I should consider renaming this blog my recounts of chance encounters of random similarities with people I have never met before. I was on the train back from some training in Kyiv, and I just happened to share a coupe with a guy who has a sister who lives and is a student (I think) in Eugene, Oregon. This is the first time I have found someone who had a strong idea where Oregon really is who isn’t from the U.S. And my Tillamook notoriety, well the cheese’s notoriety struck again as I met a volunteer who extolled the virtues of Tillamook Cheese.

As for the day-to-day activities, as I mentioned earlier I was in Kyiv for a week of Peace Corps training that gave us more information on technical skills as well as language. I haven’t always been real thrilled about previous trainings and found them marginally helpful, but I can’t say anything too bad about this most recent one, it offered pertinent classes and the language part, while it pointed out how much I screw up the, gave a lot of good pointers and correction assistance. Although I am dealing with one of the more complicated languages in the world, I have got to the point, that I am understanding large parts of daily conversation and most basic tasks I can achieve with only some difficulty now. I should be wiring the library where I have been working at pretty soon to network computer together in order to better teach some technical classes and internet classes to townspeople. This was a dream of the director of the library when I arrived and one of the tasks he gave me was to find a local person to help with the work, luckily I ran across a guy during a tour of a school who will be able to help. Once that happened things began moving pretty quickly and I picked up wire and tools to do the job in Lviv on Sunday. Let me tell you, people give you funny looks when you are walking through downtown with 80 meters of Ethernet wire and a staple gun. But I’m looking forward to getting to work and once I get that knocked out, I think I can begin teaching the classes that I keep getting questions about. August is shaping up to potentially be a big month and it will be interesting to actually feel like I am getting some work done, or at least see some fruit of the work that I have been chipping away at presently. I think one of the truest things I have heard about the Peace Corps experience is you will feel useless a majority of the time, but will be remembered for the times that you did something really good, and for the times that you never even knew you helped someone out. So even though I, and other volunteers may feel like they aren’t accomplishing anything, it isn’t necessarily true. It is encouraging to hear that, but doesn’t mean I can try any less hard, but only harder.

And on the recommendation of my mother, a quick account of my last Friday. I woke up at the regular time after returning from Kyiv the day before, hoping to catch up on what had been happening around town and maybe do a little catch up. The thought was in vain, we had an emergency consolidation drill. What that basically means is I get a phone call saying I need to drop everything and go to Lviv immediately bringing my “emergency kit”, which includes my passport, clothes, money food water and medicine. Obviously this is something that has the potential to be important since in the case of emergency it is helpful to think through some of the different contingencies if something did happen, political or natural. But it sure did put me in the frequent visitor category of Lviv and an honorary resident since I went back the next day for a birthday party in the city.

And finally thank you all who have been keeping up on the blog and leaving comments, I know I haven’t responded to all the comments personally, and apologize for that, but the encouragement is always appreciated. But I also want to allow all of you to help direct a little bit of what I write in future posts. If there are particular things you want to hear more about, tell me and I will try to go more in depth about them, either personally or in postings.