This may go down as one of the more eventful months in my Peace Corps service and I haven’t even had a major project yet to include in the reasoning. That is next Saturday. This isn’t even including the political on-goings in Kyiv either.

On the 8th was Easter; most of you probably already knew that, may have even celebrated it yourself. Here in Ukraine, at least in western Ukraine, it is a big deal. I had the pleasure of spending it with the director of my school and his family in a village. In order to get the best traditions, it is always better to visit the villages. This was no exception, except I did get a few extra little treats to experience as well. I’ll get into those later.

While Easter is Sunday, the celebrations start the day before, so my director, Vacil picked me up and took me to the village with his family. I got a chance meet the relatives and see a house he is in the process of developing there. Visited the church in the evening and was able to see a picture of Jesus in repose. I’ll post some pictures of that. After about an hour at church we came back and had a meal at the family’s house and then began to wait for midnight to come when a crowd gathers again in the church for the blessing of food. Each family brings a basket with a special round bread, meat, eggs and maybe sausage as well. All exquisitely decorated. The priest will then spray holy water on the basket and people, blessing the food. Only I kind of missed that part. We arrived at the church at about 1 in the morning and commenced to stand for about two hours. Walking out of the church into the courtyard was dark and people gathered around for the blessing. As I was walking with Vacil behind the crowd looking for his wife I found an open manhole, well, my foot found no ground and I fell into a pipe sticking out of it used to draw water. Let me remind you I was still in the courtyard of this church.

(Side note: This isn’t exactly the first time this has happened, but the first time I was in training and playing football (soccer) and on the field backed into one. Didn’t hurt myself, but did remind me there is no safe place. People stealing manhole covers is a widespread problem in Ukraine because they are then resold for cash as scrap metal. Go figure.)

I was wearing a heavy leather jacket, plus several other layers of clothing, but still got the wind knocked out of me pretty severely. For several second I couldn’t breath at all, but made it back to the house. I had a pretty nasty mark on my side even though there were no holes in my clothing. But as it hurt pretty bad, there was the decision to go to the hospital and get me checked out, at about 4 in the morning. Hospitals in Ukraine don’t have the best reputations and tend to look like there is a time warp straight to the 1950s. Well, I can tell you it does look pretty much like something straight out of the 50s after I had an x-ray at 5:30 in the morning as well as a sonogram about that time. However the people were all really nice. That is the part people here have a hard time believing. They say it is just because I’m the American. Well, whatever works for me I guess. Although I was checked out by about 5 different doctors, plus several other technicians and specialists. But after the end of it all, it ended up I didn’t break anything, I was concerned I may have broken a rib, but just was going to have a really bad bruise. It must be pretty bad, cause it is still giving me some problems, although it is better, just don’t touch it. So that was one weekend. I was hoping to get a feel of Ukrainians traditions over Easter and did have some of that, but also ended up seeing a part of Ukraine I had heard I would want to avoid, yeah, if you can I would recommend avoiding it.

After a long week at site I was hoping to relax this weekend a little bit and took off to spend the day Saturday with Ira and her mom, took apart a printer and declared it dead. Also helped picked out a new TV and microwave for them. But that wasn’t exactly the exciting part. On my bus ride back I was mostly asleep listening to music, believe Bush was playing at the moment when I was awoken by a huge crash. I thought maybe the bus had blown a tire, although it was a pretty large sound. No, a car had broadsided the bus right about where I was sitting. No one was going very fast so no one was hurt although the car looked like total loss. How could a car hit the side of a bus you might ask? Driver was drunk, as in really drunk and it was hard to get much of anything out of him, he ended up walking away and disappeared. That left the bus driver kind of in a spot so he took the license plate since the guy was too drunk to sign his name and we all signed a piece paper saying what happened. The bus wasn’t badly damaged, with a small dent in a baggage compartment. It just held us up for about 45 minutes. My day wasn’t even over yet when I finally arrived home I realized I had left my keys to my apartment on the desk at Ira’s parents, a good 2 hours away. So I ended up spending the night at my host families since my landlords and extra key were out of town.

What can I say, it just hasn’t been the best of months for me so far, I’m hoping it can only get better. Wish me luck on my tree-planting project this Friday. Have about eight PCVs showing up and who knows how many people from the town.