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After landing in Kiev, all seventy four Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) were whisked off to a Soviet era hotel in Chernihiv for a two day retreat to prepare us for life with host families in Ukraine. They split us up into sectors (Community Development, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and Youth Development), and into smaller language groups from there. We dipped our pinky toes into the wonders of Ukrainian cuisine (Hello mayonnaise, potatoes, beets, and tea!), and had introductory sessions on the language, sectors, policies and procedures, and Ukrainian mentality.

Early on, we heard how our trainer has told every group that she’s worked with that they were in Ukraine at the most crucial time yet. She proceeded to tell us that we really are here at the “most crucialest” time. I couldn’t pretend to do justice to what the Ukrainian staff shared with us regarding the state of the country, but I hope to continue to learn and to share more about it at some point in the future. For now, I’ll say there’s a fight for a successful democracy that has been smoldering for decades but that was fanned into a flame fairly recently. Google it, y’all.

The highlight of the training was probably homestay orientation which started off with what we assumed was an over the top skit on what to expect in our first days. Between the five of us in my cluster, I think we’ve experienced 95% of what was portrayed there, so it wasn’t exactly over the top.

Besides walking away with the ability to kind-of sort-of sound out words in Ukrainian, and to greet people (as long as it was only morning or afternoon), I walked away with a serious appreciate of the preparation on the part of Peace Corps staff. It was evident from the moment we were met at baggage claim that PC Ukraine is full of organized, passionate, compassionate, people who are so happy to help. Any question I’ve had has been answered, most times even before I’ve voiced the question myself. I’m excited to continue working with this team over the next couple of years, and to get to know each of them a bit better.

Saturday we had a final preparatory language class, then we repacked our bags, somehow manged to fit them all in a bus, and were yet again whisked off to a new, unfamiliar place, this time with a host family waiting at the other end.

I’ll be spending the next three months in Pre-Service Training in a small village just a few miles outside of Chernihiv. The five trainees that make up my cluster all live on the same street, and our commute to class is maaaaaaybe two minutes, if we walk very slowly or can’t figure out how to open the gate (…guilty). I feel like I lucked out in terms of location, LCF, host family, and cluster-mates. The thought of going out and doing everything we’re supposed to do in the next three months is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating, but I am so ridiculously happy to finally be here. 

I have an address that I can share to get letters until I get to permanent site, and I’d love to use my pen to write something other than Ukrainian vocabulary. Shoot me your address in a message and I’ll send you a letter or postcard from Ukraine!

Hopped on a plane at MIA…

… with a dream and too much stuff.

No, but really. This is the picture I took as my roommate and I were checking out of our room. I guess for two years, it isn’t that much, but carrying everything on my own is a bit of a trick.

 

… with a dream and too much stuff.

No, but really. This is the picture I took as my roommate and I were checking out of our room. I guess for two years, it isn’t that much, but carrying everything on my own is a bit of a trick.

Monday the 7th, I landed in Miami and spent five hours in staging. We did a quick ice breaker, some brief exercises about the Peace Corps, its foundation (Thanks, JFK!), mission, security, goals, expectations, departure logistics, our anxieties and aspirations, a role-playing exercise regarding the core expectations for volunteers, and some final travel directions.

We were lucky enough to have our country director at staging, which isn’t a normal occurrence. After we got our official Peace Corps Volunteer t-shirts and took a group picture, he spoke to us for a few minutes. Besides telling us how great the group is, he talked a bit about the discussion on whether PC is a development organization or a diplomacy organization and said that he lands solidly on the side of it being a development organization, and that we will be trained with that expectation.

Our training group is huuuuuge. There are just over seventy of us, fairly evenly split between the three sectors: Community Development, Youth Development, and Teaching English as Foreign Language. We have people from Mississippi, Michigan, Montana, and most states in between. Some trainees came fresh from their undergrad, some were in the middle of their careers, some are retired. There are many that have traveled the world for years, and for some, this is their first time flying on a plane or traveling past the state next to their hometown. My introvert self hasn’t talked to as many of the group as probably should have, but everyone I’ve talked to has a fascinating story and their own motivations for signing up to spend two years in a new, unfamiliar country.

The next day, we spent some time checking out of our rooms, trekking to the airport, enjoying our last American meals, and not sleeping anywhere enough on the nine hour leg of our travels, and maybe a little bit more on the final two hour leg to Kiev. We made it to Kyiv, sleep deprived and incredibly excited to get started.

Next up: Our first Ukrainian meals, days, and trainings.

T minus seven days

One of the very important Ukrainian phrases I’ve learned.

My final day of work was last Friday, and since then, my time has been filled with see-ya-laters, a stellar good bye party, eating all the Ethiopian, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Chipotle my stomach can handle, and lots of studying Ukrainian.

I moved out of my house Saturday, and am squatting in my aunt and uncle’s basement for the next week, until I fly out to Miami for staging.

For the non-Peace Corps folks reading, staging is where the entire group of Peace Corps Trainees meet up, have a few hours of introduction and preparation for travel, and then everyone flies out together. My understanding is that we take care of a mountain of paperwork, get to know the other trainees, and are given a bit more information regarding what will happen when we finally arrive in Ukraine.

With only six days left here in the US, there’s a list several pages long of things I still need to get done, but I really just want to be there already. It’s been in the works for so long that it feels like it’s time to just get started. Only seven sleeps left though, so I’ll survive.

 

F.Y.I. Vol. 3

I’ve decided to leave up my Nepal F.Y.I. posts, because I still think the things I shared are interesting and worth checking out. Obviously now I’ll be sharing articles about Ukraine instead.

First off, I was fascinated to see this New York Times piece about police overhauls in Kiev. There are a couple of other articles floating around the interwebs that mention police being encouraged to take selfies with the population, and of young people giving up higher paying jobs because they believe in helping to make their country better. I appreciate solid strides towards gender parity and improved police/civilian relations as much as the next person, and I’m curious to see what it looks like in person.

Vogue is not generally my reading material of choice, but they have a super rad article in their February edition talking about vinok, or traditional Ukrainian flower crowns, and how and why they’ve gained popularity in the past couple of years.

Map nerds, you’ll enjoy this collection of ten maps that help explain some of Ukraine’s struggles since gaining independence and the fall of the USSR. The PC Ukraine training manager shared this article with all the incoming volunteers. Now is a fascinating, albeit challenging, time to be working there, and the more I learn, the more excited I am to finally get my feet on the ground.

Finally, this brief article talks about the unexpected variety of Ukrainian/Eastern European cuisine, as shared by a Crimea-born, London-based chef.

 

 

Right ’round, baby

Sometimes I need reminders that most things are absolutely and completely out of my control. Peace Corps is happy to take care of those reminders for me.

The first country I was under consideration for was Moldova. I did all my research and read all the blogs and got so excited about it and the fact that I’d be relatively close to Hungary, and able to visit my friends and host families from the year I spent there.

Not too much later, I received another email saying I was under consideration for Nepal. I spent the next several months preparing for the interview, accepting my invitation, and generally prepping for my departure.

And then… Friday the 29th of January, I got a couple of calls from a number I didn’t recognize while I was in a meeting. They called back. Twice. The fifth time the number called, I picked up and heard “I’m sorry to have to tell you this…” There went my heart to the floor. Due to a lil’ bit of civil unrest, fuel shortages and some other issues, Peace Corps Nepal was unable to find enough sites for all the volunteers they had invited, so they were shifting some volunteers to other countries, and a placement officer would be calling me Monday or Tuesday the following week to discuss the two options they’d picked out for me.

I spent the next several hours spinning, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I wouldn’t be going to Nepal, and that I’d be going somewhere completely different instead, and sooner. Concentrating on anything at work was a challenge, to say the least.

I found the welcome books for each country, searched for blogs, read wikipedia pages and reached out to people I’d kind-of-sort-of met who had served in each country. (I was creepy. I’ll admit it. Did I redownload tinder specifically to ask this guy who served in Armenia to talk to me about his experience? You bet I did. Did I facebook message this girl I met at a party over a year ago who served in Ukraine? Absolutely. My saving grace on this front is that RPCVS are generally super happy to talk about their experience so neither of them seemed to mind terribly. No word yet on restraining orders taken out against me.)

By the next morning, my nerves had settled and I’d mostly managed to find the delicate balance between not liking one country more than the other because the final decision might not be up to me and finding aspects of each countries that I will genuinely enjoy and appreciate should I end up in either place.

The following Tuesday, I was sent the post descriptions and asked to have an answer in to them by the end of the week. That evening, I met up with my bestie at our regular bar where he listened to me go back and forth about the pros and cons of each option for far longer than was necessary. Eventually I made up my mind (ish), slept on it, and responded to the placement officer with my decision. It took two days, but I got the official invitation and now I can finally say with 96% certainty that I will be going to Ukraine as a Business/NGO Adviser Volunteer.

I feel like going to Ukraine takes me full circle. I’m going to a country that neighbors my first home away from home, to a part of the world that I love. I can’t pretend I haven’t been disappointed during this process, but I do trust Peace Corps to have the best interests of the host countries, communities, and volunteers in mind.

I’m excited to see how the next two and a half years go, and I hope I’ll do a semi-passable job of sharing this journey with you on “You Borscht Believe It” (Srsly though, shedding a tear for the beauty that was “Namaste a While”.)

F.Y.I. Vol. 2

This is a beautiful collection of photographs of women in the Terai (the lowland area in the Western section of Nepal) working in forest conservation and community education. Many of the projects mentioned are ones that I have seen PCVs working on in Nepal as well.

READ (Rural Education and Development) is an organization that works to build community libraries and resource education centers. Read more about their work in Nepal here.

Finally, the New York Times shared this op-ed, written by the son of two volunteers to serve in the first Peace Corps group in Nepal in 1962. He went to back Nepal this summer, and walks through his travels in this article.

F.Y.I. Vol. 1

This series may be doomed to failure, but for now it seems like a fun idea. Every once in a while, I’d like to share a couple of things that are related to Nepal, the Peace Corps, food security, or whatever else I find interesting and worth sharing.

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This story is about something I (and I would hope, most Peace Corps Volunteers) think about a lot. Courtney Martin, the author, discusses the pitfalls of what she terms “the reductive seduction of other people’s problems.” Read the whole thing, but appreciate this closing paragraph:

There’s a better way. For all of us. Resist the reductive seduction of other people’s problems and, instead, fall in love with the longer-term prospect of staying home and facing systemic complexity head on. Or go if you must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that “other people” become real people. But, be warned, they may not seem so easy to “save.”

This is an article from August that talks a bit about the role that animals play in Nepali households.

And finally, as a lover of bluegrass, I enjoyed this exploration of the similarities between traditional Appalachian and the music of the Gandharbas, the “wandering ministrels” of Nepal. There are a couple of other clips available on the website, but I particularly appreciated this one:

 

That’s all for now, folks.

Hike Your Own Hike

Photo credit to Eric S. who took my mom and I out for a trek on the Lanipo Mau’umae Trail when we were in Hawai’i last week.

One of my favorite things to do when the stars of money, time, and temperature align is run off to the Appalachian mountains for a weekend. Like any person who remotely enjoys nature as a form of escapism, I’ve contemplated doing a through hike of the Appalachian Trail, and have read as many trail logs as I can get my hands on.

A recurring theme in all of those logs is “hike your own hike”, which is to say, stop comparing yourself to everyone else and find your own measure of success. The veteran ultralight hiker may delight in winnowing their pack down to seven pounds and getting up in the middle of the night to do jumping jacks when their body temperature drops because their tent is essentially a tarp held up by their hiking poles. The technologically inclined may not mind the extra ounces to carry that solar charger on their pack so they can blog/read/have dance parties every night. Those who need a warm body to cuddle with at night may not mind slowing down a bit so that their shorter legged canine friend can keep up.

My point is none of these examples are hiking wrong. They’re making choices that help them achieve what they want to on the trail, and I think it’ll be helpful to keep a similar mindset during Peace Corps service.

It’s easy to find articles like this one that shares ten projects ranging from developing translation apps to building playgrounds, and to be intimidated. My feeling right now, a couple of months out from service, is that those feelings aren’t worth it.

It’s impossible to comprehend what living in Nepal will actually be like for me, and it’s even more impossible for me to predict what the needs and interests of the community will be. Maybe there will be something big that the community needs and that I can help to make happen that will be featured on a buzzfeed article (that’s when I’ll know I’ve made it, right?), but it’s also entirely plausible that there won’t be. That alone won’t be the determining factor of success for my service. Maybe you should remind me of that a year in though, okay?

Medical Clearance

For future/current applicants, I’m writing this while it is still fresh in my brain. For non-applicants, you probably don’t care and can come back later to read posts filled with bad puns and funny stories.

The medical clearance is challenging. No two ways about it. I got my tasks on September 19th and finally got medically cleared on December 28th, after six doctors appointments and multiple visits back to pick up paperwork, ask why it wasn’t done, get it filled in correctly, tell the people working that I really did get that tetanus booster on February 12th 2012 and that I do need proof of it, get more blood drawn because the first batch wasn’t entered into the system correctly, get my TB test read, etc.

Within a couple of days after you receive your invitation, you’ll receive an email or two. The first will remind you that you leaving is contingent upon receiving medical clearance, that you should get your tasks done as soon as possible, and that you need to keep medical updated if anything changes, or if you’re considering changing medication, getting lasik, or an IUD, for you uterus-havers.

If there was anything on your health history form that you filled out during the initial application process that raised flags, you’ll get another email saying that your medical review may take a while longer, and remind you again that you should not make any big changes like quitting your job or getting out of a lease until you’re medically cleared. Obviously, they’re serious about this. Don’t quit your day job. Or your night job.

Included in one or both of those emails will be a link to your map. Pop in, take a look, read the intro message from your nurse and don’t freak out. When I logged in, I had eighteen tasks. Most of them were the standard requests for a physical, immunization records, dental check up, and one was a request for more information regarding a past issue.

Make your appointments as soon as possible.

Be honest– they make it clear that if they find out you were dishonest, you could be sent home at any point. Peace Corps takes volunteer safety very seriously and want to make sure that your site has the resources available to help with any known issues.

For the un- or under- insured, your local Veterans Affairs clinic is an option for some of the shots and the physical, but it may take a little more leg work, as many VAs are not aware that they provide these services to Peace Corps invitees. You can also utilize that #thanksobama hashtag for the ACA taking care of preventative health care for us.

With no desire to talk down to anyone, make sure your name, birthdate, and case number are on everything. I had to resubmit a couple of tasks because I forgot about it, and it’s easier to just do it the first time (Weird, right? No one ever says that about anything else. Ever.) Get the most official paperwork possible, with signatures on anything that might possibly need it. And heck, in the interest of being a responsible adult, keep those files somewhere for future reference.

For less common immunizations, like the yellow fever, check out your local travel clinic, but be aware that you’ll probably have to pay out of pocket. When I looked, most of them in the DC area had an appointment fee of about $85 on top of the cost of the immunization.

From the peace corps reddit, I realized that I was incredibly lucky to be assigned a nurse who checked on my forms within a day or two of my submitting them (Tina, if you’re reading this: you’re a gem!), and let me know if there were issues. She also responded promptly to any questions, and was generous with extensions due to insurance issues and struggles with tracking down medical records. Others have said that they have trouble getting responses to questions, or that their nurses didn’t look at the forms until everything was submitted.

Once you submit all your tasks, you’ll get an automated email from the Office of Medical Services saying they’ve received your submissions. This still isn’t clearance and you could get some fun surprise tasks afterwards. My fun surprise task was a polio booster, which was just added to the list for Nepal volunteers. Once I got that taken care of, and resubmitted the more official paperwork, I got another copy of that automated response, and then a message from my nurse asking me to confirm any prescription or OTC drugs I take on a regular basis and then five minutes and four seconds later, clearance, sweet clearance. There was a congratulatory email, with more reminders to keep medical up to date on anything that changes, and a message from my nurse with requirements regarding glasses, prescriptions, allergies, and another request to keep her updated with any changes. Repetition is a theme here.

I’m happy to answer any questions from the applicant side of things. I also found the peace corps reddit to great if you had a quick question about challenges other people have dealt with. Ultimately though, your nurse is your best, most knowledgeable resource.

Bottom line: Get things done. Quickly. My invitation timeline gave me some leeway in terms of extensions, and as my dentist said “Your history is about as vanilla as it gets.”, so I wasn’t too concerned about not getting cleared, but I still got two extensions and spent many hours tracking down forms.

And so it goes…

Somewhere in the long list of things to do to get ready for Peace Corps service, nestled between getting a polio booster shot and giving my job notice, was come up with a punny blog name and build a page so that my loyal readers (that’s you, fyi) can follow along with as I spend twenty-seven months as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal.

I’m still a couple of months out from departure, so posts will be few and far between, but here it is!

Credit for the name goes to Conor, who is also heading out for two years of Peace Corps service.  We may or may not be having a competition to see who blogs best.