Looking back: first summer in Ukraine!

June to July 2008

The summer for Peace Corps volunteers was a completely different entity from the rest of the year. We were free from classes and could travel. We were allotted a few weeks a year to assist fellow PCVs with summer camps, could organize our own camps, and had the opportunity to attend various conferences and language camp refreshers. We could also use our cumulative two vacation days a month to visit other countries.

For two weeks after school ended, I led an English camp. I invited pupils from the other schools in the city, and several Americans to help me on the different days.

I met a student, Julie, on the second day. She was enthusiastic, outspoken and precise. If I passed out papers and was waiting for everyone to stop buzzing so I could explain the activity, she was quick to point out that they didn’t understand what we were going to do.

We played Red Rover-Red Rover, Red Light Green Light, Mother May I, Charades, Hangman, relays and enacted a scavenger hunt. 

I developed a camp plan that I followed both years. The second year, I invited more teachers to be involved. I taught the song, “Do your ears hang low,” one verse a day, because it turned out there were like eight verses to that song. Those ears hang low, high, wide, and come right off, and then we move on to tongue, nose, and eyes popping out. I didn’t realize that until I downloaded the song off iTunes and the thing kept going on and on.

I implemented three new English words a day. I taught them three words that I thought we’d be using that day like bounce, brain, sky-dive, round, and touch. We practiced spelling the words and listening for the wordsd. If they heard me or the other teachers say the words during the camp, they could shout out and I’d throw them candy. This worked great for about 30 minutes until we were immersed in another activity and forgot all about it.

I gave them a daily mind game/brain teaser. “I’m going to Grandpa’s house and I want to bring a… gorilla.” Another teacher said, “I’m going to Grandpa’s house and I want to bring a rabbit.” Then, “I’m going to grandpa’s house and I want to bring an apple. There was a pattern to the things you wanted to bring; in this case, the items brought must begin with the letters of the word “Grandpa.” The children were asked to bring something and if they couldn’t figure out the pattern, I said, “Sorry, you can’t bring that” until they figured it out. I played other such pattern games with them and after the first time, they started to get the hang of it.

We also played indoor and outdoor games and my friends Katy and Peter came for a couple days the second summer. They both had creative ideas and were able to jump in when needed.

We played a great station game where the children had to go to different stations, manned by a teacher, and perform a task to get a clue.

Katy and Peter stayed in my apartment. Peter had a miraculous habit of discovering things for me. He walked in the first day he arrived and looked up at the rafters above my hall cabinet, and said, “Interesting that there’s a knife up here. That where you normally keep it?”

This is the knife I'd been looking for for months. 

Later, Peter said, “Hey, could I use this pad for my floor bed?” about a thin rolled mattress that was stored in an open ceiling compartment in the hallway that I may or may not have been aware of. Those tall guys, they notice things.

Friday morning before I got out of bed, I could hear Peter in the kitchen trying to use my lighter on the stove and I thought he might be having problem so I stumbled out of bed and then I saw the right front burner merrily lit up under a kettle of water and I said to Peter, “Interesting because I’ve never used that burner seeing as how my landlady said only the burners on the left work.”

***

My friend Michelle, who had lived in the village with me, did a two-week summer camp and invited volunteers to help her. I got my first glimpse of the mountains and it made me very, very happy to know that places like this existed in Ukraine. Antonella, Michelle and I traveled from Kiev together to Michelle’s village. It was a 14-hour journey.

We had three end seats on the aisle and we were in a car with about 1,000 children on their way to summer camp in the mountains. Which meant that they moved up and down the aisles, giggled and talked until the lights turned off at 10 p.m., then were up again at 3 a.m. when the lights turned back on. Why the heck the lights turned on at 3 a.m., I had no idea. I slept in my narrow bed off the aisle, second bunk, so narrow that I couldn’t roll over without falling off. And I woke up every five minutes. It was possible they were laughing at me because there were instances of me waking up to find my butt hanging out into the aisle, or my head leaning off the bunk with my mouth open. The children got off the train at 5 a.m. and it was finally silent.

Michelle’s village was beautiful and friendly. She had a large house with two floors and three bedrooms. She invited so many volunteers that at one point, two people slept in her room; two were on the living room futon, two volunteers were on each of the two beds on the second floor, the guys were on mattresses in an empty storage room and she and Antonella were sleeping in the hayloft.

We made homemade bread and corn bread and pizza and macaroni salad and 20 eggs’ worth of scrambled eggs and scratched our heads daily to think of meals to prepare.

At camp we played games for three hours with the children; kickball and capture the flag and Frisbee and “Human Knot.” Then we swam in the river if time permitted. Kickball was always amusing. The children didn’t understand the rules. They hung around on base when they should be running, while all their teammates shouted at them, or they took off at a dead run for the wrong base because they had no idea what was going on.

Every day, we were invited by Michelle’s neighbors somewhere for lunch, or to milk a cow, or for tea and cake, or on picnics, or to go mushroom hunting.

Michelle said that this was how her life was on a normal basis and the rest of us wondered how she did it. We had so many invitations coming in that it was like the president had come to town.

I stopped off to visit my village host family for a few days that summer. They invited me to go camping by the Desna river. Sestra and her cousin didn’t want to go so it was all the adults.

We left the village at 6:30 p.m. or so. Drove 10 minutes, then stopped by a field. My host mom stayed in the car. My host dad grabbed a bucket and told me to come with him. “Take a stick,” he said, or something to that effect. He said words and picked up a stick and I got the picture. He pushed aside dead brush on the ground and dug into the dirt. He began plucking worms from the ground and tossing them into the bucket.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “This is what we are doing?” Using two sticks, I helped.

My contributions consisted of lots of clods of dirt until he looked at the bucket and said, “The dirt is not needed, only the worms.”

“But I can’t just pick up the worms,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I don’t want to touch them,” I said.

He smiled. “Use the sticks then but dirt is not needed.”

We drove to the city and picked up his sister and husband from the train station. Then drove to the river.

The men set up tents and built a fire, and the women prepared vegetables, sausage and potatoes with pieces of salo (pig fat) in the middle. My host dad's sister learned about my involvement in the collection of the worms and laughed when I described it.

“You were his slave,” she giggled. I mostly stood around, at a loss as to how to help. We drank beer and vodka and in my head, I toasted America’s Independence Day. Just before we went to bed, it started to rain. On the second day, it rained to mid-afternoon. The men set up fishing poles on the river. My host dad propped up four fishing rods sticking out of pieces of pipe in the ground along the shore. Each line had a bell on it that would ring if the line was pulled on. Then he sat in his chair on the shore and ate sunflower seeds.

The men built another fire under a big table umbrella they had brought. My host mom roasted Shashliki (shish kabobs) and potatoes. We ate in the rain. We adjourned to the van to talk. Well, I listened. I did a lot of listening. Then we went back to sleep because there was nothing to do. Mostly, we did a lot of sleeping and eating because of the rain.

We swam a little on the afternoon of the third day before heading back to the village.

Looking back: Cooking in Ukraine

February 2, 2008:

I was a timid cook in Ukraine. Every woman in the country went to the same cooking school and can make soup, Borshch, ravioli, cabbage rolls, dumplings, pie and potato pancakes from scratch. I figured they spent more time in the kitchen than anywhere else. Whenever I cooked for other people I wondered, would they like it? Would they eat it? What were they thinking when they ate it?

One day while my second host family was out, I decided to make cookies. The family was at a birthday and I had stayed home to rest, so I could talk to myself in English. Sometimes it was exhausting trying to understand everything.

I used a toll house chocolate chip recipe and the small electronic timer I’d brought from America. I found flour and sugar in my host family’s cupboards. My host parents bought it in the one-ton bag variety. I mixed in baking soda and a little vanilla and went to look for eggs. I opened the refrigerator and realized we were out of eggs. “Oh,” I said, and called my mom in America. She told me to substitute oil and a little water for eggs. Then I checked the fridge again, no butter. No butter except for a chunk of chocolate butter sitting on a plate. My host mom excitedly introduced this to me the week before. It was like regular butter, except it was sweet and flavored like chocolate.

I dumped it into the mix but it didn’t seem like enough so I added some kind of fatty, homemade Crisco-like substance that I found in a jar in the back of the refrigerator. I added white chocolate and walnuts and mixed everything together. The mixture was dry so I added more water and oil until it looked like cookie dough.

I giggled as I mixed everything together because I was pretty sure these cookies were going to taste like crap.

I lit the oven. It was a gas stove and oven so not only did you have to use a lighter to light the stovetop, but you had to do the same to light the oven fuse from underneath. This was my first attempt to work the oven on my own and I was successful on the first try. I baked the cookies and felt triumphant when I pulled out the first batch and they looked like cookies. They were a little flat and they tasted a little strange from the fatty stuff but my host family liked them.

“These are delicious!” they said when they ate them. I felt mollified. I baked in Ukraine!

When I moved into my own apartment, I made pizza more times than was strictly necessary. You know how when you're living in a foreign country, and nothing makes sense, and you can't go shopping in an English-speaking store, and that one cashier wasn't very kind, and you can't order a pizza, and you start to wonder if you can really do this?

Then you make pizza.

I was asked by Sestra's family in the village, “What do you eat there where you're living alone? Sandwiches and ravioli and pizza?”

“Haha, no,” I said. “I make many things! Eggs, and potatoes, and bread and apples and... um... I don't make pizza EVERY weekend... Haha...”

I liked to experiment and simulate American dishes from raw ingredients. It made me joyful to make something that tasted like home. 

One day I made compote by myself. My Koziatyn host parents had made it all the time. When I first heard about this, it sounded like some old-fashiony thing we had done in America when everyone wore bonnets and traveled in covered wagons.

It was usually water, apples with some kind of berries, and sugar. The fruit juice boiled out of the fruit and made a light juice.

I made apple compote and it was pretty tasty.

Then the next day, I made burritos. From scratch! That was a word I taught my ninth form English class. I tried to explain what a tortilla was during our discussion of American foods and even Natasha was lost. 

I made tortillas and then I cooked up beans, rice and ham. I piled that into the tortilla and added cheese, a spritz of lemon and a line of Ranch dressing. It was amazing. Like the best thing I ever cooked in Ukraine. When I showed my host mom from the villlage how I made tortillas, it was difficult to convince her to make them without oil.

I also made homemade tortillas, and then fried them into chips, and made nachos.

Occasionally I tried to make Ukrainian food. I made borshch with beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, a little tomato sauce, water, carrots, beans and spices. Svyeta had copied down the recipe for me in Ukrainian. It was really great. Especially when I added crushed red pepper to make it a little spicy and it tasted like chili.

Once, I went to Natasha’s house to study Ukrainian and she said she had a surprise for me. She gave me something that looked like gunge on a piece of bread. I was afraid of it until I finally sniffed it. Peanuts.

She made me peanut butter. Because she wanted to please me and she was awesome and I had once told her that peanut butter didn't exist in Ukraine. And when she couldn't find any, she made some herself. And then she had to ask me what awesome meant.

“Really, really great,” I said. “Like super ‘klasno’” (which means “cool”).

I made a feast for Anya’s family, my Ukrainian best friend. I found out avocados in my town at a little vegetable shop. Anya invited me over so I made salsa, bought avocados and chicken and went over to their house to make burritos. It was a big production. I made guacamole (and used Italian seasoning mom had sent me), rice, beans, chicken (also marinated in Italian seasoning salad dressing), cheese, salsa and tortillas. The tortillas were homemade, rolled out and cooked without oil in a skillet. Anya helped me. Her sister-in-law filmed the whole thing with my new digital camera. Sasha, our other friend, grated cheese. I told them that in America, I don’t have to make tortillas, I can buy them right at the store! I felt very home-makery.

Her parents looked on with wide eyes and tentatively tried the avocado and lime. The avocado ‘didn’t taste like anything’ and the lime was sour, according to Dasha, Anya’s sister-in-law. “I said it was like lemon,” I said. She didn’t like it. Later, her dad saw the pit from the avocado and asked where it’d come from. “It’s a seed?” he said in surprise.

“Yes, it came from the avocado!” I said.

When I went to any kind of celebratory gathering in Ukraine, I brought a gift for the hostess, usually chocolate or candies. It was called “konfeti” in Ukrainian. I took off my shoes at the door. This was the custom in Ukraine because the roads were messy and dirty, not always paved. The table was already set with large saucers of Ukrainian dishes; open-faced sandwiches with fish and butter, holodets (jello meat), halubtsy, fried chicken with the bone still in, assorted mayonnaise-based salads, mashed potatoes, sausage and cheeses, potato, salo (pig fat), maybe shashliki (kebabs) if it was summer, wine and vodka.

The hosts were eager to welcome me, to treasure me, to make me feel part of them because I was American. I was an exciting thing to them. They gave me house slippers, they told me where to sit, they gave me wine. We sat and toasted the hosts, took our first shot of vodka of the night. The third toast was to women. The men stood and clinked their glasses together for us. We ate and talked. I tried to understand everything. They ask about me, why was in Ukraine, did I like it here. That was usually the first question. “Do you like it here?”

“Of course,” I said. “The people are warm and friendly and the country is beautiful.”

“And the food?” they asked.

I smiled. “I like it usually,” was my answer.

“Usually?” they asked. “Well,” I said. “I don’t like fish, and I don’t like holodets, or salo.” I shuddered when I said “holodets” and they laughed.

“Why don’t you like holodets?” they wanted to know.

“Because it’s terrible!” I said. “We don’t eat meat in jello in America!” They were delighted by my reaction and begged me to try it.

“It’s just soup, only cold,” they said. “You like soup, yes?”

“Yes, but not cold soup like this,” I said. I stood firm to my beliefs.

We continue the meal, and when my plate was empty, they pressed me to eat more. More. More. More dishes were brought out and still they said, “yeesh, yeesh (eat, eat). You must eat more. Vodka, wine, what would you like to drink?” they asked.

“I have had enough!” I tried to say, but it was not enough. I had to eat. I had to drink more. They were my hosts and they didn’t want me to go hungry, I must eat. I was bursting but still I ate. I picked at the food, dolloped another scoop of cheese and garlic salad onto a slice of bread. There was so much left on the table.

Then we had tea and coffee with chocolates and cookies. We sat around the table for hours, talking. Maybe someone started to sing. My second host mom loved this, to play a song on the piano while we all sang. Except I’d listen, because I didn’t know the words. We drank and drank and they talked and talked.

There was no possibility of finding a TV dinner in a Ukrainian supermarket. The best I could come up with was a couple boxes of “chicken cordon bleu” meals tucked behind the raw fish. And I was all, whoa there! How long had these been sitting here and were they ordered just for me? Hard to imagine any self-respecting Ukrainian woman picking those up.

“All Jessica likes to eat are potatoes, chicken and eggs,” Sestra liked to joke. She was not far from the truth because I wasn't used to cooking this much and not having any ready-made meals. Tricia helped me find a few things that were premade, like different types of varenekiy (dumplings or large pasta with fillings of potatoes, cheese or meat).

Looking back: Teaching English at School No. 5

January to February 2008:

When it was nice out, I walked to school every morning about two miles away. I walked from my apartment down a pathway, across a street, over a bridge, down to the railroad tracks, through the train station, along the tracks to the distant side of the station, across some more tracks, up another path, across a street and arrived at my school.

I was happy to start my first semester of English teaching in January and get that hurdle out of the way. I taught four to six English classes a day in forms 5 to 10 (fourth grade to ninth grade). I taught each class group twice weekly, once with their regular teacher and once alone.

It was like teaching in an American school except that the grading system was different, the children’s first language was different and the class schedules and plans were in another language. It was terrifying. Grades, or marks, were taken daily and recorded in a special “journal” that I, as a volunteer, was not allowed to touch. It was a sacred Bible that allowed one color of ink and no white-out.

I taught fifth form to 10th form. There were about 15 to 20 children in a class. Teachers called them pupils in English because ‘student’ refers to university students. Just like school refers to elementary/high school rather than university.

The children love me. I'm new. I'm not their regular teacher. They brought me treats and they said, “Hello Miss Benes!” every time they saw me.

However, they only behaved the first time they saw me. At the next class, all bets were off.

It was a tricky thing, getting up in front of a class when they didn’t know a lot of English. It was overwhelming for both parties. I was completely out of my element and they had no idea what was going on.

I said, “I need a volunteer. Who will be my volunteer?” And I raised my hand and looked at the students expectantly and they looked at each other and at me with wide eyes and then a girl said in Ukrainian. “What do you want the class to do?” So I pointed at a student and said, “Come on up here. You are my volunteer. This is a volunteer.” Demonstration was key. Everything step by step. Later I learned that “volunteer” was a cognate and it was probably my pronunciation that threw them.

I worked with several of the classes for the full two years but I knew maybe six names in each class. Especially the larger classes, it was impossible to keep names straight. They were all Dima and Lena and Olena and Serhiy. It was all in Ukrainian and sometimes the names were difficult to pronounce or they laughed at the way I pronounced them. In the names Ilya, Alya and Olya, the letters ‘lya’ has this extra special emphasis on the way the ‘l’ sound hit the roof of your mouth. I was safer going with acceptable alternatives like Alla or Olga.

I taught the ninth form about America for two weeks. I felt particularly capable of teaching this topic. The ninth form textbooks were by the same author as those we’d first seen in the village. While the nationally-mandated curriculum demanded that teachers spend about 10 lessons on the U.S., the book was lacking. It had short paragraphs titled, “New York,” “The Grand Canyon” and “National Holidays.”

The information on our holidays were two paragraphs and read, “Americans believe that if they work hard they can have what they want and be what they want. This is a part of what they call, ‘The American Dream.’ That is why Americans are so hard-working. They do not take many vacations and there are only five national holidays that are celebrated in every state. These are New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day… There are other holidays, but they are not celebrated in all the states.” It was interesting to read about us from a Ukrainian perspective. All true though.

I wanted to start with a little history so I drew some lovely pictures of a red-haired Columbus with sideburns and three ships that looked like walnut halves with triangles stuck in them. We moved on to history, food, fast food, American customs (I suppose that we like to eat hot dogs at baseball games?), habits (we are a smile-y, handshake-y kind of people), holidays (I played up Halloween and Thanksgiving. Ukrainian children were always anxious to know about Halloween).

A vocabulary word in the ninth form textbook the first week was “haberdashery.” I had heard the word but had no idea what it meant. “Oh, haberdashery.” It sounded like a grandpa thing to say. I gave a lesson on small shops and supermarkets, and this was one of their vocabulary words. After class I asked my counterpart teacher, “What does this mean?” And she explained that it meant accessories like handbags and gloves.

Another time I asked her if the cursive letter in front of me was a cursive F or T. Most of the children were taught to write English in cursive. I have formed the habit of never writing in cursive, so I didn’t even know how to do all the capital letters correctly. It was these little things that made me feel like I should go back to third grade before attempting to teach in a Ukrainian classroom.

Teaching was great at first. The students continued to be wonderful and sweet, and the other English teachers were ready to crack the whip if any of them got out of line. “Many classes want to work with Jessica,” they warned. “She doesn’t have to work with your class.” Which puts the fear of God in them.

My regional manager from Peace Corps came to visit on occasion. Every area of Ukraine was divided into a region by Peace Corps and every region had a manager, so we had someone to take care of our needs, questions and concerns. She traveled to every site to visit school and make sure apartments were suitable.

She sat in on one class to observe me but there wasn’t much to see because the pupils were taking a test that day. At the beginning of class, I did the introductions the way the Ukrainian teacher always did them:

"Good morning class”

“Good morning teacher”

“Who is on duty today?”

“I am on duty today”

“What is the date today?”

“The date is ... the fifth... I mean first of January”

“January?”

“Uh, no, Febr…uary.”

“Thank you, you may sit down." Then I did some warm up questions about the weather. For the start of the test, I read a text in English and they wrote down the days of the week corresponding with the pictures on their sheets of paper.

My manager met with me and the other English teachers, and we discussed everything. They said I worked hard and was a good teacher. Sometimes they would break into rapid fire Ukrainian and I'd be left hoping they were saying only nice things about me. My manager said they were.

She visited my new apartment and wrote down a list of things that should be changed. When she looked around to sit down, I smiled. All I had was one stool and my bed. No chairs, no sofa. I had a bucket, though, which I used sometimes as a second seating place. It was comfortable when you draped a dishtowel over it. She sat on the stool and wrote down that I needed chairs.

At the beginning and at the end of the school year, Ukraine schools had a first and last bell ceremony. The first bell ceremony was to welcome in the new first-formers, and the last bell ceremony was to say goodbye to the 11th form graduates, although they also had a separate graduation ceremony. On Saturday after the last day of school, we gathered at the school for the ceremony at 9 a.m. The 10th formers emceed. The 11th formers paraded out after everyone was assembled. The 11th formers wore huge, puffy pom-pom bows in their hair and the traditional Ukrainian graduation garment. They looked like large 5-year-olds. The first formers also wore these bows when they started school. The director and 10th formers spoke. The director handed out certificates to teachers and pupils, and younger students performed dances.

Looking back: seeing Americans again and traveling alone.

March 2008

An hour further west from me by train was a large town called Vinnytsia. It was the central city of our oblast. A volunteer lived in the town and the rest of us were scattered around it within an hour or two. PCVs conducted an English Club in Vinnytsia every other Saturday with local teachers and Ukrainians who wanted to practice English. It was also a great opportunity for the Americans to meet up.

When a volunteer who had been in Ukraine for a year invited me to the city for the English club, I was thankful because it was the first time I would be around other Americans in a month. I went by elektrichka to Vinnytsia to visit the club. My host mom was worried about me getting there but I was just overjoyed to escape. Matt came, too, from Nemiroff, where they make famous vodka.

We met with about 10 English-speaking Ukrainians. At that first meeting, the topic was on the Iowa Caucus, election and U.S. government. One gentleman at the club brought up points about the various caucuses and why the system is still used and the electoral college and generally displayed that he knew a good deal more about my government than I did. He seemed so knowledgeable of American sports and politics that he could probably debate my father on it.

Getting together with other Americans was comforting. Despite being from different sides of the United States, we understood each other. We got the same jokes and could speak naturally about things without extensive explanations.

We made American food together and reminisced on American pastimes. We were able to use Ukrainian and English interchangeably and be understood. It was comfortable to say, “Ya nesnayu” (I don’t know) and “shcho?” when an American asked a question, because it was such a habit and everyone understood.

We made fun of each other because we had all developed a habit of enunciating, using small words, omitting articles like “it” and “to her” and saying phrases that the Ukrainian children learned at school such as “It seems to me” and “I will go to you at this time.”

“I know English,” I would tell my friend Matt, who was notorious for sounding like a Ukrainian English-speaker. “You can speak to me normally.”

-----

Traveling was such a Thing in Ukraine that it had it's own title when I blogged about going somewhere. I called these stories "Poizd Parables" because poizd or поїзд means "train" in Ukrainian. (pronounced po-yeezd). Here's the first one.

No one at the train station spoke English and none of the train schedules were ever in English, except for some in Kiev.

While people strove purposefully past, and I avoided eye contact with taxi drivers and one-legged bums on crutches, I would stare stressfully at a train schedule to decipher the Cyrillic letters and figure out which track I should wait at.

The first time our language instructor gave us a tour of the train station, he explained the schedule board to us and moved on quickly like we all understood. I understood the schedule as well as I understood my dad when he started going on about testing a product at work using a fancy equation. I stayed behind and the foreign letters swam before my eyes. It was very clear that the next time I took a train, I would probably end up in Russia or Poland.

After training, I had to get used to traveling by myself. It was easier when there were five of us and we were always going to the same places and could help each other. Now, I had to be independent.

There were several different types of trains. Simple Elektrichkas were the slow crowded, economy trains and stopped in every village and town. We also had faster elektrichkas – called schivdky electrichkas – that were slightly more comfortable and quicker. The platzkart trains had sleeper cars and were more expensive. They were fast and didn’t stop at every tiny village. Kupe was the next step up and were private compartments of two that often had plug outlets. That was like being in the lap of luxury on a train. Peace Corps Volunteers could usually afford up to a platzcart train, but not for every journey.

I didn’t know about all the trains at first. After English Club Day, I had to get home. Tamara, my host mom, had written down two times of elektrichkas that would be available at the train station. One was at 2 p.m. and the other was 6 p.m. We were still on free Internet at the English library at 2 p.m. and, while it made me a little nervous to miss that train, I figured there would be something else available before 6:22 p.m. I would just ask. Since I knew the language and all.

I took a trolley bus back to the train station, and went into the main building. I studied the board of daily trains but it only listed the end destination; not what towns the trains would stop in.

I got in one of the shorter lines with the intention of asking the woman behind the glass about the trains, but since I was unsure, people kept pushing in front of me. In Ukraine, a queue is more an idea than a practice. Finally, I stopped a woman and asked her which window I should go to if I wanted a ticket to my town. She took me outside and pointed to a smaller building.

So I went in there. “When is the next train or elektrichka?” I asked. Next one was at 6:22, like my host mom had said. That was over two hours away. Depressing because I’d gotten up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the train that morning and I was exhausted and grumpy and nervous because I was by myself, and I just wanted to be in bed. Not in a train station waiting room for two hours.

I waited 20 minutes, trying to have a good attitude, and finally called my counterpart teacher. “Is there any other way to get back?” I asked.

“Go to the kasa (ticket window) in the main building and ask if there are any trains that will stop here on their way to another city,” she said. “Usually there are some, although they’ll be more expensive.”

Side note about kasa: I wrote “kaca” in a blog one time because that is literally how the word is spelled in Ukrainian since the “c” is an “s” sound. My family members had a field day with that one.

I went to the window, purchased a ticket on a train that would be stopping at my destination, found the correct track line by asking several different people, checked with the conductor to make sure it was going to my town, and was on my way 20 minutes later.

After we’d been moving for a few minutes, I asked the woman sitting across from me where she was going and she said “Krem,” Crimea. White-hot knifes of fear pierced through my stomach and I felt the most awful panic. Because I was pretty sure Crimea was way east and way south. And I should be going north.

I spent the next 10 minutes internally freaking out, going over the map in my head of what little I knew about Ukrainian geography. I knew of friends who, during training, tried to go to Chernigiv and ended up the opposite direction in Kyiv. And they knew Russian. And if I was on the wrong train, who knew when it would be stopping next? It was a platzcart train with compartments for sleeping and maybe it wouldn’t be stopping for hours and I’d be trapped on a train overnight going the wrong direction and end up in Crimea. I’d have to call Peace Corps, which meant every American in all of Ukraine would soon know about it because that’s how rumors were. “Did you hear about that volunteer from group 33 that tried to go home an hour away and ended up on the other side of the country?” And I’d have to call my host parents, who got nervous when I traveled alone as it was, and they’d never let me travel by myself again, and I should really learn more Ukrainian quickly so I understood what the heck was going on.

And then I got up the nerve to ask the woman again, “I’m sorry, I have a question. So you say you’re going to Crimea now?” She nodded and I looked wild-eyed because she asked me kindly, “Where are you going?” I told her and asked if it was the correct train. 

She nodded and checked with her son and nodded again. “It stops there,” she said. “Yes.”

“Oh good,” I breathed in Ukrainian. “Oh thank God,” I said in English.

I learned later that my town is a large enough station that most trains stop there and that the train was going to Kiev first, and then on to Crimea.

I got to town in an hour and 5 minutes instead of the two-plus hours the electrichka takes.

Looking back: my apartments in Ukraine

February 2007

I had three apartments in the first three months of living on my own. The first two apartments were owned by the same landlord. She moved me to the second one because she wanted her newly-married son to have the first. I was moved to the third apartment because my school didn’t like the landlord.

I moved into my first apartment in early February. I had no hot water and basic amenities. It was typical of a starter-Ukrainian apartment. According to Peace Corps, a strong door and lock as well as a bed and stove were necessities. Hot water was not. My host parents and my counterpart helped me move. My host dad and his nephew called me a taxi and helped me transfer everything. I had two large suitcases and a couple of small bags. My host mom promised to give me potatoes and beans. Tricia went through her cupboards and loaded me up with pots, pans, utensils, linens and another table and chairs for my apartment, and offered the help of her friend’s son if I need anything fixed. She told me she’d shop with me for other things I needed.

The apartment was  one large room with a separate little space for the kitchen and bathroom. My bed was a narrow futon thing against one wall while the other wall was filled with the wall unit. The thing was full of dishes and glassware left by the owner, and I had to rearrange everything to make room for my clothes.

I loved being on my own and cooking for myself again. I missed both families and the fact that they cooked for me and fed me and took care of me, but I loved having my own area.

I started to feel more comfortable and confident in the town once I was in my own place. I could listen to American music and watch movies on my laptop without bothering anyone.

Because I didn’t have hot water, I washed my hair the first week with cold water. It was like taking a bath at the North Pole. The water was made from ice cubes. I knew I was in the Peace Corps and what was the Peace Corps if not mud huts and arctic baths in the river, right? But Peace Corps said we should live at a moderate level, like our neighbors. And my neighbors, here? They had hot water.

When I visited my host family in the village, Sestra and Baba and asked me several times when I would be taking a shower. Finally, I smelled my armpits. "Do I smell or what?" I asked my sister.

"You have no hot water so you need to take a shower here!" she said.

I bought two metal devices I found at the outdoor market to heat my bathtub water. I had never seen such things before. They were simple metal coils attached to plugs that could be plugged in to heat up cups of tea. I figured if I bought two, it might be enough to heat up my bath water. I plugged them in at 4 p.m. in a metal bucket in my bathtub. By 9 p.m., the water had become tepid but nowhere near warm. At this rate, I knew that I’d be bathing sometime early next year. I unplugged everything and washed up in a foot of tepid water, all scrunched up because the bathtub was short. I shivered but was glad the water wasn’t icy this time.

Saturday morning, I went to the market again – bazaars they called them – and bought a much larger coiled metal device suitable for heating a bathtub. I used this several times, even though it usually blew my circuit breaker and I had to keep flipping the switch. And then, my regional manager read my blog and told me I had to stop this dangerous practice because it was a safety hazard.

I washed my clothes in the tub, scrubbed them, rinsed them, and hung them on laundry lines above the bath. I talked to Oksana about these things and she laughed and said, “I can imagine the situation.” I bet she could. Me, the American, bathing in cold water and washing my clothes by hand.

One day my new friend Sasha stopped by to show me stores in town to buy things for my apartment and I went to unlock the door for him. The locking mechanism used a big skeleton key and I had to lock myself into and out of the apartment.

The key wouldn’t turn.

“Interesting,” I thought to myself. I imagined Sasha standing on the other side of the door, listening to the five key chains attached to my one key scrabbling with the lock.

“Don’t hurry,” Sasha said from the other side of the door.

I finally said, “I think the lock is broken. Or the key. I’m stuck in here forever.”

“Open your balcony door and throw the key down to me. I’ll try it from the other side,” he suggested. So he went around the building and I threw the key down to him from my third floor window because the windows didn’t have screens. He didn’t have any luck, either.

He went to Natasha’s house to get her copy of the key to see if that would work.

It didn’t. I was imprisoned. “How about I throw one of the keys back to you and you try it again,” he said.

“Oh, that’ll work,” I said and thought about my great hand-eye coordination and the probability that the key would become lodged in some crevice of the building instead of my grasping fingers.

“Can you catch?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. I went to the window and he tossed the keys up, and I caught it on the second try. I was quite pleased about all the key chains at that point, making it an easy and large target.

“I think you’re going to be in there for the next two years,” he said after we’d worked at the door some more from both sides. “I’ll go get my tools. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

He was also a comedian.

He came back and took the lock apart. Once freed, we went to buy a new lock.

It took me awhile to figure out the trash situation. When I lived with my host family, I noticed that periodically, my host dad took the trash out. But I never understood the pattern of days. I thought maybe there was a specific day of the week like in America but he seemed to go out randomly.

Later, I found out it arrived daily, at 6 p.m., for five minutes. We were to bring our bags down to the street and wait for the truck. The garbage truck arrived, the man lowered a big trash container, and everyone threw their trash in. It was a good time to socialize and catch up with friends.

Michelle, the fifth member of our cluster group from the village who went home over Christmas, returned Jan. 9. and brought us gifts. I got peanut butter, a Nutty Bar, Ranch salad dressing, a chocolate chip cookie mix, Andes mints and a hot chocolate packet. Pulling out each item was like a birthday party. Peanut Butter! Ranch salad dressing! Chocolate chip cookies! I baked the cookies immediately to celebrate my move. I burned them only a little because I wasn’t used to the oven.

The Ukrainian hospitality took getting used to. They were used to going over to each other's houses without warning to visit, and expected tea and cookies. Usually they brought the cookies. One day, my host mom Tamara came to visit with a friend, which was unnerving because if I wasn’t expecting company, then my house was generally a mess. So I felt embarrassed and put on water for tea. They found seats in the clutter of my one main room with my messy bed and papers all over the floor because I was lesson planning. And then I had to try to carry on a conversation and understand them in Ukrainian because they didn’t speak English. People also expected me to drop by. My host family asked me, "Why haven't you come to us, why haven't you come to us?" And I was like, “Well, you haven't invited me. I had no reason to come to you. I want to go home and relax after work. What if you're busy?” Obviously I couldn’t translate all that so I said, "I'm sorry, when would you like me to come to you?"

In Ukrainian, that's how it translated. "I'm going over to Tamara's house" was "I'm going to Tamara."

After a month, I was spontaneously told I needed to move from my apartment to a new apartment within the week and could I move on Saturday? No, I was out of town Saturday? Then could I move the next Monday? I moved to a new apartment that had hot water and more space in the kitchen.

My second apartment didn’t have Internet access. To get the wireless access I had enjoyed before, I went down the street and sat on a porch across from the antenna. People stared at me because you don’t sit on a porch in Ukraine, you’ll get sick! I brought along a towel to sit on, because my bottom often did go numb from cold, and ignored the stares.

A month after that, I moved to my third, permanent apartment. I continued to go down the street to use Internet, even while old babushkas chastised me, until Sasha found a company to install it in my apartment. I paid for it, because this wasn’t a Peace Corps-deemed necessity, but it was worth it. I was connected to the world again. I could email, I could Skype, I could blog! I felt alive again.

Looking back: first weeks in my new town

December 2007 to January 2008

We were sworn in as official Peace Corps volunteers in December and moved to our new sites. The new town in Vinnytska Oblast was large and I was anonymous, at least at first. I could walk down the street and unless I opened my mouth, no one noticed me.

In the village, people knew who we were. I didn't know all of them but they all knew me. They shouted my name on the street and when Matt and Mike went into the disco, the girls screamed like they were rock stars. The guys looked sheepish but they loved it. It was different in this larger town.

I lived in a second-story apartment for a month with two host parents. My new host mom had a small concession kiosk near one of the schools, and my new host dad was a radio deejay or “radio journalist” as he called himself. He gave me a book of poems he had written in Ukrainian. He liked to make jokes and point out things. He was a Ukrainian teacher and offered to be my Ukrainian tutor so I could continue to learn the language.

I had a hard time letting go at first. It was January and winter. I hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. I wrote home about each dark day and about how miserable I was. Antonella and I called each other daily to share our misery.

There was more mud than grass in Ukraine and the roads became wet and muddy in the winter. I suddenly understood why taking off shoes was so important to Ukrainians. I bought Ukrainian black winter booths that were very stylish. Because everyone else in Ukraine took such good care of their shoes, I learned to wipe mine off with a rag after stomping through the mud. I even polished them with black shoe polish when needed. I had never shoe-polished anything in my life.

I wrote my real mom emails full of angsty text I was embarrassed to read later like, "I'm not sure I'll ever be happy here," and "How dare you allow me to move here. What kind of mother are you?"

My mom wrote me an email after a few weeks of these sappy letters and said, "You might not want to hear this, but you can't focus too hard on the past or you won't enjoy the future."

I felt dark, dark, dark. I stayed in my room a lot and moped gloomily around. I cried in the bathtub. I went for long walks and called Antonella. The dead of winter was a bad time to move to a new place.

My new host mom liked to ask me all kinds of questions while we ate and I was always slow to respond as I paged through limited vocabulary words in my head.

I loved my counterpart teacher (my school liaison), Tricia (name changed). She seemed to understand that I was worried and nervous. She was sweet and patient and liked to tease me. I attended classes with her that first week in Koziatyn. I was at lessons on Dec. 25, and the children from fifth from came in and decorated the classroom and lit sparklers to wish me a Merry Christmas. Her classroom was one of the nicest I had ever seen in Ukraine. The desks were smooth and new. Posters, obtained from a volunteer two years previously, hung on the walls and the rear of the room was filled with English textbooks and picture books.

In two of her English lessons, I read dictations for the students, which the kids were both pleased and worried by. We didn't have "dictations" back home. When Sestra back in the village mentioned the word, I was not sure what she meant. "Dictation," she said. "It's an ENGLISH word." It meant I read a paragraph in English to the students and they wrote it down word for word to practice spelling and recognizing the words. Sometimes I'd pronounce something different then the British way and they'd look at their teacher for help. Sometimes my teacher would correct my American pronunciation to sound more British English. As I have a terrible British accent, this was comical. The children were taught not to pronounce the ‘R’ on ‘car’ or ‘bar’ and that one should say, “I shall head to the theater after supper,” instead of “will.”

This meant the Ukrainian children all spoke like little British kids with Ukrainian accidents.

I also fought with Sestra over “supper” versus “dinner” for the evening meal.

I was just in time for the last week of the semester for the students at school in my new town, which meant I didn’t really do much. I walked to school most mornings with Tricia. It was a chilly and peaceful 30-minute walk. The teachers were busy with paperwork and recording grades and the children were eager for the holiday to begin at the end of December. 

For my first New Year’s Eve, I got permission to go to Kiev and meet my previous host family. Tamara walked with me to the train station and put me on a train under the care of her friend, who worked one of the cars. New Year’s was more important than Christmas, probably because it was a big non-religious holiday that they were allowed to celebrate during the Soviet Union. People dressed up and lit off fireworks.

I went to the circus with Oksana and Slava, and later we went to a wax museum. I got my picture taken with Stalin, Lenin, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Britney Spears.

In the evening we walked around Independence Square and admired the huge New Year’s Tree. Before I came back home on New Year’s Eve, Tamila ordered pizza for lunch. She laid the table with a plate of fish, holodets and pizza. I smiled at the picture it made of Ukraine and America/Italy on the table. Holodets is a dish made of meat chilled in a bowl of jello meat fat. It’s a traditional Ukrainian dish and many Ukrainians tried to convince me how tasty it was. I was not moved.

Back in Koziatyn, my host family had supper at 11:30 p.m. and toasted the New Year at midnight. I had the thought that the New Year wouldn’t begin for another nine hours in Colorado.

Looking back: Transition from village to town in Peace Corps Ukraine

Ukrainians don't usually smile in photos and Americans smile "too big" so we had to demonstrate this.

December 2007 

I have seen where I’m going to live for two years! We attended a mid-training conference in Kyiv last weekend, where they revealed our permanent sites to us. This was a Big Moment for each of us volunteers because the next two years of our lives were being determined. We were going to visit the place where we’d meet our friends, gain new acquaintances, hopefully make a difference however small, learn so many new things… My cluster mates and I were all assigned to the same ‘oblast’ (region of Ukraine), except for one. She was assigned way west in the Carpathian mountains, about 18 hours away.

I visited my new site for a few days; met my counterpart; attended the classes of students I will be teaching; and met the host family I will live with for one month. The city has a population of over 25,000 – very different from the village of just over 5,000 people that I live in now.

I will live with a host family the first month; then move into my own flat. It will be nice to be on my own again, although I’m pretty sure I’ll miss my current family’s food. 

I leave my village here, right before America’s Christmas, and move to my new city, which will be my home for the next two years.

Interesting fact: I say America’s Christmas because we celebrate Christmas Dec. 25, while Ukraine celebrates it January 7.

The final week of our involvement at the secondary school in our community, we conducted an English week program and ended with a talent show. English week went well. The children of the school performed various singing and dancing acts and we Americans ended the festivities with a traditional Ukrainian song. They loved it.

Sunday was my birthday. What might have been a sad and depressing day for me was definitely not. My host family spent part of Saturday and all morning Sunday making food for a big dinner at noon. When I woke up and went downstairs, my host mom wished me a happy birthday and tugged on my ears. Then later my host dad shook my hand and tugged on my ears. My sister said it was tradition but I'm still not sure why.

My friends came and two of my host sister's friends, and the whole family. They presented gifts to me and kissed my cheeks and we ate a lot and drank a lot. My (American) mom called and my friends from America called and a couple friends from here, as well, including my counterpart teacher where I'll be teaching for two years. I felt loved and happy, even far away from everything familiar.

I leave here Dec. 17 for my permanent host site. Fear, anticipation, excitement, fear. Oh, I better make this quick. My host sister is just now telling me to stop writing emails and go learn some Ukrainian words so we can talk in Ukrainian because she just told me two words to remember and I now can't for the life of me remember them. She should be used to that. She'll remember words from the day before that I've taught her but it doesn't seem to work the same the other way around.

"That's because English is just easier to remember. The words don't have 25 letters," I tell her but she doesn't like that excuse.

Here in the village, I took classes in Ukrainian daily, interned at the local secondary school teaching English to children, took technical training classes on how to teach, and implemented a community project with the four other Americans in my cluster group in a small village not far from Kyiv. Which meant frustration and anticipation and downright fear all coincided with eagerness to see what I'd learn next. I lived with a large family; mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and sister. I love them dearly and am sad to leave them Dec. 17. It's impossible to believe that the training is over. In my village these last couple months I ate pig's ear and learned how to make ravioli from scratch and drank too much on my birthday  and taught English to seventh formers and learned how to read and speak a little of the language and taught my host sister 'awesome,' 'mean,' and 'cool.'

I might have had one of the best host family experiences ever in that little village. My host sister became like my own sister. My host mom admonished me when I didn't wear a hat, and she made me lasagna (that I had taught her how to make) when she thought she had upset me. On my last full day there, she made me pizza. She once said she doesn't like to drink water and then, a month later, she was sitting at the table drinking a glass of water. "Look," she said in surprise after a minute. "I'm learning to drink water." (in Ukrainian,-- she doesn't speak English). I laughed and laughed. My host dad teased me and liked to ask me things about America that I usually knew little about. How much a repairman makes and what does a house cost and how much did I make at my job. My host grandma and mom often joked about my first night there. How I don't like fish and mushrooms, and the only things I like are potatoes, eggs, and cheese. Not true. I just don't want soup for breakfast every day!

I studied Ukrainian on my host sister's bed and would bother her while she was playing 'The Sims.' "What does this mean, how do I say this...?" She filmed me with her video camera while I stood in front of a green piece of fabric, and then replaced the background with film from outside to create the effect I was flying - just like in the movies. I will miss her funny jokes in English, and her exasperation with me because I could remember how to say "I want to fart" or other inappropriate words, while I could never remember words she'd taught me like "lid" and "tree" and "road." Don't even get me started on "road" and "deer." It sounds exactly the same. We also set up the video camera to film an instance when my sister was trying to get me to say a particular Ukrainian letter that is equivalent to a combo of "H" and "G" in English. Difficult for Americans to say. Like rolling the 'r's. Apparently, only little children can't roll their r's. Little children and me.

Transition is hard. But that doesn't mean I should stop myself from experiencing new things and connecting here. It's good to realize this. So. On to meeting my new community.