I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in Chicago. But I am too worn out to fill in the blanks, so expect it in the future. Enjoy what is here. I'll get more down later.

16 December

So while that name day is over it is high time for the next holiday this month, on the 18th-19th. Basically the Ukrainian St. Nicholas Day for those of you who celebrate it in the states. Otherwise commonly known as Santa Claus in many circles. The basic idea surrounding it is as I understand is you write a letter to St. Michael of what presents you want and it is a gift giving day. Christmas day itself in this country is Jan. 7 (which happens to be the day I get back in country) and is mostly a religious holiday and a day when people visit one another, other holidays surrounding it include the gift-giving aspect found in American Christmas. Like I said, Ukrainians just like to party!

This past Thursday I went with students from the eighth form to watch a play and look at a display of wax people. My Ukrainian language tutor invited me. While the wax museum was mildly interesting, it was the play I found more interesting, although I won’t dare say I understood all of it. From what I understood, it was a group from the Ivano Frankisk Oblast where the play was also set. Much of the language was also an older dialect familiar to the area, which probably contributed to the fact I wasn’t following it all, plus the fact a professional photographer with a really nice camera was there taking pictures, I was jealous.

The play centered around what I assumed was a small village and followed them as they celebrated several different celebrations, including Christmas, Easter and a marriage. The parts Although I didn’t always understand all of the language, it was well acted and I could follow along pretty well from just the actions. It was a really enjoyable night and I will put some photos I took on my Flickr site. I was seated in the front row plus (explanation: there was a front row of regular seats and then a row of chairs in front of that. I was seated in that row of chairs with other students, which meant I got a REAL good view of what was going on. But by the end of the night my head had about enough of Ukrainian and was ready for bed. Made for a long day.

But this past Friday found me in the old town of Zhovka where fellow PCV Shelley Swendiman works and was helping host an English Week capped with an English day. Four English speaking countries and Ukraine were presented during an “summit” for these different countries to explain a little about their cultures. Five of us volunteers made the trip to help her out and basically be the American guests for the summit. It’s always fun to see how Ukrainians view other cultures from their studies and is enlightening to me as well since I am sure we have some of the same stereotypes about other cultures that we try to study, but don’t always have a full idea of what is going on. One example was the American group dressed up in “cowboy” outfits that wouldn’t be very practical if they were actually out on the range. But it is how they view American culture, for better or worse, and put a lot of work into their presentation. Overall it was an interesting night and I learned more about other countries I hadn’t know very well before and other things I did. For instance Canada has a large automobile industry, I guess. But the kids seemed to have a good time at it and enjoyed having the Americans there. The highlight of the night was the Canada group’s choice of song. Each group had to perform a song from their country. Canada chose, wait for it, Celine Dione “My Heart Will Go On” and chose a guy to be the lead singer. Yes, a guy dressed up in a wig, short skirt and balloon boobs. It was extremely disturbing and hysterical at the same time. Oh, the performance was entirely performed by candlelight as well. Let’s just say it left all of us in shock, and awe of the guy who had guts to do that. He knew the words too. Team America’s representation of Britney Spears had nothing on him.

One of the places I have had the hardest time really adjusting is the lack of people my own age to hang out with in my own town. That is slowly adjusting as I’m meeting more people my own age and had the luck of meeting one guy early on in my service here playing basketball, but didn’t see for a while. A few weeks ago, maybe a month ago I ran into him again and he expressed an interest in playing again, we had stopped playing over the summer. I said I would try to find a place to play, but wasn’t having much luck so I guess he took matters into his own hands and called me saying he had arranged for the local professional school’s gym so we played last week and this week. It has also allowed me to meet about a half dozen other guys who are about my own age at least in that environment, haven’t really interacted much with them outside the gymnasium, but maybe that will happen later. Any way I look at it, it is an improvement and even fits into my role as a youth developer as far as I can tell. Just part of my 24 hour work day.

(Note: I posted a partial packing list for potential Peace Corps Youth Development Volunteers in Ukraine in my supplemental materials section)

A couple unrelated stories for you:

I often say every day holds some new lesson for me in this country, whether it be cultural, professional or personal. Today one of those lessons was cultural, it is not entirely uncommon sight to see a funeral procession, but until today it had always been at a distance. I have always observed a lot of respect for the dead, cars will pull over and stop if they are going the opposite direction and we even stopped a football (soccer) game when one passed by at a distance. But today was the first day I was faced with one head on. Without a clue what exactly to do, I fell behind a woman who had also just gotten off a marshrutka. I observed her stop as the procession reached her.

(Quick description of a funeral procession – a banner bearer leads the procession while what I assume is the families follows immediately after accompanied by a priest. The coffin is what I have always seen to be an extremely old flatbed truck for viewing. The truck is followed by more mourners. I also assume that they all go from the church to the cemetery. All the assumptions are because I haven’t actually attended a funeral yet.)

She stood still until after the truck passed her by and started walking again. As she walked by me she told me to start walking again as well. With that I had my new lesson on how to hand a funeral procession I am not in.

Name Days
I swear it seems like there are constantly new holidays in this country, people laughed at me when I said it felt like every day is a holiday, but I swear every week must have some new holiday or celebration. There are what in English is called name days, Today is Andriy. Not sure of the exact origins of the celebrations, but most everyone in this country has names originating from the Bible (if they don’t, they’re weird) and holidays have been put aside to celebrate as far as I can tell, almost every name people are called here. It generally involves drinking and congratulating those with the same name as the day. For whatever reason, I noticed this one more; maybe because there is a little witchcraft thrown in I didn’t see in other ones. I had heard the holiday would be the next day but didn’t understand why girls were literally running around the school with pieces of paper and signatures on it. Still not sure of the exact reasons, but it has something to do with who their future husband will be. It looked close to chaos to me, plus boys seemed to be trying to steal these papers, for whatever reason that meant. I also heard of another bit of magic of throwing boots through doors and if it landed a certain way it would mean you were bound to get married that year. All of these were what girls did, don’t know if there is anything particular boys do on this day.

What I find funny, or at least interesting is how this country has in its own way combined old pagan traditions with the newer Christian traditions, yet still keeping them traditional and not completely overrun with commercialism. I say that because I know the west has fused pagan and Christian ideas as well, example, Christmas. But I love to see the two parts go together because there are the old traditions, jumping over fires last summer for Ivana Kampala and these superstitions of throwing boots. Funnily enough, they tend to include marriage in their plans.

In religion and teaching I have never been a fan of preaching, sitting in front of the class or congregation and talking or sitting I the class and congregation and just listening. But at the same time in my work here I wonder if I am having any impact at all, or whether that impact is something I may just never be able to witness personally. In that same vein, is preaching more effective or just shows its results more quickly, whether they are lasting or not.

This past week has absolutely flown by and I don’t exactly know where it went, I know that I feel as if I have been busy, but maybe I’m being too impatient in wanting to see some sort of result from my work. That probably comes at least partially from working at a newspaper and being able to see my work in print every week. Or even when I was working in a warehouse where I could witness the boxes I packed multiple times every day. Teaching and development is a different beast I’m still figuring out how much I like or not. Results may be more profound but I may never actually see those results.

When I joined the Peace Corps, I tried to keep the mindset that if I was able to change one person’s life for the better I could count my service a success. Along the way, my expectations seemed to have inflated. I still try to convince myself of the goal of helping just one person, while at the same time trying to involve myself in as many people’s lives as I can. Is it because I am feeling insignificant, am I applying a scattergun philosophy to my original idea because I don’t know who I may end up influencing, or is this simply how working is ending up for me? Maybe somewhere along the way I got the crazy idea from looking at super volunteers and witnessing what wonderful projects other people were accomplishing I made the fatal mistake of trying to measure my success against other peoples’. I can’t become complacent in the work I’m doing, but at the same time, how far should I push myself and when are the standards too high, or not high enough?

In maybe a partially related subject, but not entirely, a volunteer who recently completed her service, she’s been referenced before in my blog, Liz Baltaro, had her grandmother (she’s 82 and came to Ukraine) visit her in the last two weeks of her service. I had the honor of being able to meet the genuinely interesting woman. She had been to Kyiv once before when it was still communist along with being a lot of other places in world, like I said, an amazing woman. But what she did help me do was start to crystallize what I may be interested in doing after service. I’m still holding that my experiences here will help mold what my future will hold, but suggestions she had, such as the Foreign Service rung true with previous ideas I had held, and helped with some positive reinforcement. So who knows exactly where I will end up at the end of these two years and doing what, but I’m sure she will have an impact on it even if it is just from the one meeting.

In completely unrelated news, in case you hadn’t heard, I will be making a trip back to the U.S. this month into early next month. I have tickets into Portland on the 22nd and back to Ukraine on the 6th of January. The main reason being Aaron Wirick is getting married. I told him to wait until I got back, but I guess he couldn’t wait, didn’t listen or just knew I would come back anyway (smiling yet Aaron?). So I will be in California from Dec 26 to Dec 31 for the wedding and the rest of the time in Oregon. What exactly I will be doing in Oregon is still up in the air, but if you’re around, I’d love to meet up with you. I want to celebrate well on my birthday too; it’s on Dec. 31, in case you forgot. So drop me an email, comment or call me at home if you know that number, I have a mobile phone in Ukraine, but will go back to no phone in the states, strange… So until next time, take care.

When I start getting comments that I haven’t updated in a while and it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, I realize how time has flied, even if most of the time I don’t feel like I have accomplished all that much.

A big part of the reason for my rather tardy update is I have been at least a little bit busy, traveling to Kyiv last weekend to work on the Ukrainian Peace Corps newsletter that is sent to every volunteer in the country and other people in the country, not exactly sure all where it goes. There are three of us editors that met, although I didn’t write anything. It isn’t exactly as exciting as it sounds since we are little more than spell-checkers and page-designers, but it was a chance to do something different and feel as if I really do have at least a few skills in this country. The other big part of that was the meeting just happened to be convened on Thanksgiving. There was a flurry of SMSs between volunteers with the congratulations, but it definitely didn’t feel the same in this country, except all the staff at the Peace Corps office had the day off. We had our own little celebration by going out to TGI Friday’s and later that evening I went out with one of the other editors and we actually caught an American football game. The beers were ridiculously expensive, but watching Joey Harrington win a game on Thanksgiving was fun. We finished up by early that next afternoon and I took off for the weekend to visit my host family and get out of Kyiv, It is nice to visit, but I can’t stay there for very long because it is so prohibitively expensive on my budget. Plus it is much more fun to hang out with my host family.

While there I ended up in the church in town during a tour of the town I gave to the current LCF (Language and Cross-cultural Facilitator), who is teaching the new trainees in the town Ukrainian. I had seen the church plenty of times from the outside and I had just given her a pretty extensive tour of town. Inside felt Orthodox and I lit the first candles of my life in a church. While I tend to be hesitant of many of the traditions these follow, I found it to be a fulfilling experience. Understanding the traditions behind it and being able to worship in my own way while observing some of the Eastern traditions was good. These experiences will definitely influence my faith when I do return to the states. How and in what ways is hard to tell now, but I will be more aware of traditions and appreciate them. In some ways I wonder if America has tried to break away from some of these types of European traditions, it forgot the meaning behind them that can be so powerful. Not that I am going to endorse all the different parts, I am not all that comfortable with the amount of icons, but simple acts of lighting candles and the openness of the church that anyone can walk in during the day was appreciated. But in that same train of thought I will be looking forward to being able to have some of those deeper theological, religious and social discussions that I enjoyed back in the states, that is not a common occurrence for me here.

But my traveling brought me back to my site Monday morning, the overnight trains are a blessing and a curse, and we got to work trying to get the newspaper issue here ready to print. Things haven’t worked quite as smoothly and have reinforced my opinion that volunteers don’t always have good and bad days, but rather good and bad hours. How’s that for the ability to really screw with your head? Today was a combination of the two as I have been behind on the production, mainly because I’m allowing the students to do as much work as possible and that means things get done slower. At least it will be a lesson at the same time. At the English club I missed last week I was told when I arrived this week they missed me, but the same day I found out that the library containing all the files for the needed for the newspaper were locked away for the day. So is life here.