8 October

I’ve been told that I write too much by one girl who reads my blog, I guess the best I can do is apologize and say I will try to do better, although that can be rather hard to do. What I will try to do is split it up into more bite-size pieces so that you read a little bit at a time.

I need to back up quite a bit to talk about a couple of weekends ago that I haven’t had a chance to enter my own little bit of commentary about. The last weekend of September was Lviv’s 750 birthday, anniversary, whatever you feel like calling it. However you want to attach a label to it, it was a call for a gigantic celebration, massive concerts, fireworks, laser show, four million people in a city of one million. It was kind of a big deal. So I had plans to meet up with a couple of my Ukrainian friends,, one of them said she (Ira) thought I write too much, tough. So I met with them a little after noon, ran into a bunch of other PCVs where we hung out, drank beer and enjoyed a watching a heck-uv-a lot of people. Somehow as we headed to one concert we got separated, from the group, I split off with my Ukrainian friends and to make a long story short. I didn’t see any of the concerts, laser light show and only a nice red glow in the sky from the fireworks. One of the girls I was with came down with a really bad headache and that required talking our way into a dormitory where one of them lived and wasn’t supposed to host guests, drama enough with that and hide out there for the night until the shift changed. Because of that I didn’t exactly see a lot of the festivities Saturday night, although I did have a place to sleep better than the train station, sorry for those of you who did sleep there. But my oft-repeated line that night and my true belief is a person’s health is more important than any celebration, even if it only happens once every 750 years and has some of the biggest bands in Ukraine. Oh well, if I’m supposed to see them while I’m here, I’ll get another chance.

But I did get to see a lot more on Sunday as you can witness from my pictures posted on Flickr. What made the least sense was the enormous cake that we stumbled upon at about 10:30 a.m. or so and gathered wouldn’t be cut until 1 p.m. I don’t have that much patience and I don’t know if I want to try and push my way to the front to get any cake that’s been melting in the sun for that long anyway. Instead I went with Ira to check out a medieval celebration and ended up running into a Canadian and American tour group. Funny who you run into when you speak English in public. One thing I have found out is that part of a PCV’s mission is to inform others about what we do and more about the program in general, there is really too little information about what exactly we do and where we do it. It’s just part of the PR of the job, and I was ok with it. Talked to them for a really long time and I was late for a football game I wanted to make, which happened to be the final, they lost anyway. The funniest part of it was it looked as if I was leading a tour for a while because we were standing in the busiest walkway in the park we were in and the two of us were surrounded by people and I was talking a lot of English, which attracts a crowd anyway, but I probably had at least 15 people (probably more) at one point listening to what I said, whether they all understood me or not, I don’t know.

My week itself wasn’t all that enlightening, it was a typical work of journalism classes, English clubs and trying to be creative in coming up with ideas. The best of those came from an American music lesson where I went into different styles of music and introduced students to some artists they had never heard of before. Any one heard of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles? They hadn’t.

Most recently I found myself in a neighboring town of Sokal again. I had done helped a volunteer who lives there with a summer camp and a project stemming from the summer camp was a sports day that was held this past weekend. Since I had been involved in some obtuse way in the development of the project, they wanted me to be there and I was happy to help out. Side note: they also had developed a film to combat drugs and alcohol during the summer camp. I got a credit at the end of the film, awesome…

Ended up I didn’t need to do a whole lot at the event, it was basically a sports day with different activities, sack race, standing long jump and tug-of-war to name a few. The most I had to do was walk around and take pictures, I can manage that much. Check those out on my Flickr account and I’m sure that Liz will have her own account on her own site.
Ok, she doesn't but maybe she will.

Ok, it's a little old, but I haven't had time to write a new one or post this earlier. Hopefully a new one will be out in a few days.

28, September

As what seems like a usual occurrence, I am finding myself trying to catch up on my blog after an eventful week. Days can often feel as though they crawl by, but events seem to pile up. I guess I should start where I left off with a planned trip down through Muckachevo and visiting a fellow volunteer Robert in Irshava. My original plan was to get out of my site Friday afternoon, get a marshrutka in Lviv and be there that evening. Only problem I didn’t take full respect of was that there is about five or six different bus stations in Lviv and I hadn’t been to the one that his left from. To make a long story short, I ended up seeing three different stations, none of them what would give me a straight trip, it got late and I ended up going home and trying again on Saturday. Saturday didn’t end up a whole lot better and I took a marshrutka part of the way to a second town and waited for another bus to take me the rest of the way. The roundabout way ended up taking me a total of almost 12 hours to get to his site and left me exhausted. I took the train back and had a travel time of about six hours.
The most memorable part of the trip, other than riding a lot of marshrutkas around Lviv and standing around bus stations was entering into the Zacarpatska Oblast. They have what you call a checkpoint there where all people have their documents checked. As per the norm, the documents that Peace Corps instructs us to carry around get raised eyebrows and in this case got me asked to follow a nice young army boy to talk to his supervisor cause I didn’t have the normal passport. After a few moments and a rather quickly beating heart of mine the supervisor handed my documents back to me and waved me away. Probably I wasn't worth his dealing with. But I got plenty of strange looks from other passengers on the bus when I re-boarded. Driver asked if that was all and we took off. It was smooth sailing after that.
One remark I can make right off is the people in that Oblast have one of the best placements in this country, it was just gorgeous there, mountains, streams, rivers, wow. I’m jealous of him and I like my site, although the coal power plant isn’t much of a tourist attraction. My time there was short, we hung out, caught up a bit and before I knew it I was back on my way to Muckachevo the next day. Just to make things interesting, we found out the only marshrutka straight to Lviv from his site left at about 7 that morning, I didn’t wake up until 9, nor did we bother to check. So I headed back to the aforementioned city and in the process met a girl who was my guide for the day, Anya. She made sure I had my train ticket (I took a train back, it was just as fast and less hassle) and even ended up in church, first time in this country. Back-story on her was Rob and I were talking in the bus station, she overheard us speaking English, and inquired about it, she has been studying English for about six months, she said, and was eager to talk more. So we struck up a quick friendship. She had been learning English from an American missionary from the Reformed Church, I am not sure about their particular doctrine, but she was eager for me to come to church, even for a little bit, and I confess to being interested in meeting the missionaries. A lot of the service was in Russian from what I could understand, at least the song lyrics were, but I had to boogie out early and catch a cab back to the train station and end up crashing at another volunteer’s place because I didn’t get into Lviv until late. So there is a very brief and cursory glance at that weekend. Other stories I’m sure have been left out, such as an extended explanation of Rob, myself and another volunteer at a disco and talking to school students about studying music in the U.S. But I did warn that plenty has happened and I want to give you the best overall view possible.

Monday had me returning by the first marshrutka home and then preparing for English clubs the same day and trying to wipe the sleep out of my eyes the best I could. Nothing to comment on too much here except I started held a grand total of six different clubs in English this week in two different locations. They met different levels of success, with me still trying to find a balance in one of the clubs to manage the classroom most efficiently and another that they were asking for more. A group of really little kids made cute cards for their favorite teacher, even though they had just met me, somehow they ended up in my box of markers, it was sweet. Journalism club showed more progress and there is a deadline set for publication of the first paper of this year. I had my first pangs of missing writing and running around as a journalist today, for all of the pains, I did enjoy being in the mix of news and running around, it just got to be too much in the job I had. But it is fun getting back to the basics of journalism again.

This Saturday will be Lviv’s 750 birthday so I will plan to be there for that and take pictures if I remember, I forgot to take them when I was down south visiting. I also won’t get a chance to post this before hand so I will have this and probably the post about the anniversary at the same time. Meaning you probably already read the post about that and are just getting to this now. Thank you to those who have sent me slang words, all of them have been helpful and keep them coming.

Ok, It is Thursday, September 21, 2006; your mission should you choose to accept it is to send me as many slang words and idioms you can think of in the American Language. This message will self-destruct in 90 seconds.
Seriously, I need help gathering up as many slang words and idioms you can think of from the American language as possible. I am being besieged on all sides by people asking me for slang words and I’m not always that good at coming up with them on the spot. So in the spirit of the SETI Project and so many others, I’m farming this out to as many people as possible to try and help me get a good list. I’ll take anything from gangster slang, redneck slang, preppy slang, Goth, etc. You get the idea; send me older items as well. I got asked what a “dude” was the other day. Luckily I even knew the Ukrainian translation for it, so it wasn’t bad, but people want to learn how to speak the “real” English. Be creative and send me as many as you can, although it would be helpful to attach a little note of what you think it means in regular English as well. I will post everything I get at a later date so you can marvel at your work. Feel free to send it to me by email, sms, snail mail or just leave a comment on my blog with your suggestions.

So now that my pitch is over, what else is going on here in the faraway land of Ukraine? It hasn’t been all that long since my last post so I don’t have a whole lot of exciting news to tell anyone, it has been a routine (?) week if such a thing exists so far. My schedule is still sorting itself out as I try to balance different meetings of clubs and other activities. I’d give it a couple more weeks and I’ll have a better idea, of course by that time things will be changing and my schedule will change again. I guess I didn’t sign up for this job to have a regular routine, why should I expect one. But the major things that fell into place were the addition of several more English clubs I’ll be holding in the regional center. On Tuesday I had my first meeting with the younger students, I heard a prediction of 50 students showing up the day before, which left me freaking out, what can I possibly do with that many students. Well, nearly that many students did end up showing up and for a while I just answered questions until I decided to try and get the organized into groups and try some activities. That just turned into a disaster since I was dealing with too broad a range of ages and couldn’t keep that many students in line. So basically I tried to organize chaos for a half-hour until I let them go. I talked with some of the teachers and we set up more groups, adding to my work, but it’s only time, right? It looks like I’ll be there for three days or so and work with four different groups, that double what I’m doing in Dobrotvir right now, but I want to offer myself up to as many students as possible and can adapt these clubs into more fruitful ventures later, I’m hoping by at least directing the older students into projects and more independent thinking. That happened Tuesday and I had to run and jump on a Marshrutka in order to make it on time for my Journalism Club meeting. Thankfully that went better and I’m still sorting out the best way to teach it, but it is more familiar territory to me and I see a lot of different paths I can take with it. Right now I’m focusing on basics and trying to get them in a journalistic mindset. I don’t think any of the students right now truly know how to write in a journalistic style, so I’m looking forward to it. The only tough part is I will struggle a lot to keep up with their writing since I am still learning the language, but hopefully it will help me pick it up quicker too.

So that’s about it, only other thing is I will be away from my site this weekend visiting another volunteer down in the Carpathians. It’ll be good to see him and see some new territory. Expect some photos to be posted when I get back. And don’t forget about the slang, please…

17 September

I’ve been meaning to sit down for several days now to add a new entry, but I finally have something to really write about and even brag about. I have hot water… and I don’t mean that I heat water up on the stove or something like that, it comes out of the tap. (well, ok, it did last night, not this morning) For those of you who live in the United States or elsewhere where hot water is a daily norm it may not seem like much, but it is big news here. For those of you here in the country, I have hot water without the kolonka. When I arrived at the site, I was happy to find out that the town has a centralized hot water system from the local power plant. Unfortunately for the past month and a half, it has been turned off, partly because it is allegedly warm outside (whatever...) and the bigger reason of they were replacing pipes. Now given I saw the pipes that came out of the ground and I am surprised water was still running through them at all. The job was also slowed down by rain a good part of August, much to my chagrin. But after several promised dates of hot water, I returned from a picnic in the forest to see steam rising out of a manhole. When I got home I decided to try my luck, and it was good, having hot water come out. Hurrah! I’m going to take a hot shower sitting in my bathtub, cause that’s the best I can get. It will also make washing clothing easier, but I’ll get to that. To pull people up to date, I’ll try to just work backwards. Earlier today I went out with a bunch of kids from my younger English Club to the forest where we had a picnic and played Frisbee and soccer (football as it is called here). It was a good time and we were out there for about four hours, I’m sure some of them could have been out longer, but a couple girls were wanting to get home, so we took off, it was about time for me to get home anyway.

Yesterday, on Saturday, saw me as the domestic worker. I took a lot of the day off to just sit around and read in the sun, but that evening I knew I needed to do some laundry and was also feeling ambitious in my cooking. So I pulled out my handy-dandy Peace Corps Cook Book and got the recipe for Vareniky, which is basically stuffed dumplings of your choice. Over the course of about three hours I made a lot of vareniky, first making some with mashed potatoes, carrots and onions. When I ran out of that mix, I looked through the fridge, remembering that I had been given some apples. So I cooked those up real quick and stuffed them in with cinnamon and sugar. By real quick, I still mean the whole process took three hours, including me eating somewhere in there. I had extra dough and there are frozen vareniky I made in my freezer right now, with extra dough still in my refrigerator. I’m not going to explain the whole process here, but all the Ukrainians I have told here are impressed I cooked some myself. In my opinion they taste all right too. After cleaning up the kitchen, I actually was in the process of doing that the entire time as well, because I don’t have enough pots and other utensils to dirty a whole lot up, maybe it’s better that way. But my work for the night wasn’t done, since I had put off doing laundry for a while, this will be one of those things I’ll most likely write about only once, since it will soon become routine, but it is interesting one time around, I hope. I had the great luck to be able to use a washing machine when I was living with my host family, they have said I can continue to use it even though I am living on my own now, but last night I wanted to just get it done here. So first part was to heat water up the stove, I didn’t have hot water until last night you probably remember. Then I soaked the clothes for a while before having the pleasure to scrub them with my bare hands like most people do in this country. It isn’t an extremely fast process and it leaves your entire arms sore during the process, but I was able to turn my socks white again and rub out stains in other articles of my clothing. That whole process took another two and a half hours after which I crashed into bed and didn’t wake up until late the next day.

For those of you who read the previous post, you remember that I was a judge for flower arrangements. My work in botany continued on Friday as I was called upon to videotape all the greenery in and around the school with the biology teacher. Exact reasons for this are a little hazy; I think it has something to do with showing how many plants we have in the school. But anyway, it found me first walking around the school grounds with the teacher taping different flower gardens and her occasionally pointing out different types of flowers and plants, thankfully many of them have almost the same names. But we then proceeded to go into class after class filming the plants they had on windowsills and displayed around the room. When we finished that up, I ran to the journalism room, through it all together into one film and deliver to the director. To give you an idea of just how long the tour took and classes we visited, the whole tape was 12 minutes long and I had done a fair amount of editing. It was an all day project I did in about a half day. This just goes along with the idea that my life will constantly throw a curveball at me here. I was planning to just meet with teachers and prepare for my journalism club meeting that afternoon, until I had received a phone call from the director that morning saying it needed to be done that day. It got done and he seemed happy about it, The quality left a little to be desired in my opinion since I just used my camera to do it all, but he needed it the same day, so he got something.

The only other event of note found me back in Sokal for the going away party of a girl there who will be studying in Poland this fall. So we had a nice little shindig, not too much to talk about except the next day I was supposed to meet with my Regional Manager and I either misheard the marshrutka driver when he told me the time he was going to Dobrotvir or there was another problem, because I ended up meeting him in a different town, then went back to Sokal to spend a little more time at Oksana’s house (that’s the girl going to Poland) because my bus didn’t leave for a couple hours. But it was interesting because her parents had some old books with photos of what Lviv looked like back in Soviet times, one of the things I noticed almost right off were the roads were in good condition, and the book printed in the 1970s showed the buses I see on the road now as new. Gotta say, I found that interesting. I hope this country never stops surprising me, cause that would make life so much more boring and would be less for you to all read too.

About that marshrutka driver and non-stop surprises, I almost forgot another incident on the trip there. the driver was attempting to pass what I later saw was a truck, I couldn't see ahead of me at all only to the side, when I heard screeching tires and a car swerving out of the way. It happens, just thought to myself at that moment maybe it is better I can't see where this is going. But the adventure didn't stop there as the driver of that car turned around, forced the marshrutka to pull over and then started verbally berating the driver about how he should be a better driver and there were women and children in the van. I will admit I took what he had with a grain of salt because he was interrupted twice by his cell-phone and as he pulled away was talking on it again, safe driving for sure. But it made for an extra spicy adventure, I guess you can say.

And one last quick note, an elegy to my iPod. It has served me well over the years but it appears to have finally bit the dust, or at least the battery has, or software or something, it doesn't want to work. The full ramifications are still not apparent, but it doesn’t want to play more than a few minutes if at all if not plugged into a power source. I have had a feeling it wasn’t well, but the past few days have shown that. So if anyone is feeling extra generous (I’m not expecting any takers) and wants to buy me a new iPod I’d be most grateful. I know there are some new Nanos on the market now that are pretty cool. I’d even take an older version if someone is upgrading, well I’d take any that works right now to be honest. My faithful silver mini won’t go anywhere, but I doubt I’ll be taking it anywhere either.

12 September

It’s getting late here so I don’t want to sit here for too long, fighting a cold, it is better today, but I’m still not 100 percent.

A few updates, my original fear of the student government thing blowing up in my face was averted as the director wanted to hear a little bit more. This has given me time to lay out my positions a little more firmly and lay out some better guidelines of what we should do, and get some more people on board as well as smooth out some rough parts. So it will be happening tomorrow that we do a big presentation, we’ll see if it happens this time. Just looked at the Gumby on my desk, that’s why I have him there, cause I bend every which way, but I haven’t broken yet.

But my day also took a turn for the bizarre on Monday; it just happened that it was day of flower arrangements. Direct translation was along the lines of Celebration of flowers. I had found out about it on Friday, but got the treat of looking at all of them on Monday. They were all very pretty. Now all that is all and well, nothing bizarre, it got a little funny when they asked me to be on the jury to judge arrangements. Now, I told them I don’t have any experience, but I can sure tell them which ones I liked better, no professional reasons why. I have no idea which ones won, but there were some pretty nice ones. It also was a reminder of home, because Monday also happened to be September 11, even in Ukraine people hadn’t forgotten 2001 and there were several arrangements commemorating the event. It was touching sight on what was a somber day for me as an American. It also did make me feel a little less isolated on that day. It will be hard to tell what that day will mean in our future, but I am already comparing it to the day President Kennedy was shot in how the event has seared into our minds the memories of that day and remembering exactly where we were and what we were doing. But being the only American in town didn’t allow for a lot of reflection or discussion about the day, so that was something I missed.

Today found me in the regional seat of Kamyanka Buska. I had earlier promised to help students and teachers there in some way so today I went to do the “Hi, I’m an American” song and dance routine and talk to students a bit. It was fun to see a new group of students. One thing I have noticed in this and previous visits there is the difference that having previous volunteers makes. Where I am now there is almost jadedness to some of the things I do. People get a lot more excited with the smallest things I do there. So hopefully I won’t let them down. I met with a bunch of fourth formers first, the little guys are typically more fun, they didn’t disappoint me, we had a good time practicing simple English and talking a little bit in Ukrainian too. What surprised me were the older students. What was supposed to be just the 10th and 11th forms quickly turned into almost a free for all with students from I think 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th forms there. I had a big audience, probably too big since I could hardly hear students in the back when they asked me questions. But we had a nice question and answer period and the students were able to keep asking me questions up until the bell rang. What surprised me is they actually groaned when it was over. Sure, there are always some students who wish it could have gone longer, but this seemed like more of them than what I consider usual. I’m scheduling English clubs for next week there, so we will see how many show up.

I won’t have Internet for the next couple days, but I will get back to emails as soon as I can after that. Feel free to leave comments, I always appreciate the notes. I remember reading in another volunteers blog, “I don’t want to be the only one speaking here.”

9 September

Well, it is a late Saturday night and I got back a little while ago from a day in Lviv, but I wanted to get some thoughts down for myself and to share before they slip out the back of my head. I was in Lviv because a couple of volunteers had birthdays this weekend or technically Monday for Edwin, but what's the fun of celebrating on a Monday. Other guy was Larry; you can read of his and his wife Karen’s exploits in Ukraine here on their blog. They even have a little bit on the party too.

The first week of school is over and myself along with the rest of the teachers do not have a set schedule yet for teaching. Oh, by the way, that’s normal and no reason to be alarmed. As far as I am concerned, it is just as well with me, I’ll be honest, direct teaching wasn’t really what I was looking for when I signed up for Peace Corps, although I will do involved in it. Thankfully at this site I have a lot of control so far over the topics I’ll be involved in and they are areas that play to my strengths. But first, a quick run-through of the week.

I spent the first part of the week trying to keep a consistent presence in school, while knowing I wouldn’t have a specific schedule, so I organized my journalism room a bit, reorganized it somewhat as well and continued to try and craft friendships with teachers and administrators at the school. I also got to witness some classes and it gave me a chance to see first-hand what I had heard other PCVs say and I had believed them, but got a more visual reference of it. I visited about three different grade levels, what I found was the younger they get, the more fun they are. My favorite was a group of fifth formers (graders) who knew very little English, but were more than eager to try and use the most of what they had. We played a couple killer games of hangman on the board and practiced writing and speaking. What made it so much fun was so many of the students were raising their hands and were eager to get their own two cents in and try to speak English. As what are probably just teenagers, they get less interested as they get older, or at least that is the impression I get. Sixth graders I got spend a class were almost as fun, although the most memorable moment of that was a question they were almost too embarrassed to ask. I’m real good at playing “meet the American” and have fielded just about every question out there they can come up with. The question itself wasn’t new either, but they, she/he, don’t know was a little embarrassed to ask me. I noticed a little scrap of paper floating around the room, and I started asking what it was, they all kind of blushed, pretty quick one the teachers intercepted it and said quite plainly, “you can ask this!” A little girl then stood up (they always stand to speak or ask a question), and asked, “do you have a girlfriend?” It doesn’t seem quite so funny now that I’ve put it down on the page, but you’ll have to take my word on it and know that it was real tough for her to ask it. I’ll just say I sat in on a ninth grade class too and it was somewhat disheartening to watch so many students not care one bit whether they were there or not. They on top of that disrupting the class to the detriment of those who seemed interested in it. After class I had to ask the question why they don’t split classes up more into those who are interested in the language and those who aren’t. The all-knowing authorities, it was told to me, decided that for every smart kid, there should be a slow kid too. The logic is there, somewhere…

To continue with school stories, I’ll regale you with my near-heart attack of the week. To set the scene, I had talked with the school director earlier about the possibility of setting up a student government of some sort. His time is rather limited so he asked for ideas and said we could meet on this past Friday. After presenting what I had, he seemed interested and then hooked me up with an Assistant Director responsible for extra-curricular activities. We talked for a little while, and originally we were going to set a second meeting for Monday, except then my coordinator showed up who wanted to help and another school staffer who it sounds like she had wanted to do something like this for a couple years and had reams of information that may be useful. So what was supposed to be a meeting on Monday turned into, lets propose the idea of running for school president to the ninth through eleventh forms on Monday morning first thing. My fear is we are going from idea to lets do something now way too fast, so let’s hope it works out. I would prefer to have a better idea of how we want to start this and plan a few steps ahead. It feels like we have a skeleton of an idea right now, but we’re running with that expecting to flesh it out later. Wish us luck!

The last little anecdote I can share is my Thursday English Club meeting for grades sixth to eighth. From the beginning I have had more students show up for it than the older students club I run as well, but this past Thursday was day unto itself. I had a friend who I had met at a camp this summer come out to help. She wanted to and had been to one previous meeting before. But to all of our surprise, we had 23 students show up for this meeting, a lot of them had been previously, but there were a lot of new ones too. It seemed like a lot to me. The club started out with having all the students writing questions that they new, then playing a game, it’ll be easier to just put a link to it rather than try and explain it here. But I’ll just say that it went over real well and everyone left happy. Gave me a nice boost into the end of the week.

Photos of my new flat are now posted in supplemental materials