Well, now that the history has been updated a little bit about what has been going on in my past I want to put a little more recent news up. I arrived at my permanent site at the end of last month and you may have been following some of the goings on through pictures, but that can't exactly tell the whole story.
It is impossible to entirely wrap up what has happened here in the past three weeks, but I have been bouncing around between organizations at this point trying to get a hold of different goals and hopes people have. The best way to describe it is through "ups and downs", a saying that has been repeated by other new volunteers I have talked with as well. You will have your good and bad days, but overall, it is hard to adjust to a new community where you do not understand everything said to you and often do not have any good outlets for expressing frustration or glee.
But I think what is always more enjoyable to read are little anecdotes from daily life and yesterday had several of them.
What yesterday day did was fulfill two of the stereotypes that are talked about in training, one of them I had prayed would never happen to me.
To set the scene it was early yesterday afternoon and the temperature had peaked at 30 degrees, centigrade, in the mid 80s for all of you in the states. I needed to go to an adjacent town for a meeting with the regional administration and help out at a summer camp a bit. That requires me getting on a mini bus crammed with people, already a bad situation with a bunch of sweaty people. But to make matters worse, there is a fear of having open windows on moving vehicles, the theory is: you will get cold, then sick, and finally die. So as we are getting started I am enjoying the bit of a breeze from a window that was already open, then two older women start complaining about the open window. So of course they get closed and I commence to sweat buckets. About 30 minutes later I finally get to my destination, walk off the bus in a rather poor mood being cooped up in there, but having to laugh at the same time. Summer is going to suck for transportation.
Second funny story revolves around how we are told to expect to be rock stars at some point during our time in country. My first experience was during victory day celebrations, where I was asked to speak 30 minutes before they wanted me to give a speak, in English to be translated. You may have seen those pictures. But the more recent incident happened when I was asked to speak at a summer camp, same day as my min-bus incident, only later. So I had a nice spirited discussion with the kids there in a combination of English and Ukrainian, they were early teens I think, or maybe 11-13. At the end of it, they (all of them) wanted my signature. I didn't really take it seriously until they brought out a piece of paper and I commenced to sign my name, 20 times. Then they all came back and wanted me to write out my name so they could actually read it. Can't say I had signed signatures before, but there are now 20 kids out there with a little slip of paper with my name on it. Strange.
So there is a brief update about me, Enjoy, leave comments and I hope to put more up soon.