Observations

A few little things I’ve noticed in my not-quite six months in country:

The light switches are almost always outside the bathroom. Convenient for not running your hand over the entire wall trying to find it in the dark. Not so convenient if you have prankster friends who like to leave you in the dark.

My host dad joked the other day that he knows how to cheer up any American in five seconds: pull out the camera and say cheese. Ukrainians smile less in photos and at strangers than Americans do, and many of them think we’re a little strange/silly because of it.

Katherine and I practicing our Ukrainian photo faces at the castle. PC: Kyle

Second hand stores are a big thing. Maybe this is just Mukachevo, but I can think of about eight second hand stores off the top of my head. Every store has a set restock day where the prices are the highest, and then they drop a bit more every day. Restock day is a race to find the best goodies, and then a lot of people will head over to the bazaar and resell it there. They sell things by weight in almost all of the shops, which seems way more efficient than pricing every item out. Like any second hand store, you can find some amazing deals if you have time to sift through racks on racks on racks. Peep this perfect Advent calendar sweater that will win me all sorts of prizes at ugly sweater parties:

This country has bread down to an art, which isn’t surprisingly considering it used to be the bread basket of Europe. Sadly, I turn down a lot of it because there is so much other delicious food being offered at every meal that I have no room in my stomach for extras.

Language. Okay, you’re probably tired of hearing about this from me, but the more time I spend here, the more fascinating it is. This past Sunday I spent the day with more of my extended host family and right away heard a conversation that included several Hungarian words, as well as a significant helping of both Ukrainian and Russian. Some of the family live in villages that are majority Hungarian and use it for daily communication, while others barely know ten words. There are also villages in Zakarpattya that are majority Polish, German, or Romanian, where there are stronger cultural and linguistic influences from each of those countries. Here in Mukachevo, I’ve noticed that even people who speak mostly Ukrainian use the Russian yes/da and no/nyet.

There are surprise holidays! These vary by religion, region, city, village, family, etc. I scheduled an English Club a few weeks ago and was confused and a little frustrated when no one showed up, only to be told later that it was a religious holiday that everyone knew about. I’m hoping that after a year I’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, if only because I’ll remember all the surprise holidays that happened!

GLOW-rious

I’ve been waiting for the camp video to be released to the public before sharing this post so take a few minutes and watch this video first. Complete credit for that goes to Hayley, who is a technological magician as far as I’m concerned.

Almost all our girls, on the final day. pc: Hayley?

 

A quick run-down:

We had fifty participants and sixteen counselors holed up in a campsite in a small town in Rivne oblast for a week. Every day had a topic and four lessons that broke down that topic into smaller sections. In the evenings, we had a movie or a disco or a bonfire.

Cabin 8! They came up with a “super” banner design.

It was a wonderful, exhausting, exhilarating week.

If you don’t want a play by play, you can skip down past the picture of the giant uterus (but with a statement like that, you know you’re missing out on some good stuff!).

We started off with a day on gender equality, with a group lesson introducing the topic, then broke up into small groups to discuss women in the media, women in politics, and stereotypes. Although US and Ukraine are pretty similar at first glance, there are definitely differences and it was a great way to start off to help me gain a better, if still basic, understanding of the gender worldview of Ukraine.

Friday was on women in the world, and we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker from International Organization for Migration to discuss human trafficking with the girls. There were also lessons on intersectionality, diversity and multiculturalism, and empathy and tolerance. The speaker on human trafficking spoke in Ukrainian which meant that the American counselors didn’t get much out of it, but in feedback surveys many of the girls listed it as one of the highlights.

In a perfectly unplanned coincidence our sports day, Glolympics, fell on the same day as the opening ceremonies in Rio. We broke up into teams and decorated banners, created cheers, and sported our little hearts out, courtesy of the incredible Katie who introduced us all to Ultimate Frisbee.

We started off Sunday with a quick rendition of Let’s Talk About Sex, just to make sure the girls knew what was up for the day. I’m a firm believer in knowledge is power, and that everyone should know enough to make the correct decisions for themselves, whatever that decision will be. Cristina did an amazing lesson on the female reproductive system that included a larger than life model taped onto the floor.  We were lucky enough to have representatives from UNAIDS and All Ukrainian Network of People Living with AIDS to drop some serious knowledge bombs. A not-so-fun fact is that approximately 1% of the population aged 15-49 of Ukraine is living with AIDS, so it is a real risk for sexually active individuals here. The girls got a lesson on consent, along with some entertaining plays (thanks, Tania!) and a dinner break before starting into the real fun of the day- condom application! To lighten the mood a bit, we blew them up and had a disco to finish the night off.

Our final day of lessons was on self love and featured lessons on self esteem, peer pressure, body image, and a culminating lesson from the magnificent Kathleen called Glorious Me. After an inspiring presentation, the girls made paper versions of themselves, wrote things they like about themselves, then on each other’s cut outs, and we put them up on the wall, stood in front of them and watched Glorious together. It was a moving way to close out the lesson portion of camp.

The final night also included a talent show, followed by an introduction to a vital part of American culture- bonfires and s’mores!

The next day we said a series of good-byes and took probably a thousand pictures as groups of girls set off on their treks home. There were hugs and tears and a lot of selfie sticks.

A very true to life reenactment of sperm searching for an egg from a stellar lesson.

My happiest moments throughout the week were the ones spent in small group conversations after meals or hanging in my hammock, discussing feminism, politics, power, choice, and potential with the campers and with my fellow counselors.

I hope each of the girls walked away with an increased belief in their ability to influence themselves, their communities, and the world at large for the better. They are strong and powerful and smart and creative and glorious and can do hard things and make decisions for themselves that aren’t based solely on the expectations of society. I heard their hopes and dreams for the future and am completely confident that they can go and achieve, and I can’t wait to see it happen.

Mad, mad, mad props to our incredible director Kristie who wrote the grant and pulled the whole camp together in less than half the time that it normally takes. She dealt with all sorts of surprises and came through alive and smiling. I’ll be checking back to make sure she survives closing the grant in a few months after the girls’ projects are finished. ❤ ya, Labs.

Another big thank you and cheesy energizer cheer to all of the other counselors who impressed me with their lessons, their willingness to step in, to quietly make sure things get done (I see you, Sierra!) and their general awesomeness. Tanya, Lina, Katya, Vika, Ira, Olya, Oksana, Maria: ВИ ЧУДОВІ ЖІНКИ. I genuinely cannot imagine a greater bunch of women to do camp with. You so fine.

Finally, although I’m 99.9% she won’t read this lowly blog post: thank you to our incredible First Lady Michelle Obama for Let Girls Learn and Camp GLOW. This March 2015 initiative works with multiple governmental and private organizations to increase girls’ access to education throughout the world to empower them to reach their full potential. Our camp was partially funded through a Let Girls Learn grant, but also through generous donations from friends and family back in the States. A giant Дякую to all who donated!

Hey future Ukraine PCVS!

Hi there 50 (or 51 or 52…),

You’ve basically been bombarded with information since you got your invitation, and maybe before. I’ve watched the facebook group fill with questions about medical clearance that have turned into questions about language and packing and shared joy/distress about how soon staging is. I don’t want to add to that emotional load but I did want to take a few minutes and write to you about my experience and a few words of not-quite-wisdom from someone who was there recently and lived to tell the tale.

Peace Corps is about making friends. Here’s a goofy picture of me with my new pal Ігор the stuffed boar. 

Regarding packing: Don’t stress.

No, but really. It’s hard to think about fitting everything you need for two years into two suitcases and a carry on, but the reality is you don’t need to. You can buy the same toothpaste and shampoo and coffee presses and other such sundry here as you can in the US. Everyone says that they wish they’d brought less stuff because it’s true. You don’t need much. Bring things that make you happy or that you feel really strongly about, whether that’s your teddy bear, a favorite t-shirt, or your hippie shampoo (guilty).

That being said, the things I’m really glad I brought include: nice thermals and warm socks (I wore them until the end of May, but probably only because I’m a cold weather wimp), good quality pens, a bigggg bag of Starburst to share with host families, friends and for those days when I needed a little pick-me-up, card games, my Chacos, a 1 TB hard drive with some of my favorite movies and shows, taco seasoning and hot sauce. A RPCV from Ukraine told me she was glad she packed another whole set of underwear to bring out at the one year mark, so I did the same and think I’ll be thanking her for that bit of advice in a few months. I also brought three adapters (one of these, two of these that I already had), and that’s been more than enough for my computer, phone, and kindle.

Fashion in Ukraine is pretty similar to the US, just maybe a little more colorful, shorter, tighter, sheerer, sparklier, and with more surprising English sayings. Bring your Converse, Keds, or Nikes if you have them, but if you don’t you can buy knock-offs here for pretty cheap. Ignore that bit in the cultural reader about everyone wearing black… I see more bright colors here than I saw anywhere in the States except Hawaii. My work site is pretty casual, so the work clothes I brought don’t really “match”, but I do get to wear jeans, so it’s not all bad.

One other thing about the cultural reader: if you have visible tattoos, don’t worry. Tattoos are fairly popular younger generation, both male and female, and I haven’t heard any negative experiences from volunteers who have them.

I wish I’d spent less money before I came because there really aren’t that many things I bought that I couldn’t get here for the same/less money, and I could definitely survive without all of it. Your dollars go far here, but only if you have them. If you don’t have any money saved up, don’t worry about that either. You get plenty from Peace Corps for necessities and a little fun every month.

If you have a smart phone, get it unlocked and bring it with you. Babusyas have the old Nokia brick type phones, but most of the younger generation have smart phones, and it’ll make it easier to communicate with people in your community and with people back home if you have one.

Get a power of attorney before you leave because if you try to get one notarized here it’ll cost you almost as much money as you get for a month during PST, and will require a trip to the embassy. #personalexperience

Before getting here, I threw these on my keyboard, bought a digital copy of Learn to Read Ukrainian in Five Days, and did Ukrainian Duolingo every day on my commute. Having the alphabet mostly down definitely helped the first few days of language classes. Since I’ve been in country, I found that practicing typing at this site helps me feel productive when my brain can’t handle studying the language any more, but feel free to one-up me and know how to type in Ukrainian before you show up. You’ll amaze Ukrainians, who I’ve noticed generally use the pointer finger typing method.

Read the news. Things have been very interesting in Ukraine the past few years, and it’s helpful to have some idea of what’s going on. I follow EuroMaidan Press and Kyiv Post on facebook, which are both English language newspapers that do a pretty solid job helping me understand. If you have time, read Borderlands and watch Winter on Fire.

The PC Ukraine staff is amazing. They’re super organized and want you to be here and succeed and will provide you all the tools they have available to make that happen. They ask for feedback constantly because they want to make things better for you and for the groups that come after you. Don’t tell the other countries, but our staff may be the best in the world. 😉

Pre-Service Training is rough. I don’t remember hearing about it before I went, probably because by the time someone is well into their service or home from their service, their memories of the hard parts of PST have been replaced with happier ones. Adjusting to a new culture is challenging, and then you add in hours and hours of language, cultural, and technical training, and spending a lot of time working with a small group of people and all the group dynamics that come along with that and it only gets harder. Luckily, it’s only three months and then you get a whole new set of challenges!

This is all from me, and if you asked each of the hundred and twenty or so volunteers that are already in Ukraine, you would probably get a hundred and eighteen different opinions. Take all of them with a grain of salt and know that все буде добре, even if you forget 50% of what’s on your packing list, don’t know the difference between В and Б, and think you know how to dress yourself (your мамаor бабуся will disabuse you of that one pretty quickly).

Feel free to ask any questions here, via email, or on facebook and I’ll be happy to share my perspective on all the things I shouldn’t be writing about in a public setting.

To close, I want to say “Welcome!” You’re lucky to be coming to such a great country, and at a really pivotal time in its history. You can survive packing and saying good-bye and will make it here! You’ll survive PST! And if you’re really, really, really lucky, I know a school in the best city in the best oblast in Ukraine applied for a teacher from your group, and I hear your future site mate is pretty okay.

Good luck!

 

All set!

By which I mean, I’m settled in and happy and am thrilled to announce that I’ve made it to almost two whole months at site!

In that time, I’ve visited three castles, helped with camps that my organization hosted, traipsed around Zakkarpatia, visited Lviv, walked a huge number of kilometers, taken pictures of a few of the dozens of churches here in Mukachevo, chuckled at some hilariously wonderful English t-shirts, enjoyed time spent with other PCVs, said good-bye to volunteers who have finished their time here, taught my host family the joys of jumping photos, listened to dozens of hours of podcasts,  planned lessons for the upcoming Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), been seriously saddened by the news coming out of the US on an almost daily basis, smiled and nodded when I couldn’t understand, visited the local police department, had my picture in the paper, tried (unsuccessfully) switching between English, Ukrainian, and Hungarian in the same conversation, found a favorite cafe with the most delicious lemonade in town, shared the incredibly important cultural relic that is “Don’t Stop Believing”, reveled in the wonders of technology that allow me to see the faces of my favorite people from thousands of miles away, appreciated the kindness and generosity of just about everyone I meet, particularly my host family, planned my first couple of English Speaking Clubs, and generally enjoyed my time here.

My regional manager, who is my first contact with the Peace Corps office, called to check in last week and asked how everything was. She commented on how I’m still as happy with everything as I was when I first arrived, and I smiled and said that’s true. There have definitely been times of frustration, but they rarely last more than a few minutes. (Tangent: Locks and door knobs were my nemesis in Hungary. Ten years has not changed that. One day I spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to lock the door before I went to work. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that I’d have to yank the handle up, turn the key, then pull the handle all the way down. Weird.) I feel genuinely lucky to be in such a lovely city, to be working with an organization that does so much good, and to live with such a delightful host family. These next twenty-two months are going to be good.

I almost always love the too early or too late jumping shots as much or more than the “successful” ones. Here I am with my host brothers and father on an excursion around the oblast.

 

What have I learned?

I’ve learned that shashlik is basically a panacea for all the world’s troubles. I’m not much of a meat eater, but there is something magical about Ukrainian barbecue. I don’t know if the metal skewers they use are imbued with special powers, or if the fires here somehow cause different chemical reactions than they do in the States or what, but this stuff is amazing. I’ve already added shashlik skewers to my list of things to take home with me.

Ukrainian is hard. Wait. Just kidding. I’ve known that since I first started trying to learn this language. Some days I feel pretty good about myself and how my language is coming along, and then I start a new topic in my tutoring sessions, or I try to write a new word down and trip over the four vowels that all sound the same or the virtually indistinguishable “X” and “Г”.

There’s something special about this Peace Corps family. I feel like every time I meet with another volunteer, whether they’re someone with whom I survived PST, or if they were someone nearing the end of their service, they have some bit of valuable information to share. Whether it’s about potential partner organizations, the best places to visit in any given city, or the best way to survive the long train rides that are an inevitable aspect of traversing Ukraine, everyone has something good to share. I caught a glimpse of this before I came here, but this belief has been solidified.

 

Next week is Camp GLOW, which I’ve been looking forward to since I found out about it. There will be eight American counselors, eight Ukrainian counselors, and fifty girls, all spending a week together discussing various aspects of gender equality and generally having a good time. I finished up my last lesson plan today on leadership and representation in Ukrainian politics and am so excited to share all I’ve learned with these girls. I’d promise a blog post update on it, but I don’t want to have to call myself out for lying.

Until next time, faithful readers!

Official at last!

Last  Thursday, all seventy-one of the Peace Corps Ukraine trainees trekked across town or across the oblast to meet our regional managers and to find out where our permanent sites and our partner organizations. This was a moment I’d been waiting for since I arrived, with anticipation building by the day. Thanks to my super-sleuthing abilities (and/or the contributions of current volunteers), I knew that I was either going to end up in Zakkarpatia, the western-most part of Ukraine that borders Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Poland, or Mikolayivska, which borders the Black Sea and Odessa oblast.

The folder with my name on it happened to be on the top of stack when we arrived at the meeting, and I couldn’t help but dance a little bit when I saw that I would be in Zakkarpatia! Transcarpathia is known throughout Ukraine for its beautiful mountains, its unusual language (for reals though- it integrates Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovakian, Romanian and maybe some others?) and fairly distinct culture. I learned I would be living in Mukachevo, a city of about 86,000 people that’s less than fifty kilometers from the Hungarian border, and that I’ll be working with an organization that provides services to vulnerable populations, most notably refugees, asylum seekers, and since 2014, internally displaced people from the conflict in the east. Delighted doesn’t begin to cover how I felt with that news- I’d been not-so-silently hoping for a placement in the mountains, with the possibility of speaking Hungarian on a semi-regular basis, and Mukachevo fit those criteria perfectly.

I’m the orange flag all the way to the right!

The following few  days were spent packing up, enjoying our final evenings with fellow trainees before we were sent off to almost all corners of Ukraine, and saying good-bye to the people who played important roles in our Pre-Service Training- our teachers, students at school, and host families. One of my favorite moments was sitting down with my host mom for our ritual snack and her promising to let me know who the winner of the Ukrainian version of The Voice was, because we watched it together every Sunday evening. Our host families also surprised us with a very sweet and unexpected farewell dinner on Saturday evening, full of my favorite things from my time there- too much food, lots of laughter, and our host moms singing traditional Ukrainian folk songs loudly into the night.

Sunday morning the bus stopped outside the school to take us to Kiev, and after lots of hugs and a few misty eyes, we were on our way. Sunday and Monday were filled with some final informational sessions, a little bit of exploring the city in a downpour, and most importantly, meeting our counterparts. Counterparts in Peace Corps play a vital role. They help us understand our organizations, our roles, and our communities. They help us build relationships with other organizations and figure out what to do with our days. I lucked out on this front (an on-going theme here!). My counterpart, Nadia, is incredibly experienced, well-connected, involved, and passionate. I feel like every time we talk I find out about another project she’s working on and I can already tell that these next two years are going to be incredibly productive.

Tuesday was the big day! We rolled out of bed and into our Ukrainian вушуванкаs, ready for the hour and a half ceremony that would make us official Peace Corps Volunteers (and mean that Pre Service Training was finally and thankfully done). We were lucky enough to have the US Ambassador swear us in, and to hear from representatives of the Ukrainian ministries that sponsor each of the three PC programs. If you’re curious, you can check out news stories on the Swearing In here, here, here, or here. If you watch the first one, you can see me hugging it out with one of my favorite fellow volunteers.

I’m a real Peace Corps Volunteer!

Following Swearing In, we left the hotel in waves, headed off to our respective sites. Six of us got the distinct honor of having the longest train ride- a super fun thirteen hour overnight affair from Kiev to Mukachevo.

In the week since then, I’ve been settling in, spending time with my host family, exploring the city, meeting my colleagues, and finally starting to work. More on all of that soon!

Language Lessons

I went in to our regular hang out spot and accidentally ordered five drinks instead of a half liter, and didn’t realize until the barman started filling up the third drink. Luckily, there were enough people around to help me pay for and consume the drinks, but I still cringe when I think about it.

I decided to go to the post office in Chernihiv to mail post cards home, because the village post office has been out of the stamps I needed two of the three times I’ve stopped by. I reviewed the pertinent vocabulary and ran through it several times as I waited for my turn at the counter. I had managed to ask for the right stamps, confirm that they were all going to the US, and hand over the right amount of money to pay for it all, when the worker asked me another question and I had no idea what it meant. I mumbled “я не розумію.” (I don’t understand.), snatched my change and receipt off the counter and left.

On my way home from the post office, just steps from my house, a man stopped me on the street with a question. I couldn’t make a single word out, so I reused the same parting words from the post office and apologetically placed my ear buds back in my ears.

There are nine ways to say "my". I'm still not sure how many verbs there are for "go."

There are so many wonderful moments I don’t want to forget, but these are different. These provide an opportunity for so much more empathy when I return to the States. The stumbling, stilted, painful conversations happen every day in shops, in schools, in post offices, and in restaurants throughout the world. Many, many, many people who end up in new places, speaking new languages don’t get to spend their first three months in twenty five hours of language training a week, and are left to their own devices to figure out grammar rules, vocabulary, nuances, and slang. There’s no full staff happy to help answer their questions or to accompany them on their first outings to the bazaar or to buy their cell phones.

Hopefully throughout the next two years, these moments will come at less regular intervals, but I want to remember the embarrassment and the frustration, the moments where it didn’t matter how many times I ran through the transaction in my head because there’s always a different phrasing for the same question or there’s a completely different question. I don’t want to forget how I smile and nod and say “так.” because I don’t know how to respond even if I do understand.

Ukrainian is hard. Learning to communicate in a new language, any new language, is hard. It’s also rewarding and fun and I’m glad I’m doing it (most of the time).

Yesterday we had our Language Proficiency Interview and regardless of the specific results, I can think back to my first week here and recognize that I’ve made progress and built a foundation that I’ll contribute to build on for the rest of my time here.

I’m GLOWing!

At the beginning of August, I’ll be a counselor at Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), which is a week long camp dedicated to gender issues in Ukraine such as gender roles, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS awareness. We’ll also be discussing more typical topics you’d expect to see at summer camps in the US including things like healthy relationships, body image, and leadership skills. After the camp, participants will take what they’ve learned and apply it in a project in their community.

Camp GLOW is one facet of ‪#‎letgirlslearn‬, which is a US government initiative that works to ensure that young women throughout the world get the education they deserve. A significant portion of the money shown as still needing to be raised will be covered by a Let Girls Learn grant.

I’m incredibly excited to be a part of this, as a way to work with other Peace Corps Volunteers who recognize and prioritize the importance of gender equality, to gain a deeper understanding of how these issues impact the day to day life of girls in Ukraine, and most importantly, to spend time working with and learning from a group of individuals who have a potential to make a huge difference in Ukraine and in the world. Ukraine is at a pivotal time in its history and I have so much faith in the ability of this next generation to guide its path and shape it into a country that they and their children will be proud of.

I know not everyone is in a financial position to give, but if you are, it will be greatly appreciated. Each girl is being asked to contribute $12.50. For less than the cost of a dinner out, you can send a girl to camp for a week. You can donate here, and learn more about the camp here.

If you do donate, I would love to send you a small thank you in the mail (and who doesn’t love mail?).

Snapshots

You know how there are little moments that you have that perfectly encapsulate an experience? I want to share a few of those.

The other day, I went in to one of the four village shops to buy a bottle of water. I didn’t have enough change, and the cashier didn’t either, so I got my change back in the form of a box of matches.

Yesterday, I went out to the soccer field to study. A couple of the kids who live right across from it were there playing. The little boy, who can’t be more than five, walked up with his toy trucks and a toy shovel and chattered about them for a couple of minutes. I kept smiling and nodding, until he asked if I understood, at which point I had to say no because he was speaking Surzhyk -the mix of Russian and Ukrainian- and I’m only learning Ukrainian. At this point he shakes his head in exasperation, mutters something under his breath, and walks away. Not five minutes later, he brings me a handful of flowers and says something else I don’t understand, grins, and walks off again.

An outdoor drawing activity with our 6th grade English Club.

While I was sitting down eating lunch with my host mom on Sunday, I asked her what she was doing afterwards. She said she was going to go cut grass for the rabbits. I replied that I wanted to help, and she shrugged a bit and went off to work on something else. I heard her walk outside, so I dashed outside to meet her before she left and told her again that I wanted to help (this is a source of interest and frustration in Ukraine- you must ask something three times to get to the answer that people really mean). She grabbed an extra knife and bag for me and off we walked to the nearby dry riverbed. She pointed out which grass she wanted to take to the rabbits and we quietly filled our bags. Just as we were finishing, the storm that had been threatening to start all day began and there was no chance we were going to make it home remotely dry. Luckily the one bridge in town was also right there, so we huddled under it and waited for the rain to take a break. We chatted a bit and took turns making predictions about when the rain would stop. Once we were convinced we’d be able to make it home mostly dry, we made the short trek back home and gave all the rabbits their first round of freshly cut grass.

The other day in language class, we were asked to share about someone interesting we’d met the day before. Seeing as this was a Tuesday morning and the thriving nightlife in the village is relegated to Friday and Saturday nights, I had to make something up. I made up a little more than I meant to when I said “Last night, I met an interesting голутбці (holuptsi).” I was confused when my language teacher started laughing hysterically, until she explained that I was saying I met an interesting stuffed cabbage roll, rather than an interesting boy (хлопцш– hloptsi). I find comfort in the fact that I’m definitely not the only PCT to have done this. Besides, those stuffed cabbage rolls definitely rank higher on my favorites list than most guys a majority of the time.

Pre-Service Training is, thankfully, wrapping up soon. Our final meetings at the school are next week, we have a long list of paperwork to complete and get sent in by the 22^nd, and the following week we have our language exam and finally find out where each of us will be for the next two years. We swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers on the 31st, and leave for our sites with our new counterparts the following day. 

Life on the SS Caterpillar

It’s hard to believe that we’re solidly past the halfway mark for Pre-Service Training, and that we’ve been in country for almost two months.

In that time I’ve:

• Eaten my weight in both mayonnaise and cookies
• Spent approximately 135 hours in language classes
• Taken dozens of pictures of the village animals. Chickens and ducks and cats and rabbits and horses and cows and dogs! Oh my!
• Told my host mom that I really like my cookies without butter around twenty times
• Accidentally locked my host mom in the house
• Been locked in the house by my host mom
• Taken daily group photos with my clustermates and whoever else happens to be around
• Co-planned a Peace Corps Prom for one of the nights all 72 volunteers were in the same place
• Seen countless beautiful old churches
• Visited Kiev twice
• Sent off my first batch of post cards to friends and family back home

 

Things feel familiar in a strange way. My fingers no longer fumble for the light switches in the dark, but if you asked me what the word for light switch is, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. My first days here, I couldn’t figure out how to open any of the gates, and ended up standing outside on the street waiting for someone to open one from the other side on multiple occasions. Now I know exactly how hard I have to yank the handle up to free the latch to be able to get into my house, and that the gate to my teacher’s house slides rather than lifts. Even so, I still couldn’t figure out how to lock the door when I left the house two days ago, and spent several minutes struggling before calling a friend to come help.

I also find myself almost always saying “we” rather than “I”, not out of some newfound sense of royalty, but because I spend almost all of my time with the four other trainees assigned to the same village. We have four hours of language class a day, various technical trainings, a community project to plan and implement (more on that later!), English clubs to teach, and various attempts at community integration thrown into the mix. I definitely feel like I lucked out– they’re a bunch of fun, funny, interesting, motivated people. We work incredibly well together and still manage to enjoy each other’s company after upwards of sixty hours together every week. The blog title comes from the team name, the Caterpillars, that somehow stuck and has become a rallying cry for us and probably a source of annoyance for anyone that isn’t us.

At Arrival Retreat, they warned us that life during PST is often like living on a submarine. I haven’t spent much time underwater, so I can’t really speak to the truth of that statement, but the point they were trying to make is definitely valid. It’s a relatively high stress situation, we have limited control over almost everything, and it is much more pleasant if we all recognize that we’re all in this together.

My blogging will most likely continue to be sporadic at best, but I have been surprisingly consistent at daily instagram posts. You can follow me at @truthandliza to get your fill of cute animal pictures and sometimes unrelated captions about the Peace Corps life.

I would include some of those cute animal pictures, but the internet is having none of that uploading photos business right now.

Happy Spring, Almost

Not even a full day after arriving in the village, the best cluster in Peace Corps Ukraine 49 (sorry, everyone else…) experienced the folkloreish wonder that is Maslena.

There was dancing. There was music. There were pieces of wood being tied around unmarried and confused PCTs arms.

There were boots being kicked very high.

And not so high. There were blinis (crepes) eaten, and a tray with vodka and slices of fat passed around and passed up.

 

 

 

There was May Pole-esque dancing.

There were potatoes being thrown into a basket.

In Orthodox tradition, Maslena signals the start of Lent. If we dig into Slavic mythology, Maslena is a festival that celebrates the end of winter and a welcoming of spring. The sub-freezing temperatures and light flurries didn’t exactly scream vernal delight, but I’m optimistic that the aftereffects from burning the effigy of winter (I think…) will kick in any day now. (Hello, global warming. Are you there?)

 

It was a pretty surreal start to our time in this little town we’ll call home for the next three months.

In the days since then, I’ve spent a fair amount of time sitting in my LCF/Language and Cross Cultural Facilitator’s house, studying the language. We’ve trekked into Chernihiv for community development sector training, medical meetings that included shots and a safe sex chat with an unexpected lifelike accessory. Last week Thursday we met with the village administrator to introduce ourselves and chat about potential projects. This week we met with two other potential partner organizations to introduce ourselves and see what projects they have available. My days have been filled been filled with happiness at the wonderful people I’m lucky enough to have surround me and the inevitable frustration that comes along with being illiterate and unable to form simple sentences. Sadly, unlike a two year facing the same struggle, it isn’t exactly socially acceptable for me to throw myself on the ground, screaming and crying. Still, I find myself picking out more words by the day, and celebrating the small successes like being able to understand my host mother asking what time classes begin in the morning.

Cheesy as it may be, I’m choosing to think about Maslena not only as a welcoming of spring, but a welcoming of a season in my own life where things begin to grow. The foundation I lay here in this village during PST will hugely influence my successes over the next twenty-seven months, and I’m ready. I think?