14 May 2007

It’s been a full month (wow) since I last posted, that isn’t saying I haven’t been up to stuff, it was more I was waiting until I had good news and then was swamped with other things and didn’t have a time to sit down and put something down as a post.

So yeah, that good news, I am now declaring April over and am quite happy about it. As you can see directly below this post, it didn’t start off all that great and the tree planting I was planning did happen, but on the schedule I planned, it was delayed two weeks and I did find out that rib I only thought was bruised was in fact cracked. Hooray! It was to the point I was almost wondering what good could come out of the month and was just waiting for May to come with the expectation things could start to work again. Obviously things can’t be that cut and dry and just the changing of the month can’t realistically change my fortunes, but it seems to do the trick for me as the tree planting didn’t get any easier, but did happen.

But first a few of what can now be considered at least a little funny now in retrospect. In addition to my tree planting being postponed due the fact the nursery I wanted to buy from wasn’t able to fill my order and told me it was impossible for the rest of the year, I got stuck in Kyiv for an extra day and had my iPod stolen at an opera (probably by my own stupidity). I had gone to Kyiv to help out a new group of trainees by basically giving them some perspective and reassuring them things will be fine. Even in a bad month good things happen and you can make it through, I’m here to testify to it. Story goes I come in with them to Kyiv and went to buy a ticket home only to discover there were only tickets in the luxury class to Lviv that day. All other tickets had been sold out. Lviv as you may know isn’t a small place in Ukraine, being as far as I know the largest city in the west and at least four trains go there daily I know of, but no seats. At that point I knew it was over. I came home on the first of May.

May had so far been a much better month since I can now declare success on the tree planting after putting over 300 trees in the ground (the iPod didn’t show up even though we went to the opera to ask later). Pictures of the day of can be seen at my Flickr site, which there is a link to from this site. I had a great group of volunteers come out to help me, so thanks a lot and also thanks to those in town that gave invaluable assistance. I didn’t know for sure if it would happen until the day before when I went with a truck to pick up the trees. Not a great feeling for me since I like to know a bit more in advance, but it all worked out ok. That has been by far the largest project I have undertaken in Ukraine thus far, and am glad I can write it off as not being a complete failure.

Another larger project I am working on is helping organize a summer camp focusing on ethnic and religious diversity in Ukraine. It is an exciting project for me as it has been a topic of interest to me for a while now. The primary organizer is an American who just recently finished her Fulbright Scholarship in Ukraine. To learn more about the camp go to www.happycampukraine.org. I made the website, that took up a lot of my time recently as well, but it is starting to look pretty good.

That also means summer is coming soon, which will change my schedule and with luck usher in some more traveling to places I haven’t seen yet. Well I hope this catches you up a little bit on the goings on here. Wish I could write more, but getting tired and need to catch some sleep. Thanks for visiting!

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.

I have a big project coming up that I’ve probably talked to death, but it can take over my life at times and can be a rather good reflection of my service here.

Last week there was a professor from the Lviv Technical Forestry University that came out to look at several of the sites we are wanting to plant trees. As seems to happen so often, things don’t go exactly as I would like, some of my counterparts here at site weren’t able to meet him, so I ended up meeting him with several students from my school and a woman I know who studies at the University Graduate program. She also helped translate some things for me when the language got above my head. I felt at a disadvantage because I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when he showed up and wasn’t able to provide some of the materials he ended up wanting because of that. It ended with me feeling as though I had a heck of a lot of work ahead of me to keep on pace for the planned planting date of April 21, which is really soon.

But on the upside of the rollercoaster ride, is I had the final confirmation the money will be available and after the initial freaking out of the amount of work the professor wanted me to do (get precise measurements of a variety of different distances to plan for where to put trees) I realized I needed to simplify my plan and most of the work he had asked for is already basically done. So I was able to get a hold the required maps and I think I may be able to keep on track here. I guess I’m just feeling as if there is a knife-edge that I’m walking to keep this going and so far I’ve been able to keep moving forward. Will be looking at some different types of trees next week.

On a more personal or general note, at least, for those of you who pay attention to the news, the political situation in Ukraine is in upheaval again with some news organizations saying the biggest crisis since the Orange Revolution. I haven’t really seen much of any activity where I live and those of you with televisions probably know more about what is going on than I do. I just read what news reports I see. But otherwise life is continuing as normal here and I haven’t been affected by what is going on in Kyiv at all. Just makes life a little more interesting is all. No reason to worry at all.

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.

A quick, partial list of books I have read in Ukraine. Some of them make me look almost smart. Others are just fun super easy books to read. Enjoy it all in my supplemental materials. New Blog post should be up soon.

My time in Ukraine has now surpassed one year and I guess I should give some reflections on what that time here has meant, because it has undoubtedly changed me in some ways and reinforced me in others. Obviously I won’t be able to consciously acknowledge all of them now, or maybe even never, but there are some changes that have been obvious and don’t know if I would even need to spell them out for those of you who do know me well.

First of all let me say I don’t regret for one moment coming to Ukraine, it has its daily frustrations and there are the rare times that I just want to quit and work with other Americans, because it is easier. But those are rare times and I have never felt more than I have here that what I do can make a difference, even if I don’t get a chance to see them immediately, although if I get to see immediate changes, it helps my self-esteem (joking). Coming to this country I wasn’t sure all what it would entail, we all knew it was supposed to be a cold place, lots of farming, formerly Soviet and in Europe. The only thing I wasn’t really excited about was the idea it was still in Europe. I had been to Europe. I wanted to be sent to some exotic locale, preferably some island in the Pacific where I could hone my surfing skills. Ukraine is not very near any ocean, ok, nearly the entire continent of Europe separates me from the closest ocean (the Black Sea doesn’t count). I was also nervous about the idea of “Youth Development”. I didn’t have a lot of previous experience with kids, but I was ready to take on whatever obstacles were thrown in front of me.

Those obstacles have been thrown in front of me. A few examples of how my life has changed from this time last year: New country (I already talked about that), new language that some days I feel as if I’m almost getting and in a second moment feeling completely lost, new job that is unlike anything I have ever done, living on my own without any other roommates and the end of a two-year relationship I didn’t expect to end and the start of a new one that was just as surprising. There have been plenty more, but these are some of the more major ones or just that have come to my head at this moment.

For whatever reason, none of those obstacles have been able to break me down enough to quit and go home. Not to say that they haven’t broken me down almost completely at one point or another, but I think I can honestly say I haven’t really wanted to go home since I became a volunteer and when I did visit home I was ready to come back here. Part of the reason is I truly have work here, obligations and responsibilities I don’t want to shirk from. The other thing is I don’t know exactly what I would do if I did return, I would only have a partial service in the Peace Corps to speak for and for me personally it would the cheapen the experience as a whole for me. I didn’t sign up for Peace Corps to not expect it to be hard and quit when it did. I came in expecting things to not be easy and to be frustrated at times. It’s happened, but I have also had the good times as well. A common saying I use here is PCVs need to measure their happiness in minutes rather than days. Have I had good days, yeah, but they usually have crappy stuff happen in them too. But good minutes, yeah, plenty.

Going along with that train of thought, and focusing on some of those other obstacles. Language is something that can have good and bad days. I have found ways I can improve it on a daily level with things as simple as eating properly and having rest. As for the studying part, I can always do more, and probably should, but I do get a lot of practical practice on a daily level. So that does help. That also goes along with feeling lost occasionally, just the other day I understood all the words someone told me, yet had no idea what they said when I put them all together. Obviously I had missed some contextual meaning or it was a joke, but I just nodded and said ‘ok’ completely clueless to what was said. Other times I have what they said down no problem. But I’m frequently learning new words and need to travel more in the east so I can pick up a bit more Russian, that’s what still throws me, although Polish is surprisingly coming at a slow rate (along with long forgotten Spanish words, occasionally).

Living on my own in theory isn’t entirely new, I’ve been in college, lived on my “own” after college for a while, but during all of those times there was always a roommate, having a place entirely to myself has been a change. I always come home to a dark, quiet place since I usually get home at night and have the entire place to myself, which means I need to cook for myself and clean and all that fun stuff. Of course it has grown on me. One thing I have heard multiple times coming into PC is that people can be a bit quieter at the end because of spending so much time alone. I can see that in some ways how that is so, but I do play my music kind of loud. I hope I’m being social enough. If anything what this experience has done is make me bolder in going after things I want or need. I noticed especially when I was back in the states that I am less shy than I used to be. It is imperative to be a bit more assertive here and I did like that part of me when I was back there, sure gets stuff done a lot faster. PC also teaches you a can-do attitude, although I think I brought a lot of that with me, it has helped me refine it here.

I also know have been able to reaffirm the fact that after Peace Corps I don’t want to be a teacher. I have always respected them, but do even more now, I don’t think I have the right temperament to deal with kids and just think in a different way. Although, it has helped me start figure out more about what I want to do later. I can see myself possibly heading back to school or looking into work abroad later on. The idea of living abroad has always appealed to me and this has reinforced it, although I do love going home to the U.S.

Well, on to the part you may or may not care about after reading my post, but yeah, my relationship status has changed several times over the past year. I came to Ukraine dating a wonderful girl and had been for over two years. After a valiant struggle, it became too much for the both of us is probably the best way I can explain it. After about six months of contemplation time and reflection, I started dating someone new (surprise!). It has been about two months now and things are going well. It is a girl that I have known for a while and things developed into more than a friendship, not what either of us was planning, but have both welcomed.

So there you go, my year (plus) of Peace Corps in a nutshell. Regrets, I’ve had a few, but I’m able to say I don’t think I would have done anything differently looking back. The whole line “Hardest job you’ll ever love” rings true, but this is also real good about teaching you patience as well. Here’s to a great second year and whatever the future holds.

First of all, let me admit that I spy on you. All of you in a little way. My counter, which you can all see at the left hand side records where people come from, you can look at it yourself, on a nifty map. It is cool, because it shows people from all of the world have stumbled upon my humble site and maybe even read a little bit. But the other parts that you don't all see is I can see how you ended up on my page. Which is what this post is about. From a little bit of research and looking at where people came from I discovered if people type "fish in the sea dating site" they can find my site and also a couple different dating sites. Don't know how my site became can make people think it is a dating site, but just for the record. This is NOT a dating site. Hope that clears things up.