, I hate it even more. Oh well!

All things considered, this week is still off to a significantly better start than last week! Here’s to hoping it continues to go well!

Over a year ago, I updated my blog with some reflections about completion of service. My site-mate Tara had just completed her two (plus!) years of service and her departure got me thinking a lot about what we, as Peace Corps volunteers, accomplish in these two years. The lives we affect, the lives that affect ours, the lessons we learn, leave behind, and everything else that comes along with the intense, unique experience that is being a Peace Corps volunteer.

Now, I have been in Ukraine for over two years and will be here for another eight months. Many of my friends, including my other site-mate (Shelby) have left. And because my sentiments have stayed pretty much exactly the same as they did when Tara left, I’m reposting what I wrote here in June, 2010. Of course, some of the specifics have changed, but the experience of standing on the platform, waving good-bye remains the same.

***

Two years come and go pretty quickly. That probably never feels truer than when volunteers climb the steep steps of the train that will take them to Kyiv one last time. I can’t say for sure yet—I’m still a few months shy of half-way through my own service—but when I watched my site-mate board her final train a few weeks ago, I saw my entire service so far and the year and a half still to come flash before my eyes.

As we stood on the platform, Tara kept saying “I can’t believe I’m leaving.” And I don’t think the rest of us standing on the platform with her could believe it either. When I arrived at site six months ago, I was more than pleasantly surprised to find out that I would have two site-mates—one from my own group, and Tara, from Group 33 who had extended until June. Tara was our first friend in Chortkiv. She sent us text messages the day before we arrived, she called, she was there when we needed her, and soon she became a real friend. Six months seemed forever away and Tara wouldn’t let us talk about it until a month before her departure, anyway, so her close of service was something we hardly even thought about.

But then suddenly it was the month before her departure. She started giving us things—blankets, kitchen utensils, sweaters, scarves, coats, statues of caricature-like Cossacks that had been gifted to her and she felt bad throwing away—two and a half years worth of stuff accumulated from the life she’d built for herself here.

And then she was boarding the train—a stuffed bear given to her by a student sticking out of her backpack, all her possessions whittled down so they could fit in one rolling suitcase. Her host-mother was keeping an eye on everything with a video camera, her host-brother was clinging to her host-father’s knees as the trains clanged and rolled by. Three teachers from her school were there, one with her daughter, the sixth-former who’d given Tara the stuffed bear. Her friend Vika, Vika’s mom, and their dog were there, and we all huddled around Tara until the conductor was blowing the whistle and the командант was yelling at the passengers to get on board.

And then she was at the window—waving good-bye. As the train was winding its way around the corner of the big hill that looks out over our town, her sixth-former, Olessya, leaned toward me and said in perfect English, “I’m really going to miss Tara. She’s my best friend.” Her host mother couldn’t stop the tears rolling down her face, and everybody, even her five year-old host brother, walked away from the tracks solemnly.

Parting ways was a strange affair—Tara, the link that had formerly connected all of us, was on a train headed to Kyiv. There was nothing left to bind us—an incongruous group of people who might have never known each other, if it hadn’t been for Tara. Her host parents insisted that I come to visit and the teachers welcomed me to come speak to their students. I had planned to walk home alone, but I was joined by Vika, her mother, and their dog. On our way, they insisted that I join them to visit a friend, an old man named Bohdan Edwardovich who used to teach English at one of the primary schools and is an amateur historian and painter.

As I fell into step with Vika and her mother, and after we stopped by Bohdan Edwardovich’s house for a quick visit and eventually parted ways, with promises to call one another and meet soon, I realized how naturally life would go on for all of us without Tara.

What then, is left behind when a Peace Corps volunteer says good-bye?

Do we leave our communities with more than memories? What is the most important part of the legacy that a Peace Corps volunteer leaves behind?

A friend of mine recently completed his service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, and in his last blog post as a Peace Corps volunteer, he wrote,

In the work I have done as a PCV, I have had as many or more failures as successes. I have not made the kind of difference I thought I could before. But I have been able to do a few things well. A square is only a square because it has limits: There are four sides which surround its area, bounding the square and separating it from what it is not. People are no different, and we must recognize this: We must understand what our limits are, what we can and cannot do. We must know who we are not to understand who we are.

Although our experiences on opposite sides of the planet have been quite different, I would venture to say that this is a lesson that most volunteers learn at some point during or after their service. We’re all squares of sorts, testing the limits of our boundaries in order to do the most that we can, whatever that might be.

It’s the “whatever that might be” that’s sometimes the tricky part. We all know that we can’t fix the problems that brought us to serve as Peace Corps volunteers in the first place, but what can we do? As small squares, we are all part of a bigger picture, one that often seems blurry and out-of-focus when looked at from up close.

On the days that I feel like “just an English teacher,” I try to remind myself that this isn’t necessarily such a small thing to be, that I can do a lot, even by just being a good teacher. All of my favorite English teachers undoubtedly taught me much more than just English. A message I recently received from a Romanian friend, now completing a PhD in the States, helps me remember this:

Speaking as a former student of one such as you, I can tell you that you will never be forgotten. The sense of empowerment you instill in these students will fuel some of them forever. I learned about feminism, and races, and human rights, and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and how to survive an abusive relationship, and V day, and how to make your voice heard in a traditionally patriarchal society, and countless other things from Peace Corps volunteers.

If we’re lucky, this is our legacy as Peace Corps volunteers. Certainly we won’t change the lives of everyone we meet, and certainly we won’t solve all the world’s problems. But most of us never set out to do that in the first place anyway. We set out to make lasting human connections, to push the limits of our own boundaries and those of others. And if we’re really lucky, we get to see tangible results. But even if we never see the big picture from far away, we must believe that each small square is crucial to the whole.

In the end, it seems to me that the measure of a Peace Corps Volunteer’s legacy can be seen on the faces of the people who come to the train station to see them off, in the stuffed bears, Cossack figurines, and embroidered shirts squeezed into a backpack. The memories, the lessons learned, the boundaries pushed, and the human connections—these are the small squares.

But I already have a funny story about my assignment:  we started our meeting with the regional manager by introducing ourselves, giving some basic information like hometowns, etc.  When I said I was from Savannah, Georgia, Oleg, my R.M., said, “I thought you were from Wyoming?  I remember something about that from our interview.”  When I told him I’d only lived there for two years while getting my master’s degree, he said the Ukrainians I’ll work with wanted to know things about me and he told them I was from Wyoming.  And apparently they went through a lot of trouble researching Wyoming history and trivia on the interwebs.  So Oleg asked if I would just play along and pretend that I was from Wyoming, or at least that Wyoming was a very important part of my life, which is not a stretch at all.  My new colleagues probably all think I walk around in heavy denim with a huge wad of chew.  I just hope no one’s purchased cowboy boots.

After living so long without any certain notion of what my future would be, it seems very surreal to finally know what I will do with my life for the next two years.  I can actually make concrete plans and set real objectives.  I feel an enormous sense of relief, almost as though a huge weight has been lifted from my chest.

I can’t explain how excited I am about this post.  I’m moving to one of the largest cities in Ukraine, in an oblast that has over forty volunteers.  I have two site mates, volunteers who have been in Ukraine for some time now.  My peer mentor, Nathan, lives twenty minutes away, via trolleybus.  My closest friend here, Kyle, is maybe two hours north, and two other very close friends, Will and Scott, will be about the same distance away in Luhansk.  And two girls from the Oster cluster that I’ve gotten to know recently will be an hour or less away.

But beyond having friends so close, Donetsk is exactly what I want.  I’m teaching at a Ukrainian institute of higher education.  I’m going to a big city, larger than any I’ve lived in—the population’s four times larger than Chernigov, eight times more than Savannah, forty times larger than Laramie and nearly three times larger than Wyoming’s entire population.  It’s industrial.  And according to at least two Ukrainians I talked with yesterday, it’s dirty.

I guess dirty sounds terrible to a lot of people, and I’m sure many parts of the city are beautiful and modern and clean (Wikipedia says Donetsk was ranked the best Ukrainian city the last two years).  I talked with Nathan today about Donetsk and he says the city proper is a beautiful place to live.  And when I told my host mother today where I will live, she was very excited.  Apparently her parents live in the city and she told me how wonderful Donetsk is.  That was the first real conversation she and I have had in weeks.

All of the industry has been moved outside of the city to the surrounding area, so the suburbs will be gritty.  But for some time now I’ve wanted a city, badly.  And when I think of city, I think grime.  I don’t know why, but grime seems like a real experience, and in no way possesses a negative connotation.  Either way I am excited.

It’s probably a romantic idea of a city, but I feel like being in the grit and dirt brings you closer to the pulse of the city.  You feel closer to the people.  Maybe what I mean is that I think of industrialism and working class people and for some reason that seems very real to me.  I remember my friend Sam Clevenger saying last fall how he wanted to get back to the East Coast and the Rust Belt because of the grit and I couldn’t understand why he would want that, especially living in a place as beautiful and clean as Wyoming.  I think I get what he meant now.

The contrast with what I’m writing now and the ramblings and rantings in my journal from fall 2009 is incredible.  I went through an “Into the Wild” phase then.  Two years ago, I thought the only real experience a person could have was raw communion with nature.  I would have been furious about being placed in a city like Donetsk.  I wanted somewhere in the bush.  (The specific place was a village in sub-Saharan Africa as far removed from masses of people as I could get.)  Nature is wonderful and I still think the most alive I’ve ever felt was in the high plains and foothills of the Bighorn Mountains or on the windswept plains of southern Colorado or any of the remote landscapes of the West.  I still categorically insist God’s beauty is most evident in his creation.  But the Thoreauvian ideal of an aesthetic voyager fighting some climatic battle of the soul alone in the wilderness is a bunch of bullshit.  I am fully convinced that the path to personal fulfillment can’t be found wondering around, playing mountain man.  If you really want to do something good, you have to be with people, working with them to meet some need within their lives.

That’s what will make me happy.  And that’s why I’m happy with Donetsk.

Here’s what we have left, though:

-Self-assessment interview tomorrow, which is a stress-free experience.

-Language Proficiency Exam on Wednesday, which we should be worried about considering we have to achieve intermediate mid, but as we were playing with our nerf basketball today, Zhenya commented that we didn’t seem worried at all, so you can see our level of concern.  Really though, how much will two days of cramming really affect our language knowledge?  At this point, our proficiency is what it is.  Plus we’ll live here for two years, and most likely pick up a lot of language during that time. And if we are at a level lower than the target, the Peace Corps will just make us get a tutor and continue to study, which is probably a good thing anyway.  Maybe it’s a poor way of considering it, but I want to continue studying anyway.

-Regional manager meeting on Friday.  That’s the good stuff because we’ll find out our permanent sites and assignments.  I found out Thursday that I’m going to region 8 with nine other trainees from group 42.  Kyle and Sarah from my group will be going as well.  Unfortunately, Will and Scott were assigned to region 6, but it sits on top of region 8, so maybe we’ll be close.  I don’t know a whole lot about the region, except that it encompasses the Zaporozhye and Donetsk oblasts in extreme southeast Ukraine. It’s supposed to be an industrial area, which I think is great.  Both oblasts have coastlines along the Sea of Azov, and the Donetsk oblast borders Russia.  I’m really excited about this region and about the people who’ll be there with me.  (More to come about my site after Friday!)

-And of course, finally, saying goodbye to my host family.  I’m really disappointed in my home stay during training, and here’s why.  Besides a series of really frustrating/annoying encounters, they didn’t talk to me.  At the end of week 4, my host mother told me my Russian sucked, qualifying this sentiment the next day by making sure I knew my Russian was “very” bad, and then told me no when I asked her to then help me improve.  From that point on, the conversations mostly stopped.  My contact with my family became limited only to a few questions and usually a visible annoyance at my struggles to speak an incredibly difficult language after an incredibly short time, isolation during breakfast and dinner, and the insistence that I close my bedroom door while I’m studying or reading because I “need privacy” and because walking past my open door made my host mom uncomfortable.  (I kept my door open so they would know I wanted to talk.)  I visited a friend’s house this weekend and his host mother was incredible.  All she wanted was to talk to me and help me speak Russian.  My friend said that’s been true for his entire stay with her.  I feel like my host family stay was a wasted opportunity to drastically improve my Russian skills.  Language acquisition is a major reason Peace Corps places us with host families during training.

Regardless, the end of training is coming.  I leave Chernigov in 8 days.  Swearing-in  is in 10 days and then my Peace Corps experience can actually begin…

This year, I did it on Saturday because Thurs is a regular workday here. Besides turkey, which Vitaliy helps with a lot, I made real cranberry sauce! I never knew anything could be so delicious!!! And I was pleased with the gravy, too. I also did green beans with ham bits, which was new for me, too.

It was a culinary success :) My Ukrainian friends brought salads that were delicious, and the one other American involved brought deviled eggs and pumpkin pie. I also did pumpkin and apple pies. Vitaliy said it was the perfect combination of foods. I agree! We’re still feasting on the leftovers, too.

This year's crew

Cooking in a foreign country is, not surprisingly, an interesting experience.

You can’t always buy what you want — either because it doesn’t exist where you live (e.g. sweet potatoes) or because the shop doesn’t have it (either because it’s poorly stocked or because everyone grows XY or Z themselves and therefore has no need to buy it in a store). Or you might not be able to buy it because you don’t know the word for it and all the food in the store is behind the counter, which means you have to know the word if you want to ask the cashier to get it for you.

But even if you can buy what you want, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to cook it without any complications. My first year of cooking here was complicated by the fact that I had no oven. Then, last year, when I was preparing to go cook Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house, the staff in my dorm asked me why I wasn’t cooking a turkey in the dorm where I live. I explained that it was because I had no oven. To which they replied “Oh! You can use the oven in room 1103.” Surprise! Turns out there had been an oven the whole time…but it’s located in the central wing of the building, down a labrynthine series of corridors, through a bedroom, in a tiny, windowless little closet that also inexplicably contains a sink and one shelf. It’s not exactly the kind of oven you feel warm and cozy about. And it only has two temperatures: lukewarm and blazing hot. But it gets the job done.

So I have access to an oven now, but it’s still more complicated to bake a cake in that oven than it would be to bake a cake in an oven that was actually located in my kitchen and had more than two temperatures. And to add to that complication, said cake needs to be baked from scratch.

And that, my friends, is what makes cooking here so much more interesting than it was in America. I don’t necessarily “like” it more and I don’t really love cooking to begin with. But I’ve really enjoyed learning how to make things from scratch, putting things together that I’d only ever dumped out of a box before. It adds a feeling of accomplishment to sitting down with a group of friends to eat a meal that you all contributed to — whether that was by procuring spices or items from behind a counter in a foriegn language, or by peeling countless potatoes/carrots/beets, or by mixing things together and cobbling together recipes to get the best approximation of something from home that everyone really misses eating.

So, in honor of my Ukrainian-acquired cooking skills and my third Thanksgiving in Ukraine, here’s a list of things I can now make from scratch without blinking twice.

• Pancakes
• Bisquits
• Cornbread
• Split Pea Soup
• Chicken Noodle Soup
• Borscht
• Vegetable Soup
• Tortillas
• Chocolate Cake
• Stuffing
• Gravy
• Spaghetti Sauce
• Chili

And add to that list anything that includes eggs (with the exception of Spanish tortilla. Haven’t quite bothered to master that yet…but it’d certainly be worth trying!).

I guess none of those things are particularly impressive things to be able to cook from scratch, but I’m still proud of myself. And that’s mainly because those are all things that, when I prepared in America, I prepared at least mostly from a box or a can. Now I can say that I know how to actually make those things, not just pour them out and mix them with a can of water.

That’s not to say I won’t revert back to my former can- and box-mix preparing ways when I’m given the opportunity (upon my glorious return in about 9 months…), but I’m glad I at least know how these things are supposed to come together and could do it myself if I wanted to. And there’s something to be said for that, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, as I’m sure everyone in the states knows, Ukrainians don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving.  Peace Corps volunteers do celebrate Thanksgiving, however.  Thanksgiving Day we had our normal workload, so two hours of language lessons plus three hours of tech training.  But afterwards, some of us met up at a cafe/bar and celebrated the day with a cheeseburger and a beer.  Last year for Thanksgiving, Sam Clevenger and I ate a Thanksgiving feast courtesy of Shari’s (the 24 hour diner and a fine dining establishment), so I’d say Thanksgiving Day dinner 2011 was on par.

The real celebration was today though.  Yesterday after class, Zhenya (my cluster’s LCF) and Sarah, Kyle and myself went shopping at the bazaar and local grocery store and bought a lot of food to cook for today.  Then this morning, we started cooking at 8:30 and our rotational LCF and her cluster from Oster (where Zhenya rotated to) joined us for a really good lunch.  Zhenya throws down in the kitchen.  It really felt like a Thanksgiving celebration.  Tons of food–turkey, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, pumpkin pie–good conversations, a great game of Pictionary and unfulfilled threats to “make it rain.”  And I guess the Oster cluster’s pretty cool too.

So this Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and for not being afraid to do it.  I’m also thankful for supportive family.  And I’m thankful for sharing the experience with the friends I get to share it with.  Thanks everyone.

(Alternative post titles, courtesy of Will Granger and Scott Healy: “An Asshole’s Thanksgiving, or The Eagle’s Thanksgiving Odyssey” or “Cluster C Curbstomps Cluster J.”)

The interview process was very relaxed.  They just asked me about my background and qualifications, as well as what courses beyond English interested me.  But during the interview, I was asked if I am a small town or a big city person.  I told them I’m from a rural area and that Savannah, which I claim as my hometown, has only half of Chernigov’s population, and as such, Chernigov is the biggest city I’ve lived in.  I explained that I moved to Wyoming because it was rural and isolated.  But I also explained that when I return to America, I want to attend a Ph.D. program in a bigger city, just so I could have the experience of living in a city.  So my answer to the question was I would be comfortable in either a village or a large city.

The question made me think of a conversation I had the other day with a friend who lives in a village near Chernigov.  We were talking about site placement and I said I would not want to be a secondary education volunteer because they have a significant chance of being placed in a tiny village, isolated from anything and anyone familiar.  As a university TEFL volunteer, the odds (they do exist) of me being placed in a small village are very small.  But my buddy said that’s what he wanted.  He said, “In fact, I will be upset if I’m placed in a big city.”

That made me think a lot about my mindset regarding placement.  I want a city, I do, I admit it.  And I want a city because there are many things to do and lots of people, maybe even another Peace Corps volunteer.  But why did I join the Peace Corps?  It wasn’t to live in a city so I could go to bars or have WiFi access every day.  I did it because I wanted to sacrifice my time and my comfort so I could contribute whatever I could to something that was bigger than me.  When I applied in the spring of 2010, I thought the best way to accomplish these goals was to live in an isolated area without modern comforts while doing difficult (manual) labor.

You don’t have to live in a small village to do good though.  There’s plenty of work to be done in big cities, especially if you’re a higher education TEFL volunteer.  The people you teach will one day be the ones teaching Ukrainian children English.  So you have a great opportunity to impact a lot of people, even if you’ll never know the vast majority of them.  But if I am placed in a big city, I cannot let myself be distracted by the temptations a city offers.  Especially not to the point that my work suffers.

In the posts I’ve written about Wyoming, it’s obvious the reason I miss it so much is the landscape.  The beauty of the place is incredible, but part of its beauty is its isolation.  I loved Wyoming because it wasn’t the city.  This time last year, I didn’t give two shits about living in an urban area.  I wanted to hike and camp in the mountains and fly-fish in the rivers and lakes.  But that changed in the last year (the reasons why are complicated and need not be discussed).

The change worries me though because I’m afraid I will let myself be distracted from my mission here.  I worry the fun of living in a foreign country and in a big city will overshadow teaching, and therefore replace making some kind of difference.

I’m worried about a possibility, though, not a certainty.  And there’s plenty of time and reasons to make sure the worry never reaches fruition.

But for me, here’s some of what I’ve noticed.  Many of the creature comforts Americans are used to can be found in Ukrainian cities.  I take hot showers and I have a flush toilet.  Some of my friends in the villages have outhouses and have to heat water for bathing on a stove.  I have daily access to the internet, although not at home.  But the university where I’m interning has Wi-Fi, as does any number of cafés around town.  Or I can go to the library and use their computers.

Like many American cities, there’s great public transportation.  If I want to go downtown, I ride either a marshurtka (a cross between a van and a bus) or the trolleybus.  I like the trolleybus because it’s cheaper and larger, so even if it’s crowded you have more room.  On the marshurtka, especially at rush hour, people cram into the vehicle.  They’re packed so tightly you can’t really move.  So if you’re at the back of the bus, you have to start working your way to the door at least one stop before yours and by the time you reach the front, you’ve more than likely groped a few people or been groped yourself.

Another similarity is bars.  They’re everywhere.  And beer is pretty cheap.  At some places, you can buy a beer for seven hryvnia, which is less than a dollar.  We frequent the bars fairly often.  A lot of the places we go remind me of American bars, and maybe that’s why we go to the ones we do.

But alcohol is also a huge difference between the two cultures.  Although alcohol, and especially vodka, is everywhere, there’s a cultural stigma against drinking in public.  The city is probably a little different because the views here seem to be more liberal, but in our cultural lessons, we’ve learned that many Ukrainians view bars as places where drunks and alcoholics go to drink.  My first night in Ukraine, I had a medical interview.  At some point, probably during the application process, I stated I drank one or two beers two to three times a week (in Wyoming, four or five times a week was probably more accurate).  I feel that two or three times a week for a college/grad student is moderate at worst.  But the doctor asked me if my drinking concerned me and hinted that he was concerned.  Apparently, alcoholism is a big problem here, but I’m not sure if it’s any more common than in America.  It seems that alcohol is something to be enjoyed with friends in the privacy of home.

Another difference is the food.  Ukrainians eat a lot less meat than Americans.  We eat meat or fish with nearly every meal.  Here, I may get meat every other meal at best.  It’s expensive.  The variety of food is also much more limited, especially during the winter.  I’ve heard from various PCVs that the bizarres have tons and tons of cheap vegetables during the summer, so I look forward to that.  Ukraine was the bread basket of the Soviet Union, so it makes sense.  The lack of spices here is also kind of depressing.  Much of the time, the food’s pretty bland.  Salt and black pepper are common of course, as is sugar.  But good luck finding things like oregano or basil.

People also eat out a lot less often than in America.  Restaurants are more expensive, or at least Ukrainians have less money to spend on restaurant food.  Usually, cafés or restaurants are reserved for celebrations for special occasions.  I don’t get a large enough food allowance to afford to eat at a restaurant more than two or three times a month.  And when I go to a café to get Wi-Fi and watch people getting food, they eat so much smaller portions than Americans would at a restaurant.  Judging by the amount of food Ukrainians eat at home, the price has to be the reason.  I’ve realized how much Americans take food for granted.

After writing all of this, it seems the most important difference to me, and at least some of my friends, is the food.  Will Granger and I talk all the time about hamburgers, how all we want is a half-pound hamburger, maybe with a fried egg thrown on top.

And sometimes I find myself daydreaming about a Papa John’s supreme pizza or Pad Thai…

So in another increasingly typical move, I’m going to give the briefest of brief updates, in the hopes that maybe just getting a post up will get me motivated to write more at a (near)future date. I actually have a post in the making (all about the trials and tribulations of teaching), but it needs a little more thought and work before I can post it.

For now, here are the basic details:

• School started again in September. I’m working with new textbooks this year (yay!) thanks to the grant we wrote last year for updated resources and materials. It makes a world of difference to teach with quality, authentic textbooks. Planning and teaching are both so much easier!
• I’m working with 10 groups of students this year — four sub-groups of 1st-year students, 4 sub-groups of 2nd-year students, and 2 sub-groups of 3rd-year students. Unfortunately the schedule didn’t work out to let me work with the 4th-year students…but thankfully some of them still come to English club, so I see them once a week at least. My 1st-year students this year are a really unique group — they’re really enthusiastic and much better organized than my 1st-year students were last year. It’s interesting what a difference there can be from group to group. Overall, I’m really satisfied with my students this year — they’re a lot of fun and I’m enjoying teaching them and working on projects.
• I’m not working on many new projects, as this will be my last school year here, but I am working on accumulating as many professional development lesson plans created by other volunteers in an effort to help others conduct easy teacher-training seminars at their own sites. So far I’ve collected over 70 lessons and soon these will be made available to others. It’s nice to work with kids of course, but the more sustainable change will come from helping teachers become better professionals, so hopefully this project will have a lasting impact in many communities all over Ukraine.
• In other project news, World AIDS Day (December 1st) is coming soon, and I’m hoping to get our HIV/AIDS Educational Campaign project even further off the ground. Camp KLLAS in the summer was our first big educational event, and hopefully in the month of November we will be going into schools all around the community to teach about this serious issue. On November 5th, we’ll have a training of trainers, with the students who’ve already been educated about HIV/AIDS leading the lessons for other students. It’ll be our first training of this kind, so hopefully it’ll be successful! I’ll try to report back soon about this — it’s an important, exciting project!
• In personal news, I’m still running! Not always a lot or very fast, but I still get out about 3 times a week, which is about as much as I can usually manage. My schedule this semester is nice in that I have no classes at all on Mondays, but I pay two-fold starting the very next morning, when every single day that follows starts far too early (I have 8 o’clock classes Tuesday-Friday) and winds up completely exhausting me by the time Wednesday is half over. So thanks to this schedule, it’s about all I can do to drag myself out for three runs a week. Hopefully next semester I’ll be a little less exhausted and can fit in a little more exercise. But for now, I’m just pleased to still be running.

Not much else is new…

For those who aren’t aware, I am officially staying in Ukraine until August of 2012, an extension of 8 months. After that, I’m not really sure where I’ll go or what I’ll do…so I’m doing my best to concentrate on the work I still have here, which is plenty!

Although it’s a bit strange to watch my friends prepare to go back to America (most of them are in countdown mode now, as they’ll begin leaving between mid-November and December), I’m still glad that I’ll be staying. I can’t imagine being ready to leave in three weeks, or even in a month and a half. I want to stay through the school year and leave when Ukraine is most beautiful — the summertime.

It’s starting to get cold here, and as I enter what will be my third winter in Ukraine, I no longer feel freaked out about the snow, the dark, and the bleak months ahead like I did last winter, and I’m no longer quite as amazed or astounded by little things like I used to be, but I’m still regularly enchanted by what I’ve begun to think of as “perfectly Ukraine momements” — the sight of a kerchief-wearing old woman riding down a village road on a rickety old bicycle; a bright purple house standing unique in the midst of it’s dingy brown-gray-white neighbors; cows tied up to graze in a field now ankle-deep with yellow and orange leaves.

That alone is reason enough to stay, in my humble opinion.

Hope all is well where you are!