I had recently posted a notice here that I would be updating soon. Here it is, hope it isn’t too late.

Over the past two weeks, I have had busy weekends and this one isn’t looking any quieter. A couple of weeks ago I needed to make a quick trip to Kyiv for the Environmental Group I am on. Quick means I slept on a train going to Kyiv Friday night, had meetings Saturday and Sunday and slept on the train back to be back in Lviv Monday morning. But that doesn’t mean the meetings weren’t fruitful. There are developing partnerships with local Ukrainian NGOs as well as the US Embassy and our working group, which is exciting, and some real forward momentum on a summer camp as well as organizing more material for PCVs to use during lessons and make it easy for them to incorporate it into the curriculum.
Another of the added perks was our meeting just happened to coincide with one of the Regional Manager’s band playing at the Marine House. Yes, the house where US Marines live who guard the embassy. It was a going away party for an embassy staffer and we got an invite. Met the ambassador and other staffers and had a great time and open bar. It was a somewhat surreal experience being surrounded by almost entirely Americans in what felt sort of like a college party atmosphere, just with older people. Anyway, we had a good time, probably stuck around for too long, but all was great.

A week later, volunteers gathered together in the Lviv'ska Oblast for some training in human trafficking (it’s a big problem in Ukraine). We got ideas for new training and how to better educate Ukrainians. But since it was also St. Patrick’s Day we all went out to celebrate the saint driving snakes out of Ireland and converting them all to Christianity. We celebrated with green beer. I know there have been questions about where we were able to find it. It was more a case of making it. There is a little confusion to who actually brought the food coloring, but it was a hit as the entire bar we were at ended up with green beer. They didn’t need to know us or even be in our group. They got green beer, or vodka in one case, too. It was good times all around and everyone was in high spirits.
So there you go, all of you who were asking about it, we made the beer turn green. It was kind of cool, mix in two drops of green food coloring and stir it in. Bam, green beer.

I’m sitting in the Kyiv office again; yes I know it is the second time in two weeks, after finishing the volunteer newspaper. It has got a little expensive, but I was able to spend time with my first host family for part of the weekend, so that was fun and saved me some money, now I can actually afford to pay for my way home. New month comes soon so I will have a little bit of cash, which will get me on a short vacation for spring break and prepare for a tree planting project scheduled for the middle of April. I’ll try to explain more of that as it gets closer.