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.

Looking back: Learning Ukrainian

Ukrainian phrases:

Мене звати джесіка. - My name is Jessica.

Я з америки, штат колорадо. - I am from America, the state of Colorado.

Our lessons took place at our language teacher's house. His living room was our classroom and he filled poster sheets of paper with verb tenses, conjugations and charts. He started each lesson by asking us simple questions about our state of being, what we did in our free time and if we liked the weather outside. I later used this same technique in my own classroom.

I often confused “Yak tebe svaty?” (What is your name) with “Yak cpraviy?” (How are you) and answered “What is your name?” with “I’m doing very well, thank you, although I didn’t sleep well.”

We played matching games and board games that Serhiy created himself to learn the many and varied tenses of the verb, "to go." I hated that verb. Slightly different letters added on to the verb meant you were coming, leaving, going around, returning, or that you had been or would go. We learned that the noun ending changed depending on the context and conjugation of the verb.

I was able to start having simple conversations with my host family. In one conversation, Baba said the family would be sad when I left and I couldn’t go very far away so I could visit. I said I would like to stay close and would definitely come visit. Well, that was the point I wanted to get across. Because of my limited language, it sounded more like, “yes, yes, not far away, not far away. I’ll tell the Peace Corps. (laughter) I will visit by mashrutka or bus or train.”

I asked Oksana if I could use the Internet and she said, "Ask me in Ukrainian" so I said "ok, можна … iнтернет?" (Can I... Internet).

I didn't know the word for 'to use' so she said it went like this, “(insert word that is seven syllables long)" and I said, “Say what?”

And she wrote it down, використовувати. I glared at her and said, "Why does that word have a million letters?"

"Huh?" she asked.

"1,2,3,4...15." I said. “The word 'use' has three letters and that word 'vikoristovoovaty' has 15 letters. Why?"

She giggled at me.

I came home from my Ukrainian lessons one day and my host mom Svyeta tried to ask me why I was home early. But she didn’t speak English and my Ukrainian was still awful so she tried to ask me this with a dictionary. Something about how Oksana was at school until 2 or 3 p.m. and I was home earlier than that.

What I got out of it was that I wasn’t learning the language very quickly and I should be working harder like Oksana, and I was home early because I hadn’t studied very hard.

My insecurity might have played a role here. So I burst into tears.

“I’m doing the best I can and I’m far away from home and I miss my family and I study every night and it’s not like I can learn a language in three weeks! It’s a hard language and it’s confusing and I just don’t get it!” I said, in a speedy rush of English while she stared at me, bewildered and wide-eyed.

Oksana came home then and asked, “What is going on?” She translated what her mom had been asking me.

“Oh,” I said. I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to tell them what my interpretation had been.

The next morning I found out from three different people in town that everyone knew I had cried. Thank you, small town.

Looking back: breakfast and travel in Ukraine

Nov. 7, 2007

I have had many discussions with my host grandma and sister about how I do like soup and borscht and chicken on the bone; I just don’t like them for breakfast.

Yesterday when they gave me soup and I picked at it and ate the boiled eggs and sausage instead, they told me that soup would start my day out right. There are many vitamins in soup. It is good for me and will not make my stomach feel bad. “Yes, that’s true,” I said, still skeptical.

“When you go back to America,” Baba (Grandma) said, “You will tell your mom, soup for breakfast!” I laughed and laughed.

The other day when Baba and Mama were upset at my host sister for not eating enough, they pointed at her and said “Jessica!” and pointed at me and back to her. Teasing both of us because I don’t eat enough.

I just want to eat something light like eggs or cereal for breakfast, I try to tell them.

“You can eat anything anytime you want,” my host sister says. I think she feels I’m limited by these rules I’ve imposed on myself. “Where is this book that says you can’t eat lasagna for breakfast? I have not read that anywhere.”

“It is how we do things in American. We have certain things for breakfast and other things we eat for lunch and dinner,” I said, giggling.

“You are wrong, we are right,” she told me. 

I made my host family lasagna for supper the other night. I had to find the ingredients in Kyiv, and they were startled by the flat noodles. They all liked the meal and said “very good” over and over in Ukrainian, so I was pleased. There was some left over and Baba said, “Tomorrow. We’ll eat it tomorrow.” I started to smile and shake my head at the same time that she said, “in the morning. You can eat it in the morning.”

“Not for breakfast,” I said and laughed. “I’m not eating lasagna for breakfast.”

“What do you want?” she said in Ukrainian.

“I want eggs and malincy (similar to pancakes with berry jam) and Muesli,” I said, and even responded in Ukrainian. “I will eat lasagna for lunch.”

“For lunch,” she agreed.

------

I went to Kyiv with my host grandmother last week to visit her daughter and daughter’s family. They live in a nice apartment in Kyiv. 

Her daughter – we’ll call her Tammy – and family took me to the center of Kyiv to see some of the main points of interest. We went to Shevchenko Park and saw the university named after the famous poet. They pointed out to me many of the historic buildings, and we saw the Golden Gates memorial. They explained how much of the city was destroyed after the second world war and there are not many ancient buildings left. We went into the underground mall in the Center and my eyes rounded at how modern it was. And I was excited that there was a McDonald's food. American food! Sometimes I miss fast food. I know that we eat too much of it in America but I still miss it.

“I like McDonald’s,” said Tammy’s daughter, Jane.

“Jessica, maybe you want Verenicky (meat dumplings) or something else? Tell Jane that McDonald’s is not healthy,” Tammy said.

“McDonald’s is not healthy,” I said to Jane in a small voice. “But I really, really want it. Like really, really.” So we had McDonald’s. It was wonderful.

The train ride back to my village the next day was two hours. I pulled out my Ukrainian flashcards and discussed them with Baba. Pretty soon, the older ladies nearby were watching me, interjecting a comment or two if I pronounced something wrong. A young lady on the train came up to me afterwhile because she had overheard me speak English. We talked for awhile in English.

Meanwhile, a drunk young man was very interested in me and our conversation and would try to interject comments or talk to us. His mom hushed him up sometimes. He’d walk by in the aisle and tried to talk to me or grab my hand and I’d gently push him away, or just ignore him.

Finally, he stood up and tried to touch my knee. I shoved his hand away and instantly there were about five babusyas on their feet, shouting at his mother to control her drunk son. My new friend translated. “She’s saying she hasn’t done anything wrong and her son is just fine, they’re the ones who are wrong,” she said. “They’re saying she shouldn’t take him out in public and that they’re going to call the police …” Then she added. “This doesn’t really happen that often.” The two got off at the next stop.

It was very exciting.

Looking back: learning to live in Ukraine

October 2007

We had a crash course in all things Ukrainian during those first three months. We learned how to teach in Ukrainian classrooms and had four hours a day of language classes.

Our training teacher taught the English class and we observed her. I felt like an exotic bird. Before class, the children giggled and clustered around the desks on the other side of the room. They stared at us and whispered like we were a particularly interesting exhibit at the museum. Most of these children had never seen Americans before and they acted the way I might if Brad Pitt or Ewan McGregor stopped by to hang out.

“Who will have the nerve?” I wondered, amused. Finally a student ventured forth from the pack. “How old are you?” she blurted at us. We answered and she went to report back to her group.

During a break, Antonella and I walked across the street to get a snack from a yellow kiosk. It was the closest available food and a hot spot for the students to buy snacks. 

We waited patiently for our turn while children around us pushed in and placed orders. It was a free for all and we would have been standing there into next year if we hadn’t started thinking like Ukrainians. “You just have to get in there,” I muttered to my friend. “You’re going to be next. Go, go, go!” And I pushed her forward. We learned that lines, or queues, are not widely used in Ukraine.

The village school used a series of old, pictureless textbooks by a Ukrainian author who had purportedly been to England and had a well-rounded grasp of English and American cultures.

The map of North America at the front of the book was a basic outline and placed “Washington” somewhere below Lake Erie, and Niagara Falls across the arm of the U.S. under New York. It took some doing to convince the students that there was a Washington D.C. and a state of Washington, and that they were in two separate locations.

The books’ technique for teaching English was to memorize and recite vocabulary words and paragraphs of text. Often for homework, the students were told to retell a text. This meant the kids memorized the paragraph and recited it in class.

It was rare that more than three or four students actually completed the assignment. Most of the students would stand up, stutter through a few words, and then sit down after the teacher wrote down their low mark (grade).

We wrote lesson plans and used the tools we’d been taught in our technical training sessions to teach the children. The first day that we were to teach, Michelle was the only one who taught. She had a third period class and the rest of us were supposed to teach fourth period lessons. However, all classes after third period were canceled because the students helped clean the school. I had stayed up late planning a lesson that never happened and I was upset at Ukrainian last minute schedules.

We asked Michelle how she did as the first veteran among us and she only muttered, "I don't want to talk about it."

My first official day of teaching went well. The seventh form students ate up what I said and thought I was pretty awesome. I taught food vocabulary. I taught the words for "breakfast," "lunch" and "dinner" and cut out pictures of food from magazines. In the United States, we have a different idea of food. We eat definite things for different meals. Eggs, pancakes, juice and fruit are for breakfast. Sandwiches are for lunch. And hot things like meat and potatoes are for dinner (that is, depending on where you live in the states). In Ukraine, they eat everything for all meals. Borshch is the only thing that is considered a lunch or dinner item.

Sestra asked me if I would come to her class some time to teach. She was in ninth form and I didn’t have her class as one of the ones I was scheduled to teach. She arranged with her teacher a time for me to come.

When I arrived at the class after my Ukrainian language class, the teacher told me I had the students for the whole hour and she'd be in the Teachers’ Lounge.

I had to extend the 20-minute presentation I had prepared to 50 minutes by going slowly and then thinking madly for other things to say. I asked them everything they knew about American and pointed to popular states on the map. After class, the students told me to come back and teach English every lesson.

The toilets at the school were in back. They were small round holes cut into the ground inside four stalls. The female pupils waited outside for their turn because there were no doors on the stalls.

***

On Saturdays, we met with another American cohort in a nearby town. It was 30 minutes away by bus. The first week while waiting for the bus, Michelle walked over to a kiosk to get a bottle of water. A few minutes later, she returned empty-handed.

“I failed,” she said, downcast. “How?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she said. “I asked for Voda (water) and she said ‘nee’ and I said ‘tak’ and she said ‘nee’ so I said, ‘fine’ and left.” (She had probably asked for vodka because the words are almost the same).

When the small bus came and the door opened, it was packed and I had to stand next to the driver.

The driver stopped to let someone off and two more people got in. Then it stopped again and three more people got in. Then it stopped and the driver argued with the waiting people, obviously letting them know we were full. That didn’t stop two more insistent people from shoving their way on. I found myself sitting backwards on the dashboard almost on top of the driver, hunched over with my hand on the driver’s shoulder so I wouldn’t fall into the sardine-in-a-can passengers.

Michelle muttered when we got off, “The man behind me got to third base.”

Looking back: First days in a Ukrainian village

I thought it might be nice to look back and remember some great experiences in Ukraine. I lived in a village for 3 months in October to December 2007, before I moved to a larger town where I worked as an English teacher from January 2008 to December 2009.

Oct. 4, 2007

(Names and places have been changed)

Sestra (Ukrainian word for sister) later liked to tease me that the first thing I said when I walked in the door and met her parents and grandparents was, “Where should I put my shoes?” This was something we’d learned in orientation. Ukrainians take off their shoes when they enter a house and they bring candy or chocolate. I was nervous. I didn’t want to offend anyone.

Of course, that’s when they led me into their kitchen and we crowded around the table and they beamed at me and served fish.

There was that fish with the eyes sitting on the plate and sardines and caviar on bread. I ate the potatoes and bread and bravely nibbled at the fish.

They kept pressuring me to eat more, more, and eventually I just couldn’t because it was all too fishy and I could see that they were discussing it. Sestra looked at me helplessly like she didn’t want to translate so finally I said, "I don't really like fish ... but it's okay, the potatoes and bread were delicious." This distressed them and Sestra said, "We didn't know, we'll serve something else tomorrow."

I said, “No it's fine!”

They served an apple cake and chocolate and coffee for dessert.

Sestra didn't really understand the concept of my pickiness. "There's not many things I don't eat," she said.

I never realized just how picky I was until I started traveling, because I could be choosy with my selection in the states. I only like six fruits, I love meats, but not their organs, and I’m also relatively selective with vegetables.

They served me borscht, a famous Ukrainian dish of tomato, beets and cabbage. I’m not usually a fan of beets but had to let that one go since the soup was tasty.

The first night, I blew their electricity twice. I had plug adapters but my surge protector didn’t have the proper electrical adaptation. I tried to plug it in, there was a pop and the lights went out. My stomach dropped and I thought, "Nice, I just murdered their electricity."

Her father knew what to do and the lights came back on. Then he examined the surge protector and my other appliances, and finally took it away with him. He did something to it and got it to work with their electricity.

I lay in bed that first night, wide-eyed, lying in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar house with strange electricity and food, in an unfamiliar country, and I was gripped with panic again.

I spent a lot of time over the next few days buying prepaid phone cards after I had purchased a cheap mobile phone, and calling my parents and friends back home. I needed the connection and the village didn’t have good Internet, which meant I wasn’t able to send emails or get on Skype.

The village I lived in had a population of 5,000.

There were lots of trees and a few stores, factory, hospital, couple of cafe-slash-bars, a school and a “culture” house, which is where their disco nights and concerts were held. One street went through town, which was paved in the middle and turned to mud along the sides. It split near the school and a statue to the "Unknown Soldier." My house was to the left, by a deep gulley of overgrown brush and skeleton trees, which Oksana said was haunted. She and her friends told me about the ghost they’d seen there. They also liked to stage filmed episodes of the TV show, “Charmed,” which ran as reruns on an English channel.

My host family had a very nice house because the father was always making improvements. They had a western toilet and a shower that rivaled mine in the states. The shower stall had a radio and water came from a spigot in the ceiling, which was the only of its kind I ever saw in Ukraine. Usually, the showers were nozzles attached to hoses, and weren’t always anchored to the wall. It was a process of washing with one hand while holding the nozzle with the other.

I lived with a complete family; parents, grandparents and one 14-year old daughter, Sestra. They were open and welcoming, although also disapproving of the general sloppiness and obesity of Americans. Sestra had been learning English in school and picked even more up as we communicated. The rest of the family knew nothing. They were eager to point at objects and get me to say them.

I lived on the second floor in a small bedroom across from Sestra's room. The stairs up to my bedroom were so steep it was almost like a ladder. I had a stand-alone wardrobe and a desk with a lamp.

The family had pigs, a cow and chickens. They grew grapes along wooden posts outside their front door and had two nearby fields where they grew potatoes, beets, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, strawberries and onions.