December 29th,2007
You would think I would learn. As any of you who read my blog would know, I had a somewhat interesting experience in the elevator at my apartment complex when I first moved into my apartment here in Ukraine. I, and all of my stuff, got stuck in the elevator for about 40 minutes. After that I took the stairs because I had visions of getting trapped without my Ukrainian host family to save me. Recently, the elevator was broken for over 3 weeks and special people were finally brought in to fix it. I still avoided using it on general principal but as the days have gotten shorter I have started using the elevator after dark simply because the landings in my building only have a light bulb on every third landing and you never know who you might meet, or what you might step in in the dark so I generally choose to risk a known danger rather then a unknown one.
This being said, I decided to make a late night run to the store to get the stuff to make crapes and after dodging all of the youths hanging out on a Friday night (this is how pathetic I am, I am cooking alone in my house on a Friday night. I am trying not to think about it, it could always be worse and I could be drinking) I elected to take the elevator, which had been working perfectly since the repair guys came, up to my apartment. I get in, press the button and the elevator doors close and I start moving up. There is a gap when the doors close and you can see the landings as you pass them and say hello to you neighbors, that sort of thing. I always count the landings because I am trying to improve my Ukrainian numbers. I reach seven when the elevator jerks to a stop. I am eye level with the eighth floor landing so I know we have stopped in between floors. I say “we” meaning me and the giant premonition of doom standing beside me. The elevator shudders and I can hear the elevator engine (which is probably a refurbished model-T engine from 1910) straining to lift the elevator. My brain does the lightening calculations:
The engine is still running
but the elevator is not moving
meaning the elevator really is “stuck”
Meaning the cable (which is probably as old as the model T engine) is under a significant amount of stress.
and I am 8 floors up
in an elevator that probably does not have the best safety backups
all this equals = major bummer for me.
I hear a loud clink, much like somebody dropping a giant wrench, the engine stops and the elevator drops 2 feet. I scream like a little girl. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I find myself once again stuck in the elevator. But unlike last time, I am 7 floors up and I have no babycia to come get a burly taxi driver to pry open the doors for me. I think to myself, “hmm, what would Jesus do?”, no wait that won’t help me. Jesus is busy and if I am about to die I don’t want him to hear any of the words I am using right now anyway.
I know,“what would Macgyver do?” I take a catalogue of all of the things I have on me. I have just gone to the store and I bought, flour, milk, vinegar, and fizzy mineral water. I also have my purse with Faulkners Absalom, Absalom, some migraine pills, a maxi pad, and pens. “this is good.” I think, “I have some things to work with, what can I make with what I have”. Macgyver was able to stop a leak in a Soviet nuclear reactor with a chocolate bar surely I can get out of a soviet elevator with what I have. Right?
This is roughly my train of thought. “Okay, I have fizzy water, maybe if I shake it really hard I can create an explosion, ooohh, I also have vinegar doesn’t that fizz and explode with baking soda? Wait, I don’t have baking soda. Will flour work? no stupid, all you need to add then is the milk and you can make a cake. But I have no eggs…that’s not the point. Wait a minuite, I don’t really want an explosion anyway, I am in a little elevator, held up by a cable that has more rust on it then the water coming out of my pipes. And how would I make the explosion go out of the elevator instead of in and ending up as Peace corps puree? Don’t be an idiot Shannon, it’s fizzy water, not TNT, the worst you could do is soak yourself and put your eye out with a flying bottle top. Wait, I have paper and I think I have matches I can send a smoke signel. Faulkner won’t mind and it’s not like I am ever really going to read this book anyway, I have been carrying it around for weeks and I am only on page 17. Hold on, lighting a fire in a small confined space is probably not a good idea. Smoke is not a good warning, people here burn their trash all the time and I would suffocate far before I ever got noticed. Maybe if I wedge the maxi pad between the doors and get it wet it will push the doors open. Who are we kidding, they aren’t really that absorbent and I would rather die of starvation then have to try and explain what I was doing with a maxi pad in an elevator and why it was all wet. Well, I have enough water for a few days and a book to read surly someone will notice I’m missing, Right? Wait, Macgyver would never think that Shannon, but then who are we kidding, you are not Macgyver. Maybe I should leave a note just in case? Mommy!”
Macgyver I am not. So instead of coming up with a brilliant solution I stare stupidly at the elevator doors. I hear something. It’s a meow. The cat from the 8th floor is looking down on me from it’s perch on the 8th floor landing. An idea dawns, the people on the 8th floor always come out to let their cat in when it meows and then I can call out to them. The cat looks at me. It doesn’t want to meow at it’s door because I am far more interesting then going inside. I stare at it, it stares at me. And I think, I am going to have to wait until this cat gets bored. That could take forever since my cat in America can stare at a blank wall for hours and not even blink. “go home honey!”, I say “go home, isn’t kitty hungry?”. I am talking to the cat like it’s Lassie. But Lassie is a dog, Lassie would care, this is a cat, they don’t care about anything but eating and napping in sunbeams. I jump up, waving my arms and trying to scare the cat away so it will ask to be let in at it’s door. All the while saying, “go home honey, go home”.
I hear another noise. I look down and see that, while my attention was fixed above my head on the cat a large group of teenagers had walked up to the 7th floor landing and were watching me wave my arms and shout towards the ceiling. I look at them and blushed deep red from my toenails to my ears.
Being my usual eloquent self I blurt out, “I’m stuck” (in English, which none of the kids speak)
“Are you drunk?” They ask in Ukrainian.
“Hi (no) lift ne pratsue (the lift does not work) I reply.
Understanding dawns and the teenagers separate to either side of the elevator doors and begin to pull. They have obviously done this before. The doors open and I step the two feet down to the 7th floor landing. “Thanks” I say and scurry up the stairs before they can ask who I was talking to all by myself in the elevator. I pass the cat on the 8th floor that is still staring into the elevator and probably stayed there all night. I see lots of stairs in my future.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Ukrainian Post
You have to love the Ukrainian postal service. This is what that package I recieved yesterday looked like. I think they played soccer with it before delivering it. Note: if you ever send anything to Ukraine, pad it well and make sure it isn't that valueable.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Guinea Pig Drama
Guinea Pig Drama – December 12, 2007
I don’t know if any of you out there have a guinea pig but for the first time in my life I now have one of my very own. My host sister was afraid that I would be lonely living all my myself so one day she handed me a shoe box that was filled with vegetables and a six month old guinea pig. I promptly named the little thing Misha because it is the only Ukrainian name I can remember with any regularity besides Miroslav. And since Miroslav means “warrior for peace” it seemed a little presumptuous for a guinea pig, so Misha it was.
Guinea Pigs are interesting creatures. It is like having a really dumb dog in a cage. Misha will squeal when I come in and purrs like a cat when I pet her. I like to think its purring because the only other option would be trembling in fear. She is also as twitchy as a canary on espresso. If I move to quickly she will freak out and run full force in the opposite direction, often forgetting that she is in a cage so she just ends banging her little head against the bars. Did I mention that she is cute but stupid? When I put her on the linoleum floor in my apartment she tries to run so fast that her little clawed feet only slip and she ends up going no where. It’s like watching a dog run on hardwood floors but slightly more pathetic.
This being said, I often feel bad to keep her in her little cage so I shut the door to my bedroom and let her run around the hallway way while I study Ukrainian in the kitchen. That way I can keep an eye on her but still do something else. Well the other day, I didn’t pay enough attention and I looked up to see Misha at my feet in the kitchen. I don’t let her run around the kitchen because there are places that she can hide that I would never get her out of like under the stove or refrigerator. So guess where she goes the second I try to catch her. Behind the fridge. Now, I am not to worried about this because she will have to come out eventually so I just finish studying. She hasn’t come out and I need to leave. I know that guinea pigs like to chew on wires so I can’t very well leave here out while I am gone. I look behind the fridge…and she isn’t there. This is not good. Then I here something, I look a little closer and realize that she is not longer behind the fridge because she has crawled under the fridge and into the 1960 motor it is powered by. Now the motor for my fridge come one about ever 25 minutes and it sounds like a garbage disposal running. It is loud and makes the whole fridge shake but it works so I don’t complain. But I know that with that amount of action that means there are some rapidly moving parts in that motor that will not hesitate to turn my guinea pig into chop suey. So I do the only reasonable thing I can think of, I panic. I move the fridge away from the wall so I can see the tiny space between the motor and the back cover. I can also see Misha left rear foot. I can’t get my hand in there to grab her and am not really inclined to try out the medical system here in Ukraine by going in with a fridge mauled hand so I grab my ever trusty spatula and attempt to spatula her out of the motor. She simply squeals (probably a guinea pig laugh) and disappears from my view. The fridge has not turned on for awhile so I know it is just a matter of minutes and I have these horrible visions of the fridge starting to rock and little pieces of guinea pig being flung out of the motor. Then I would be minus a guinea pig and the fridge that it took me 5 months to get. I would not be happy. I am just about to get my leatherman to remove the back panel of the fridge when the motor turns on.
The fridge rocks, I drop to the floor to look for Misha, I hear a squeal, and she shoots out from under the fridge faster then lightening and hits me straight in the face. We both fall back surprised but since she is used to banging her head into things she recovers faster and shoots down the hall. I am grateful that Misha is still alive because now I am going to kill her. She hides in my sneaker, her little white tush still visible but to a guinea pig “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me” is the rule. I straighten my glasses, which she has actually bent with the force of our encounter and (knowing that If I touched her I will wring her little neck) I put the whole shoe in her cage and head out the door for that class that I am now late for. I should have gotten a cat.
I don’t know if any of you out there have a guinea pig but for the first time in my life I now have one of my very own. My host sister was afraid that I would be lonely living all my myself so one day she handed me a shoe box that was filled with vegetables and a six month old guinea pig. I promptly named the little thing Misha because it is the only Ukrainian name I can remember with any regularity besides Miroslav. And since Miroslav means “warrior for peace” it seemed a little presumptuous for a guinea pig, so Misha it was.
Guinea Pigs are interesting creatures. It is like having a really dumb dog in a cage. Misha will squeal when I come in and purrs like a cat when I pet her. I like to think its purring because the only other option would be trembling in fear. She is also as twitchy as a canary on espresso. If I move to quickly she will freak out and run full force in the opposite direction, often forgetting that she is in a cage so she just ends banging her little head against the bars. Did I mention that she is cute but stupid? When I put her on the linoleum floor in my apartment she tries to run so fast that her little clawed feet only slip and she ends up going no where. It’s like watching a dog run on hardwood floors but slightly more pathetic.
This being said, I often feel bad to keep her in her little cage so I shut the door to my bedroom and let her run around the hallway way while I study Ukrainian in the kitchen. That way I can keep an eye on her but still do something else. Well the other day, I didn’t pay enough attention and I looked up to see Misha at my feet in the kitchen. I don’t let her run around the kitchen because there are places that she can hide that I would never get her out of like under the stove or refrigerator. So guess where she goes the second I try to catch her. Behind the fridge. Now, I am not to worried about this because she will have to come out eventually so I just finish studying. She hasn’t come out and I need to leave. I know that guinea pigs like to chew on wires so I can’t very well leave here out while I am gone. I look behind the fridge…and she isn’t there. This is not good. Then I here something, I look a little closer and realize that she is not longer behind the fridge because she has crawled under the fridge and into the 1960 motor it is powered by. Now the motor for my fridge come one about ever 25 minutes and it sounds like a garbage disposal running. It is loud and makes the whole fridge shake but it works so I don’t complain. But I know that with that amount of action that means there are some rapidly moving parts in that motor that will not hesitate to turn my guinea pig into chop suey. So I do the only reasonable thing I can think of, I panic. I move the fridge away from the wall so I can see the tiny space between the motor and the back cover. I can also see Misha left rear foot. I can’t get my hand in there to grab her and am not really inclined to try out the medical system here in Ukraine by going in with a fridge mauled hand so I grab my ever trusty spatula and attempt to spatula her out of the motor. She simply squeals (probably a guinea pig laugh) and disappears from my view. The fridge has not turned on for awhile so I know it is just a matter of minutes and I have these horrible visions of the fridge starting to rock and little pieces of guinea pig being flung out of the motor. Then I would be minus a guinea pig and the fridge that it took me 5 months to get. I would not be happy. I am just about to get my leatherman to remove the back panel of the fridge when the motor turns on.
The fridge rocks, I drop to the floor to look for Misha, I hear a squeal, and she shoots out from under the fridge faster then lightening and hits me straight in the face. We both fall back surprised but since she is used to banging her head into things she recovers faster and shoots down the hall. I am grateful that Misha is still alive because now I am going to kill her. She hides in my sneaker, her little white tush still visible but to a guinea pig “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me” is the rule. I straighten my glasses, which she has actually bent with the force of our encounter and (knowing that If I touched her I will wring her little neck) I put the whole shoe in her cage and head out the door for that class that I am now late for. I should have gotten a cat.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Group Photo
Here is a picture of me with some of the PCV who were there. We spent most of the time outdoors because we couldn't get the lights to work in the house for most of the evening. Thats Ukraine.Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Football Dishes
Since the girls did most of the cooking it was the boys job to do the dishes after the meal. In true Thanksgiving fashion they decided to "football" wash the dishes. Complete with passing, fakes, and calling out plays and probably freaking out the neighbors. I haven't laughed that hard in a really long time. Some of the plays were like "double forks, double forks, up high." or "sharp knife, sharp knife, watch yourself" They would huddle to make sure they handled things like large bowls and platters correctly. It was great and much more interesting then watching real football.Turkey Day
I had a truly unique Thanksgiving experience. I headed down to a little town near Odessa in southern Ukraine not far from the Black Sea and met up with several other PVC's to celebrate the holiday. We stayed at another volunteers house and it was like camping indoors. We slept inside but the house was heated by a coal oven/furnace thing that was not the most efficient. You had to go outside for running water and they had a midget sized outhouse. In fact the whole house was made for someone who was a little bit smaller then the average bear. Luckly the volunteer who lives there is 5 foot two or so.
The first night we arrived we went to the local school and did a little presentation on Gender equality that seemed to go pretty well. Then we attempted to teach the kids how to play American Football. Something tells me that this is a sport that will probably never catch on in Ukraine. But we tried. Then we went to see our turkey. I had visions of gazing on a large nicley browned stuffed bird. Instead I looked at this bird and it looked back at me. And gobbled a little. Then gave a surprizing human like scream as the neighbor picked it and its buddy up by the back legs and in one motion chopped their little heads off. I may never eat turkey again. And it really does take about 10 minutes for the bodies to stop flapping around. Then the kindly neighbor showed us how to pluck our turkey and gut it so it is ready to cook. Besides the screaming the rest of it was not that bad and now I can say that I know how to clean a bird. I am not planning on doing it again but at least I know how.
then i read "The Princesses Bride" outloud as everyone fell asleep.
The next day we started our flurry of cooking. We had 15 people to feed and one electric oven and 3 burners to work with. We mill around like cattle drinking coffee and felling relaxed for the first time in weeks. Then we start peeling potatos. And we keep peeling and peeling. Let me remind you that there are not potato peelers in Ukraine, you use a knife. And peeling one potato takes all day but when you need to peel potato for 15 people it takes forever. Then the electricity went out and we begin to wonder it the turkeys would get cooked. Thankfully it went back on in about an hour. The same neighbor who gave us the turky killing demonstration brought over borsht for everyone for lunch and we rotated the 3 bowls so we all got a chance to eat. Then we went to all the neighbors and borrowed a table, plates, and silverware. We made pumpkin pie from scratch, cheesy mashed potatos, 2 turkeys, had cranberry sauce and candy corn from home, gravy, stuffing, and 3 different kinds of salad. It was the best meal I have had since I got here. And even though there were 10 people working in a kitchen ment for 2, we had to wash dishes with well water, and I got blisters from peeling it is one of my favorite days. Check out the following pictures.
The first night we arrived we went to the local school and did a little presentation on Gender equality that seemed to go pretty well. Then we attempted to teach the kids how to play American Football. Something tells me that this is a sport that will probably never catch on in Ukraine. But we tried. Then we went to see our turkey. I had visions of gazing on a large nicley browned stuffed bird. Instead I looked at this bird and it looked back at me. And gobbled a little. Then gave a surprizing human like scream as the neighbor picked it and its buddy up by the back legs and in one motion chopped their little heads off. I may never eat turkey again. And it really does take about 10 minutes for the bodies to stop flapping around. Then the kindly neighbor showed us how to pluck our turkey and gut it so it is ready to cook. Besides the screaming the rest of it was not that bad and now I can say that I know how to clean a bird. I am not planning on doing it again but at least I know how.
then i read "The Princesses Bride" outloud as everyone fell asleep.
The next day we started our flurry of cooking. We had 15 people to feed and one electric oven and 3 burners to work with. We mill around like cattle drinking coffee and felling relaxed for the first time in weeks. Then we start peeling potatos. And we keep peeling and peeling. Let me remind you that there are not potato peelers in Ukraine, you use a knife. And peeling one potato takes all day but when you need to peel potato for 15 people it takes forever. Then the electricity went out and we begin to wonder it the turkeys would get cooked. Thankfully it went back on in about an hour. The same neighbor who gave us the turky killing demonstration brought over borsht for everyone for lunch and we rotated the 3 bowls so we all got a chance to eat. Then we went to all the neighbors and borrowed a table, plates, and silverware. We made pumpkin pie from scratch, cheesy mashed potatos, 2 turkeys, had cranberry sauce and candy corn from home, gravy, stuffing, and 3 different kinds of salad. It was the best meal I have had since I got here. And even though there were 10 people working in a kitchen ment for 2, we had to wash dishes with well water, and I got blisters from peeling it is one of my favorite days. Check out the following pictures.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Language woes
November 13th, 2007
If there is one thing I have learned from living and working in a foreign country is that learning a foreign language is HARD. I think fondly back to the days where I blissfully sat in high school French with my very patient and very friendly French teacher who would only smile fondly at me when I messed of my verb conjugations for the 537th time. She would always say, “good try Shannon but remember one form is singular and the other is plural”. Now, if I conjugate my verb incorrectly I usually receive exasperated looks, a mumbled insult in Russian or a pat on the head as if to say, “aren’t you the cute little amerikanka trying to learn Ukrainian, how adorable!”. The worst is when a well meaning Ukrainian who knows English will politely say, “just speak English, it will be easier”. That is usually about the point where I either want to club them over the head with my language manuals and scream, “I have to live here jackass let me practice!” or the alternate, curl up with my English DVD’s in my little apartment and gorge on yummy Ukrainian chocolate. That still counts as a cross cultural experience right? I mean, the chocolate is Ukrainian after all. I know they are trying to help but I would rather struggle through a question in Ukrainian with someone who knows English, then as a last ditch effort I can ask in English. But there will always come a time when the person I am talking to does not know English. That happens a lot here, it being, you know, Ukraine and all. So the more I can practice with a safety net the better. I don’t need to work on my English, I already know that language. Although my English teacher friends are horrified that I don’t know the difference between past perfect and past indefinite. We maybe covered that is eighth grade English but that was long before I wanted to travel the world and learn other languages so I just figured, “I already speak this language what do I need to know this for?” and I didn’t pay much attention. Looking back, I was a pretty stupid eighth grader.
I wouldn’t say I am language phobic; in fact the opposite is true. I love Ukrainian. It is one of the most beautiful languages with words like Листопад (list-o-pad) which literally means “leaves falling” and is the Ukrainian word for November. I mean, how cool is that? The other months are just as good, like April, Квітен (kaviten) which means flowers and February, Лютий (Luetie), meaning angry (as in wind). Americans would never say, “I love the month of leaves falling, everything is so colorful!” Heck no, we would say something along the lines of, “November sucks! Its freezing but there isn’t enough snow to go skiing yet.” Of course now that I am living through my first November in Ukraine and it has showed solid for the past three days I would be more inclined to say, “снігопад” (snee-o-pad) meaning snowfall rather then leaves falling is more appropriate. But that is neither here nor there.
The only part about Ukrainian I just don’t get, I mean besides the fact that I don’t really know the language yet, is the difference between the two H sounds. One sound is written as, “г” and is said like the H in how or happy, the other looks like “x” and is said like the more guttural sounding H in loch. Think that German sounding guttural hocking a loogie sound and that will be about right. Apparently, I am incapable of creating the latter of these two H sounds. This have been the source for much amusement for my Ukrainian collogues and creates somewhat of a little problem for me since that particular letter happens to be in a lot of Ukrainian words. The worst is when the difference between the two H’s entirely changes the meaning of the word. For example, to say “I am hungry” you say, “Я голодна”. On the other hand, the word for “cold” is “холодна”. I finally figured out the connection between these two words when my Ukrainian Babycia kept handing me sweaters in mid-July when I thought I was saying I was hungry. Those were what I like to call “cultural moments”. And now I just say, “Їсти” which means “eat?”. It is not as suave, but there is less confusion and no more sweaters in July.
If there is one thing I have learned from living and working in a foreign country is that learning a foreign language is HARD. I think fondly back to the days where I blissfully sat in high school French with my very patient and very friendly French teacher who would only smile fondly at me when I messed of my verb conjugations for the 537th time. She would always say, “good try Shannon but remember one form is singular and the other is plural”. Now, if I conjugate my verb incorrectly I usually receive exasperated looks, a mumbled insult in Russian or a pat on the head as if to say, “aren’t you the cute little amerikanka trying to learn Ukrainian, how adorable!”. The worst is when a well meaning Ukrainian who knows English will politely say, “just speak English, it will be easier”. That is usually about the point where I either want to club them over the head with my language manuals and scream, “I have to live here jackass let me practice!” or the alternate, curl up with my English DVD’s in my little apartment and gorge on yummy Ukrainian chocolate. That still counts as a cross cultural experience right? I mean, the chocolate is Ukrainian after all. I know they are trying to help but I would rather struggle through a question in Ukrainian with someone who knows English, then as a last ditch effort I can ask in English. But there will always come a time when the person I am talking to does not know English. That happens a lot here, it being, you know, Ukraine and all. So the more I can practice with a safety net the better. I don’t need to work on my English, I already know that language. Although my English teacher friends are horrified that I don’t know the difference between past perfect and past indefinite. We maybe covered that is eighth grade English but that was long before I wanted to travel the world and learn other languages so I just figured, “I already speak this language what do I need to know this for?” and I didn’t pay much attention. Looking back, I was a pretty stupid eighth grader.
I wouldn’t say I am language phobic; in fact the opposite is true. I love Ukrainian. It is one of the most beautiful languages with words like Листопад (list-o-pad) which literally means “leaves falling” and is the Ukrainian word for November. I mean, how cool is that? The other months are just as good, like April, Квітен (kaviten) which means flowers and February, Лютий (Luetie), meaning angry (as in wind). Americans would never say, “I love the month of leaves falling, everything is so colorful!” Heck no, we would say something along the lines of, “November sucks! Its freezing but there isn’t enough snow to go skiing yet.” Of course now that I am living through my first November in Ukraine and it has showed solid for the past three days I would be more inclined to say, “снігопад” (snee-o-pad) meaning snowfall rather then leaves falling is more appropriate. But that is neither here nor there.
The only part about Ukrainian I just don’t get, I mean besides the fact that I don’t really know the language yet, is the difference between the two H sounds. One sound is written as, “г” and is said like the H in how or happy, the other looks like “x” and is said like the more guttural sounding H in loch. Think that German sounding guttural hocking a loogie sound and that will be about right. Apparently, I am incapable of creating the latter of these two H sounds. This have been the source for much amusement for my Ukrainian collogues and creates somewhat of a little problem for me since that particular letter happens to be in a lot of Ukrainian words. The worst is when the difference between the two H’s entirely changes the meaning of the word. For example, to say “I am hungry” you say, “Я голодна”. On the other hand, the word for “cold” is “холодна”. I finally figured out the connection between these two words when my Ukrainian Babycia kept handing me sweaters in mid-July when I thought I was saying I was hungry. Those were what I like to call “cultural moments”. And now I just say, “Їсти” which means “eat?”. It is not as suave, but there is less confusion and no more sweaters in July.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Ukrainian Wedding
Alina’s Wedding
On October 6th I was lucky enough to go to a Ukrainian Wedding. It was my host sister Alina’s wedding. She is marrying her boyfriend of 2 years Sergi and I was privileged enough to be invited. I arrived at the Alina’s house around 10 am to a great bustle of activity. Alina’s apartment is very small. She and her fiancé share one room, her grand mother has the other and her mother sleeps in the living room every night. The only other rooms are a tiny kitchen and bathroom. The one main room in the house was set up with tables that had been borrowed from neighbors and Alina’s mom, grandma, aunt, friend, godfather, and soon to be father and mother in law were busy with last minute preparations like creating enormous amounts of food and primping to get ready for the ceremony. Alina was sitting on a stool staying well clear of the food in her white wedding dress. She looked so young and so excited. She is only 17 years old and I have a hard time wrapping myself around the idea that she is the bride that day. I am 25 and have finally come to the realization that I have no idea what I want from life and here is Alina, 7 years my junior, and getting married. She looks amazing. I spend the next hour trying to understand questions asked by Alina’s friend and her Godfather. In Ukraine, the role of godfather and godmother is often given a lot of weight. Alina referred to him as her second father and it was very important that he be there.
There was a knock on the door. It was the hopeful groom with two of his best men. None of them are over 20. The groom, Sergi, is 20 himself. Alina’s mother and all of the other women in the house met him at the door and proceeded to ask him questions from a script that they had written out. I don’t know what they are asking but I get the distinct impression that Sergi needs to answer these questions right or he won’t be let in and he will suddenly find himself single. I think this is a standard tradition because he came armed with flowers and chocolate to give to Alina’s mother until she relented, satisfied, and let him in. There is a bustle of last minute preparation and red sashes are affixed across the chests of certain family members. Each sash has something written on it but I didn’t have my dictionary so I don’t know what it said. Both Alina and Sergi have a friend, similar to a brides maid and grooms men, that have sashes. Besides them, I am the only person there that is not family.
All of the neighbors that live in that apartment complex have turned out to see the happy couple head to the wedding. As they exit the apartment Alina’s mother throws coins, grain, and candy over them and the borrowed cars. Money for wealth and prosperity, candy for a sweet life, and grain to represent bread and plenty. We cram way more people then is safe in the four cars we have and head off to the Administration building where the wedding will take place.
When we arrive, Alina’s mother disappears with a box of things needed inside for the wedding (they have to provide everything). A few minutes later, a dignified administrator comes out carrying a large decorated round loaf of bread on a traditional Ukrainian towel. This bread is called Karavie ( I haven’t a clue how that is spelled in Ukrainain) they have special ones for weddings. The loaf has lighter dough designs on the top that create wheat stalks, entwined rings, and doves. It is gorgeous and something I could never hope to make in my lifetime. I can’t even guess how long it took to create. The Administrator greets the expectant couple with the bread and salt. It is a tradition in Ukraine to greet guests with bread and salt. We ender the building to, I am surprised to hear, the familiar strains of “here comes the bride”.
Now here I have to make a disclaimer. This wedding was done in a foreign language. I really don’t know exactly was going on so my observations and assumptions may not be correct. This is just what I observed so my apologies for any inaccuracies. The couple stood in front of the administrator and she spoke at length about…something, I don’t know what. Then a nicly embroidered traditional Ukrainian towel ( a different on from the bread one) was laid on the ground by the groomsmen. The couple stepped onto it and said their vows. I know it was the vows because they each answered with a firm “da”. There is a superstition in Ukraine that whoever steps onto the towel first will be the leader in the marriage but to me it looked like they stepped on it at the same time. Alina probably would have killed Sergy if he had stepped first. Then the rings were exchanges. Next the happy couple signed the marriage certificate a the groomsmen and bridesmaid signed as well. Then Alina and Sergy drank from matching goblets and both ate a piece of chocolate. I am assuming that is to represent a sweet life again but I am just guessing. Next, the highlight of the ceremony. Alina and Sergy walked up to their parents and bowed deeply three times. This seemed to be the emotional highpoint of the day and all of the parents were tearing up. I will have to admit that I got a little goobery myself but If pressed I will deny everything. Then flower petals were thrown and Sergy carried Alina out of the Administration building. It is probably safer that he did that then try and carry her into her house since the entryway is so small they would either come toppeling down the stairs or Sergy would knock Alina silly in the narrow hall.
Then we piled into the cars again and headed to Kharkiv for pictures. There is a fountain in Kharkiv that is known as a good place for lovers and everybody and their brother has their wedding picture taken there. When we arrived there was a line of brides waiting their turn. I counted 15 other brides that day and some of the dresses I saw took my breath away of just made my jaw drop. If you are a guy and you are reading this you might want to skip the next few paragraphs because I am going to talk about wedding dresses and I wouldn’t want the men to go comatose and smack their heads against their keyboards.
In Ukraine fashion is a little different then in the U.S. Hoop skirts are in. One bride had a dress so wide the groom had trouble getting close enough to her for the photographs. Not an auspicious start if you ask me. Another brides dress had a see through top that had a v-neck down to her waist. When she walked you could see her lace skirt was slit up to her hip and she had on white stiletto knee high boots. All I could think when I saw here was, “you’re a married woman now, time to close up shop”. I know, that’s horrible but I couldn’t help it. There was a bride that had a dress made entirely out of feathers whose puffiness couldn’t quite cover up that fact that she must have been 8 months pregnant. I looked about for the shotgun but it must have been well hidden. There were brides in Satin dresses, lace dresses, and one dress with ostentatious fur trim complete with the poor little animals’ tails. Yuck! That’s like wearing my guinea pig to my wedding. The best dress I saw had a Neferttiti like top with beading and a hoop skirt that had layers of cloth that were cleverly arranged to make large roses over the entire skirt. It is hard to describe but when I am ready to get married I will try harder with the unfortunate dress maker I choose. We wandered around the park in the freezing cold for over an hour getting lots of off the cuff pictures. When your photographer is the 19 year old best man what do you expect? Then we piled back into the car to hit another monument and finally headed back to the village getting very lost on the way.
We returned to Alina’s house around 3 pm and commenced to eat. It there is one thing the Ukrainians do very well it is feed guests. We ate, sat and talked for awhile, then ate again, then presented gifts, then ate again. There were lots of dishes that had herring in them so I was able to curb my appetite a little. I only ate enough to feed a small country, it could have been much worse.
At this particular wedding, each person got up to say their wishes for the happy couple and then present their gift. I copped out and spoke in English. I had been trying to understand increasingly drunk Ukrainian for the better part of 9 hours at that point and I wasn’t up to the challenge of creating an impromptu speech in Ukrainian. I can ask for milk but not wish someone a happy and prosperous life yet. One of Alina’s gifts was a photo album from her mother for the wedding and for some strange reason all of the headings were in Spanish. I helped the best I could, I don’t know Spanish but I know English and it is closer to Spanish then Ukrainian, so I was a better guesser. I hope I guessed right but even if I didn’t they will probably never know.
After a long and heated (but friendly) discussion with Sergy’s father I decided it was time to leave. He wanted to know why I wasn’t married. I explained that I am in Ukraine and my boyfriend is in America. He drank some vodka, then asked why I didn’t have a boyfriend in Ukraine. I explained that I already had one in America and they take lots of time so I didn’t want to double up. No one ever believes me when I say I adore my boyfriend so I don’t want another one. They just ask “ then why did you leave America” and I can’t even begin to explain that. He drank some more vodka, then asked why I didn’t have kids. I explained that, again, my boyfriend is in America and I am several thousand miles away, kids would be tough. Then I made the mistake of saying.I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids. That was really bad idea. Bad Shannon! Always tell your well meaning Ukrainian friends that you want kids. Heck, tell them you are going to breed like a rabbit, it will make them happy. Sergy’s dad drank more vodka and then came back with a proposition that I should get married in Ukraine and have lots of babies. I politely declined and said I needed to be getting home as my Guinea pig needed dinner and she worries if I am late. Alina insisted I wait until she threw her bouquet. Now this is a small wedding and there were a whopping 3 women there who were not married. We huddled onto the first floor landing while Alina threw her bouquet from the top of the stair. The other two women leaped for the bouquet while I leaped out of the way. Needless to say, I didn’t catch it. My single hood is secured until my next wedding experience. Although I highly doubt that I will attend a wedding similar to this one.
On October 6th I was lucky enough to go to a Ukrainian Wedding. It was my host sister Alina’s wedding. She is marrying her boyfriend of 2 years Sergi and I was privileged enough to be invited. I arrived at the Alina’s house around 10 am to a great bustle of activity. Alina’s apartment is very small. She and her fiancé share one room, her grand mother has the other and her mother sleeps in the living room every night. The only other rooms are a tiny kitchen and bathroom. The one main room in the house was set up with tables that had been borrowed from neighbors and Alina’s mom, grandma, aunt, friend, godfather, and soon to be father and mother in law were busy with last minute preparations like creating enormous amounts of food and primping to get ready for the ceremony. Alina was sitting on a stool staying well clear of the food in her white wedding dress. She looked so young and so excited. She is only 17 years old and I have a hard time wrapping myself around the idea that she is the bride that day. I am 25 and have finally come to the realization that I have no idea what I want from life and here is Alina, 7 years my junior, and getting married. She looks amazing. I spend the next hour trying to understand questions asked by Alina’s friend and her Godfather. In Ukraine, the role of godfather and godmother is often given a lot of weight. Alina referred to him as her second father and it was very important that he be there.
There was a knock on the door. It was the hopeful groom with two of his best men. None of them are over 20. The groom, Sergi, is 20 himself. Alina’s mother and all of the other women in the house met him at the door and proceeded to ask him questions from a script that they had written out. I don’t know what they are asking but I get the distinct impression that Sergi needs to answer these questions right or he won’t be let in and he will suddenly find himself single. I think this is a standard tradition because he came armed with flowers and chocolate to give to Alina’s mother until she relented, satisfied, and let him in. There is a bustle of last minute preparation and red sashes are affixed across the chests of certain family members. Each sash has something written on it but I didn’t have my dictionary so I don’t know what it said. Both Alina and Sergi have a friend, similar to a brides maid and grooms men, that have sashes. Besides them, I am the only person there that is not family.
All of the neighbors that live in that apartment complex have turned out to see the happy couple head to the wedding. As they exit the apartment Alina’s mother throws coins, grain, and candy over them and the borrowed cars. Money for wealth and prosperity, candy for a sweet life, and grain to represent bread and plenty. We cram way more people then is safe in the four cars we have and head off to the Administration building where the wedding will take place.
When we arrive, Alina’s mother disappears with a box of things needed inside for the wedding (they have to provide everything). A few minutes later, a dignified administrator comes out carrying a large decorated round loaf of bread on a traditional Ukrainian towel. This bread is called Karavie ( I haven’t a clue how that is spelled in Ukrainain) they have special ones for weddings. The loaf has lighter dough designs on the top that create wheat stalks, entwined rings, and doves. It is gorgeous and something I could never hope to make in my lifetime. I can’t even guess how long it took to create. The Administrator greets the expectant couple with the bread and salt. It is a tradition in Ukraine to greet guests with bread and salt. We ender the building to, I am surprised to hear, the familiar strains of “here comes the bride”.
Now here I have to make a disclaimer. This wedding was done in a foreign language. I really don’t know exactly was going on so my observations and assumptions may not be correct. This is just what I observed so my apologies for any inaccuracies. The couple stood in front of the administrator and she spoke at length about…something, I don’t know what. Then a nicly embroidered traditional Ukrainian towel ( a different on from the bread one) was laid on the ground by the groomsmen. The couple stepped onto it and said their vows. I know it was the vows because they each answered with a firm “da”. There is a superstition in Ukraine that whoever steps onto the towel first will be the leader in the marriage but to me it looked like they stepped on it at the same time. Alina probably would have killed Sergy if he had stepped first. Then the rings were exchanges. Next the happy couple signed the marriage certificate a the groomsmen and bridesmaid signed as well. Then Alina and Sergy drank from matching goblets and both ate a piece of chocolate. I am assuming that is to represent a sweet life again but I am just guessing. Next, the highlight of the ceremony. Alina and Sergy walked up to their parents and bowed deeply three times. This seemed to be the emotional highpoint of the day and all of the parents were tearing up. I will have to admit that I got a little goobery myself but If pressed I will deny everything. Then flower petals were thrown and Sergy carried Alina out of the Administration building. It is probably safer that he did that then try and carry her into her house since the entryway is so small they would either come toppeling down the stairs or Sergy would knock Alina silly in the narrow hall.
Then we piled into the cars again and headed to Kharkiv for pictures. There is a fountain in Kharkiv that is known as a good place for lovers and everybody and their brother has their wedding picture taken there. When we arrived there was a line of brides waiting their turn. I counted 15 other brides that day and some of the dresses I saw took my breath away of just made my jaw drop. If you are a guy and you are reading this you might want to skip the next few paragraphs because I am going to talk about wedding dresses and I wouldn’t want the men to go comatose and smack their heads against their keyboards.
In Ukraine fashion is a little different then in the U.S. Hoop skirts are in. One bride had a dress so wide the groom had trouble getting close enough to her for the photographs. Not an auspicious start if you ask me. Another brides dress had a see through top that had a v-neck down to her waist. When she walked you could see her lace skirt was slit up to her hip and she had on white stiletto knee high boots. All I could think when I saw here was, “you’re a married woman now, time to close up shop”. I know, that’s horrible but I couldn’t help it. There was a bride that had a dress made entirely out of feathers whose puffiness couldn’t quite cover up that fact that she must have been 8 months pregnant. I looked about for the shotgun but it must have been well hidden. There were brides in Satin dresses, lace dresses, and one dress with ostentatious fur trim complete with the poor little animals’ tails. Yuck! That’s like wearing my guinea pig to my wedding. The best dress I saw had a Neferttiti like top with beading and a hoop skirt that had layers of cloth that were cleverly arranged to make large roses over the entire skirt. It is hard to describe but when I am ready to get married I will try harder with the unfortunate dress maker I choose. We wandered around the park in the freezing cold for over an hour getting lots of off the cuff pictures. When your photographer is the 19 year old best man what do you expect? Then we piled back into the car to hit another monument and finally headed back to the village getting very lost on the way.
We returned to Alina’s house around 3 pm and commenced to eat. It there is one thing the Ukrainians do very well it is feed guests. We ate, sat and talked for awhile, then ate again, then presented gifts, then ate again. There were lots of dishes that had herring in them so I was able to curb my appetite a little. I only ate enough to feed a small country, it could have been much worse.
At this particular wedding, each person got up to say their wishes for the happy couple and then present their gift. I copped out and spoke in English. I had been trying to understand increasingly drunk Ukrainian for the better part of 9 hours at that point and I wasn’t up to the challenge of creating an impromptu speech in Ukrainian. I can ask for milk but not wish someone a happy and prosperous life yet. One of Alina’s gifts was a photo album from her mother for the wedding and for some strange reason all of the headings were in Spanish. I helped the best I could, I don’t know Spanish but I know English and it is closer to Spanish then Ukrainian, so I was a better guesser. I hope I guessed right but even if I didn’t they will probably never know.
After a long and heated (but friendly) discussion with Sergy’s father I decided it was time to leave. He wanted to know why I wasn’t married. I explained that I am in Ukraine and my boyfriend is in America. He drank some vodka, then asked why I didn’t have a boyfriend in Ukraine. I explained that I already had one in America and they take lots of time so I didn’t want to double up. No one ever believes me when I say I adore my boyfriend so I don’t want another one. They just ask “ then why did you leave America” and I can’t even begin to explain that. He drank some more vodka, then asked why I didn’t have kids. I explained that, again, my boyfriend is in America and I am several thousand miles away, kids would be tough. Then I made the mistake of saying.I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids. That was really bad idea. Bad Shannon! Always tell your well meaning Ukrainian friends that you want kids. Heck, tell them you are going to breed like a rabbit, it will make them happy. Sergy’s dad drank more vodka and then came back with a proposition that I should get married in Ukraine and have lots of babies. I politely declined and said I needed to be getting home as my Guinea pig needed dinner and she worries if I am late. Alina insisted I wait until she threw her bouquet. Now this is a small wedding and there were a whopping 3 women there who were not married. We huddled onto the first floor landing while Alina threw her bouquet from the top of the stair. The other two women leaped for the bouquet while I leaped out of the way. Needless to say, I didn’t catch it. My single hood is secured until my next wedding experience. Although I highly doubt that I will attend a wedding similar to this one.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The never ending search for the water guy
The never ending search for the water guy…
In my apartment you cannot drink the tap water. Well, you can drink the water but I STRONGLY encourage you not to. My building is fairly old, dating back somewhere between when Caesar ruled and Jesus was born, give or take a few years. The plumbing in my building, to my knowledge, has never been replaced although I cannot seem to locate where they are hiding the aqueducts. However, I am always hearing gurgling and bubbling from mysterious locations so I am sure that must be them. I believe they come complete with roman slaves that were never told about the fall of Rome.
When you turn on the faucet in my apartment at first nothing happens. Then you hear moaning and clanking and distant gurgling sounds. I assume this is the roman slaves in the basement moaning and commencing to haul buckets of water from the aqueduct to wherever it needs to be put to come out of my faucet. If I listen hard enough I can hear the ocean. Ten or so minutes later, after increased rattling and groaning of pipes (or slaves) rust red water begins to spit from my faucet. The first time I saw this I screamed like a little girl because I thought I had entered a horror movie and the faucets were pouring blood. My neighbor assured me that if you let the water run for a few minutes it will pale to an only slightly tinted red color. That way when you use it to wash your clothes they only turn pink instead of a lovely shade of burnt umber. Good to know. Either way I now realize why people would rather drink vodka then tap water. Vodka is better for you. On special days when the roman captives are on vacation, the water doesn’t run at all. I have learned to plan ahead for this and keep large bottles of faintly red water in my kitchen for washing purposed on roman holidays.
This being said, I must buy bottled water for all of my drinking and cooking needs. You can buy water in Ukraine in 5 liter jugs that cost around 6 hryven (roughly $1.07). That may not seem a lot to you but to a stingy little Peace Corps volunteer I feel like I am paying for Perrier water to boil noodles. However, there is an alternative. Once you have emptied a 5 liter jug of its Perrier water there is a guy that comes around to our apartment complex every Saturday with a big water truck full of deliciously drinkable and much cheaper water (like 1 hryven per 5 liters or 17 or so cents). You find him and he will fill your empty water jugs. How do I know this? I have seen people leave my apartment with empty water jugs and return with the same full water jugs. Other PC volunteers have mentioned that the same thing happens in their communities. My only problem was that I could never find this guy. He is like a Ukrainian Carmen Sandiego.
The first time I tried to find him I followed an old Babucia who was carrying some empty 2 liter Fanta bottles. I figured she just couldn’t carry 5 liters so she opted for 2. She led me straight to, get this, the milk truck. Not your normal American milk truck with the guy in the white outfit and bottles of milk. This looked like a mini gas tanker with a hose fixed to the back and had MOЛОКО (milk) spray painted on the side. You hand the tough looking babucia at the back some money and she will use the hose to fill up whatever containers you brought with you with fresh Ukrainian milk. I am saying fresh with ridiculous optimism here but one can hope. Not having a fridge I decided that I didn’t want to buy two 5 liter jugs of milk and risk receiving some “full jugs” jokes. Although, the humor may not translate into Ukrainian.
On my next attempt I decided to follow an old grandpaw who was carrying 5 liter jugs. I hoped that he still had enough teeth that he was going to use those jugs for water and not milk so I began to tail him. If you know anything about Ukrainians you should know that they take their time getting places on Saturday morning. Especially the retired folks because this is like their Friday and Saturday night. They need to stop and talk to every other old person that is outside on that day, and they are all outside because they wouldn’t want to miss the party. It’s like they are trying to hide their tracks and one of the main reasons I was never able just watch were they went to find the water guy. In Ukraine, the shortest distance between two points is too your neighbors, around the block, stopping next door, popping into the store, and chatting with 8 people on your way to these various places. Not a straight line.
The first couple of times grandpaw stopped I just walked by him like I was on my way to some other place or on an errand. While he chatted up the Babucia in building 10K I pretended to look at fruit and had to buy some expensive peaches to make up for all of the poorly worded insipid question I asked the shopkeeper just to look like I belonged there. He meandered down the street with his jugs and I pretended to play with the million half feral cats that prowled the streets. I stopped that when they started ganging up on me and I remembered that none of these cute but armed and dangerous fuzzies had ever had a shot in their entire 9 lives. He stopped again to chat up babucia #2, this one with bigger jugs then him but hers’ weren’t in her hands if you know what I mean. I pretended to be waiting for someone, glancing at my watch until I realized that I wasn’t wearing one. I hoped he was nearsighted.
By this time, grandpaw has noticed my attentions and he was starting to look decidedly nervous. I can imagine what was going through his mind when he realized he was being stalked by the American in the building. This man lived through the cold war. I look and am harmless but for all he knows I am a trained killer. He begins to double back moving surprisingly quickly for a man stopped at a 90 degree angle and I am forced to dart behind shrubbery to hide myself. I realize that I am going to give this old man a heart attack or a complex or both so I give up that chase and he disappears around a corner. I didn’t find the water guy and now everyone who has witnessed my little prowl around the apartment complex keeps looking at me like they are checking for weapons.
I returned home from a trip to Kyiv recently and needed to stock up on supplies. I headed to the Milk Kiosk, yes they have a store just for milk and it is the only place I can buy servings of cheese for one person so I love it. I discover the Kiosk is closed and as I round the corner I run smack dab into a teenager dressed entirely in army fatigues. Being the hardened American I am I don’t yell but let out a much more dignified and Ukrainian “oi!”. We both apologize to each other and he disappears. I mean, literally disappears. One minute he is there, the next he is gone, so I look closer. Yes, I know horror movies start out this way but it was a Saturday morning so I figured how dangerous could it be? There, parked in a little clump of shrubbery is a giant green truck that has a camouflage covered flat bed. Under that camouflage is a giant water tank. It was the water guy!!! I heard angles singing and skipped off to get my depleted water jugs. Good things come to those who wait and who don’t watch where they are going when they are leaving the milk kiosk.
In my apartment you cannot drink the tap water. Well, you can drink the water but I STRONGLY encourage you not to. My building is fairly old, dating back somewhere between when Caesar ruled and Jesus was born, give or take a few years. The plumbing in my building, to my knowledge, has never been replaced although I cannot seem to locate where they are hiding the aqueducts. However, I am always hearing gurgling and bubbling from mysterious locations so I am sure that must be them. I believe they come complete with roman slaves that were never told about the fall of Rome.
When you turn on the faucet in my apartment at first nothing happens. Then you hear moaning and clanking and distant gurgling sounds. I assume this is the roman slaves in the basement moaning and commencing to haul buckets of water from the aqueduct to wherever it needs to be put to come out of my faucet. If I listen hard enough I can hear the ocean. Ten or so minutes later, after increased rattling and groaning of pipes (or slaves) rust red water begins to spit from my faucet. The first time I saw this I screamed like a little girl because I thought I had entered a horror movie and the faucets were pouring blood. My neighbor assured me that if you let the water run for a few minutes it will pale to an only slightly tinted red color. That way when you use it to wash your clothes they only turn pink instead of a lovely shade of burnt umber. Good to know. Either way I now realize why people would rather drink vodka then tap water. Vodka is better for you. On special days when the roman captives are on vacation, the water doesn’t run at all. I have learned to plan ahead for this and keep large bottles of faintly red water in my kitchen for washing purposed on roman holidays.
This being said, I must buy bottled water for all of my drinking and cooking needs. You can buy water in Ukraine in 5 liter jugs that cost around 6 hryven (roughly $1.07). That may not seem a lot to you but to a stingy little Peace Corps volunteer I feel like I am paying for Perrier water to boil noodles. However, there is an alternative. Once you have emptied a 5 liter jug of its Perrier water there is a guy that comes around to our apartment complex every Saturday with a big water truck full of deliciously drinkable and much cheaper water (like 1 hryven per 5 liters or 17 or so cents). You find him and he will fill your empty water jugs. How do I know this? I have seen people leave my apartment with empty water jugs and return with the same full water jugs. Other PC volunteers have mentioned that the same thing happens in their communities. My only problem was that I could never find this guy. He is like a Ukrainian Carmen Sandiego.
The first time I tried to find him I followed an old Babucia who was carrying some empty 2 liter Fanta bottles. I figured she just couldn’t carry 5 liters so she opted for 2. She led me straight to, get this, the milk truck. Not your normal American milk truck with the guy in the white outfit and bottles of milk. This looked like a mini gas tanker with a hose fixed to the back and had MOЛОКО (milk) spray painted on the side. You hand the tough looking babucia at the back some money and she will use the hose to fill up whatever containers you brought with you with fresh Ukrainian milk. I am saying fresh with ridiculous optimism here but one can hope. Not having a fridge I decided that I didn’t want to buy two 5 liter jugs of milk and risk receiving some “full jugs” jokes. Although, the humor may not translate into Ukrainian.
On my next attempt I decided to follow an old grandpaw who was carrying 5 liter jugs. I hoped that he still had enough teeth that he was going to use those jugs for water and not milk so I began to tail him. If you know anything about Ukrainians you should know that they take their time getting places on Saturday morning. Especially the retired folks because this is like their Friday and Saturday night. They need to stop and talk to every other old person that is outside on that day, and they are all outside because they wouldn’t want to miss the party. It’s like they are trying to hide their tracks and one of the main reasons I was never able just watch were they went to find the water guy. In Ukraine, the shortest distance between two points is too your neighbors, around the block, stopping next door, popping into the store, and chatting with 8 people on your way to these various places. Not a straight line.
The first couple of times grandpaw stopped I just walked by him like I was on my way to some other place or on an errand. While he chatted up the Babucia in building 10K I pretended to look at fruit and had to buy some expensive peaches to make up for all of the poorly worded insipid question I asked the shopkeeper just to look like I belonged there. He meandered down the street with his jugs and I pretended to play with the million half feral cats that prowled the streets. I stopped that when they started ganging up on me and I remembered that none of these cute but armed and dangerous fuzzies had ever had a shot in their entire 9 lives. He stopped again to chat up babucia #2, this one with bigger jugs then him but hers’ weren’t in her hands if you know what I mean. I pretended to be waiting for someone, glancing at my watch until I realized that I wasn’t wearing one. I hoped he was nearsighted.
By this time, grandpaw has noticed my attentions and he was starting to look decidedly nervous. I can imagine what was going through his mind when he realized he was being stalked by the American in the building. This man lived through the cold war. I look and am harmless but for all he knows I am a trained killer. He begins to double back moving surprisingly quickly for a man stopped at a 90 degree angle and I am forced to dart behind shrubbery to hide myself. I realize that I am going to give this old man a heart attack or a complex or both so I give up that chase and he disappears around a corner. I didn’t find the water guy and now everyone who has witnessed my little prowl around the apartment complex keeps looking at me like they are checking for weapons.
I returned home from a trip to Kyiv recently and needed to stock up on supplies. I headed to the Milk Kiosk, yes they have a store just for milk and it is the only place I can buy servings of cheese for one person so I love it. I discover the Kiosk is closed and as I round the corner I run smack dab into a teenager dressed entirely in army fatigues. Being the hardened American I am I don’t yell but let out a much more dignified and Ukrainian “oi!”. We both apologize to each other and he disappears. I mean, literally disappears. One minute he is there, the next he is gone, so I look closer. Yes, I know horror movies start out this way but it was a Saturday morning so I figured how dangerous could it be? There, parked in a little clump of shrubbery is a giant green truck that has a camouflage covered flat bed. Under that camouflage is a giant water tank. It was the water guy!!! I heard angles singing and skipped off to get my depleted water jugs. Good things come to those who wait and who don’t watch where they are going when they are leaving the milk kiosk.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
The Blue Days of Ukraine
It is a given to most people in Ukraine that you have to wash clothes by hand here. I remember grousing about having to buy nice clothes in America that were hand wash only and now I look back at myself and Laaaaaaugh. I am actually getting the hang of hand washing. After a couple of disastrous attempts that resulted in mixing colors or having soap stiff clothes I was beginning to feel like this might be a skill that I could master in the conceivable future. I learned that you don’t wring out sweaters or the arms will hang past your knees with it dries. You need to rinse jeans twice or it’s like wearing sandpaper and you have to be very patient when washing socks even though it is totally gross. Not to long ago I decided that I needed to wash my sheets. Now, I have new sheets in my apartment and being a typical 20 something, I just took them straight out of the package and put them on my bed. It was fine, I didn’t break out into spots or anything. But the weather here is getting colder and I decided that I should probably wash them before it got to rainy or cold because I only have one set of sheets. The more days it takes for them to dry the more time I spend sleeping in my sleeping bag. Winter will be a different story. I haven’t yet figured out how to freeze dry my clothes. Apparently in winter you hang stuff out to dry, let it freeze and then just break the ice off. Voila, freeze dried clothes. I am not sure if the person telling me this was kidding or not. Either way…
So I get up bright and early one morning and take the entire sheet set including pillowcases and toss them into my handy washing tub. I love this tub, it is probably the most useful thing I own. I was laundry in it, I take baths using it etc… The tub and I are friends. I have mixed the hot water from the kettle with the detergent and I figure I will let everything soak while I make breakfast. Satisfactorily fed, I head into the bathroom to commence with the washing. Now, I have placed the tub in my giant iron bathtub so that if there is any spillage etc…it’s not a problem and I then have access to cold water to rinse. Lots of splashing does tend to occur. Now my bathtub is raised up on some cinder blocks, I don’t know why, but that puts that edge of the bathtub at my mid thigh. I do the usual swish everything around rub it together etc…splashing water everywhere of course. On the walls and mostly on me. It is then time to wring everything out so I can rinse it. I lean into the bath tub and grab what I think is a pillow case and pull. It’s not a pillow case. It’s the heavy comforter cover. My feet, clad in slippers on the smooth bathroom tile that is now liberally covered in soapy water have no real grip and, being off balance, they flip up and I fall face first into my trusty tub with my bedding. Now I am not really hurt, just a little surprised as I spit out soapy suds and get water out of my eyes. It is then that I notice that my hand is a somewhat alarming shade of blue. Intrigued, I look at my other hand, well what do you know, it’s blue too. My fingernails are almost sapphire. Interesting. I look into the tub, the water isn’t dirty like I thought, it’s blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. And now I am blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. I run my hands under the tap and realize that the blue does not just wash off, in fact it doesn’t even get lighter. Then I look in the mirror. My face was submerged only for a second so it’s not as bad as my hands but is it a distinct shade of, you guessed it!, blue. I have darker blue spots all over my cheeks and forehead from where earlier splashes hit my face. “Dear God” I think, “I look like a leopard Smurf. How and I going to explain that to the kids at my school?” Maybe I can tell them it’s some weird American ritual, like green beer on Saint Patrick’s day. Will they believe me if I say Americans dye there faces and hands blue for labor day because they work until they are blue in the face? Something tells me they won’t buy it. I have to be at work in less then two hours. I am supposed to meet with the 11th graders and answer the questions they have prepared for me in English. Should I call in sick? Maybe if I wear a blue sweater they will think I an just accessorizing? I could start a new fashion! Okay, I am panicking a little. I take a deep breath and decide to finish washing my sheets while I think of an alternative. As I am hanging up my sheets it hits me. If detergent gets the dye out of the sheets maybe it will get the dye out of me. I grab some detergent, get my hands wet and scrub. It works! It kind of hurts but it works. It takes me 40 minutes to de blue myself and I won’t need to exfoliate for the next several months but I am no longer an homage to smurfdom. I also had to paint my nails because there was nothing I could do to fix that little problem and I didn’t want to keep having to tell people I was cold. On the train to work that day it finally struck me how ridiculous that whole thing was and I laughed so hard the lady sitting next to me got up and moved to another seat. I bought rubber gloves on my way home, no one can say I didn’t learn for this experience.
It is a given to most people in Ukraine that you have to wash clothes by hand here. I remember grousing about having to buy nice clothes in America that were hand wash only and now I look back at myself and Laaaaaaugh. I am actually getting the hang of hand washing. After a couple of disastrous attempts that resulted in mixing colors or having soap stiff clothes I was beginning to feel like this might be a skill that I could master in the conceivable future. I learned that you don’t wring out sweaters or the arms will hang past your knees with it dries. You need to rinse jeans twice or it’s like wearing sandpaper and you have to be very patient when washing socks even though it is totally gross. Not to long ago I decided that I needed to wash my sheets. Now, I have new sheets in my apartment and being a typical 20 something, I just took them straight out of the package and put them on my bed. It was fine, I didn’t break out into spots or anything. But the weather here is getting colder and I decided that I should probably wash them before it got to rainy or cold because I only have one set of sheets. The more days it takes for them to dry the more time I spend sleeping in my sleeping bag. Winter will be a different story. I haven’t yet figured out how to freeze dry my clothes. Apparently in winter you hang stuff out to dry, let it freeze and then just break the ice off. Voila, freeze dried clothes. I am not sure if the person telling me this was kidding or not. Either way…
So I get up bright and early one morning and take the entire sheet set including pillowcases and toss them into my handy washing tub. I love this tub, it is probably the most useful thing I own. I was laundry in it, I take baths using it etc… The tub and I are friends. I have mixed the hot water from the kettle with the detergent and I figure I will let everything soak while I make breakfast. Satisfactorily fed, I head into the bathroom to commence with the washing. Now, I have placed the tub in my giant iron bathtub so that if there is any spillage etc…it’s not a problem and I then have access to cold water to rinse. Lots of splashing does tend to occur. Now my bathtub is raised up on some cinder blocks, I don’t know why, but that puts that edge of the bathtub at my mid thigh. I do the usual swish everything around rub it together etc…splashing water everywhere of course. On the walls and mostly on me. It is then time to wring everything out so I can rinse it. I lean into the bath tub and grab what I think is a pillow case and pull. It’s not a pillow case. It’s the heavy comforter cover. My feet, clad in slippers on the smooth bathroom tile that is now liberally covered in soapy water have no real grip and, being off balance, they flip up and I fall face first into my trusty tub with my bedding. Now I am not really hurt, just a little surprised as I spit out soapy suds and get water out of my eyes. It is then that I notice that my hand is a somewhat alarming shade of blue. Intrigued, I look at my other hand, well what do you know, it’s blue too. My fingernails are almost sapphire. Interesting. I look into the tub, the water isn’t dirty like I thought, it’s blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. And now I am blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. I run my hands under the tap and realize that the blue does not just wash off, in fact it doesn’t even get lighter. Then I look in the mirror. My face was submerged only for a second so it’s not as bad as my hands but is it a distinct shade of, you guessed it!, blue. I have darker blue spots all over my cheeks and forehead from where earlier splashes hit my face. “Dear God” I think, “I look like a leopard Smurf. How and I going to explain that to the kids at my school?” Maybe I can tell them it’s some weird American ritual, like green beer on Saint Patrick’s day. Will they believe me if I say Americans dye there faces and hands blue for labor day because they work until they are blue in the face? Something tells me they won’t buy it. I have to be at work in less then two hours. I am supposed to meet with the 11th graders and answer the questions they have prepared for me in English. Should I call in sick? Maybe if I wear a blue sweater they will think I an just accessorizing? I could start a new fashion! Okay, I am panicking a little. I take a deep breath and decide to finish washing my sheets while I think of an alternative. As I am hanging up my sheets it hits me. If detergent gets the dye out of the sheets maybe it will get the dye out of me. I grab some detergent, get my hands wet and scrub. It works! It kind of hurts but it works. It takes me 40 minutes to de blue myself and I won’t need to exfoliate for the next several months but I am no longer an homage to smurfdom. I also had to paint my nails because there was nothing I could do to fix that little problem and I didn’t want to keep having to tell people I was cold. On the train to work that day it finally struck me how ridiculous that whole thing was and I laughed so hard the lady sitting next to me got up and moved to another seat. I bought rubber gloves on my way home, no one can say I didn’t learn for this experience.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
My new apartment!
July 23, 2007
I joined the Peace Corps to really experience the sensation of “roughing it” and to know what is means to struggle to survive, right? Well, when I ended up in Ukraine it seemed that while I many have to lower my artificially high American standards a little, roughing it didn’t really come to mind. That was until I got my first apartment. I say first because I really hope it will not be the only place I stay during my two years here and this is why.
Can you say ninth floor? So can I, and I get a lot of practice with my Ukrainian numbers because I count each step up to the ninth floor every day as I trek up and down. Now before you ask, yes, it does have a lift but allow me to briefly describe why I don’t use this lift. It is very old. It makes more noises while it is going up then the babycias do when they hike up 9 flights of stairs. When I came to look at the apartment my host sister and I rode in the lift and managed to make the trip without incident. Then next day when we came with my distressingly large amounts of baggage to move me in, I loaded the tiny lift with bags and then wedged myself in thinking, “the fewer trips on this death trap the better”. The doors closed and I pressed the button for the 9th floor. And waited…and waited…still waiting…the lift didn’t move. And interestingly enough, even though the lift wasn’t moving, the doors wouldn’t open.
Here is a brief explanation of a Ukrainian elevator. They are very small compared to western elevators, maybe 4 feet by 3 feet. They are dark but the doors (on this lift anyway) don’t close all the way so you get some light from each floor you pass and you can wave to, say hi, and chat about the weather with people on the landings as you head up to your floor. There is no such thing as a panic button that will ring highly trained help to come rescue if you get stuck. You have to beg for help from anyone who happens to be passing by, please remember that these people speak only Russian while I on the other hand, do not. So here I am, stuck in the lift will half of my worldly belongings and having no clear escape. Thankfully, I was with other people and I watched through the crack in the doors as my babycia went for help. Meaning, she got some large burly gentleman to try and pry the doors open. That didn’t work but it did make the lift shake a lot and threaten to drop into the basement. I also got a great look at this gigantic mans sweaty and very furry chest. Next they sent my host sister to look for the handy guy, he was nowhere to be found, vacationing in Siberia or something… .but if I wanted to wait.... At this point I am starting to have visions of myself becoming the only Peace Corps volunteer to successfully complete their service from inside of an elevator. I could be the new poster child for why building upkeep and renovation is so badly needed. I had visions of my Babycia passing me traditional dishes through the gap in the doors and setting up a tube that would keep me supplied with water and borsht, the only two things you really need to live in Ukraine. Desperate, I start pushing buttons, thinking to myself, “at the very worst this thing will explode and I can at least be buried in America.” The lift begins to shake, then squeal, then sigh, then quote a little Shakespeare, then the doors opened and I jetted out of there faster then a Peace Corps volunteer headed for McDonalds.
At this point we gave up on the elevator and began to hoof it up the 9 flights to my new apartment. Well, new to me anyway. I have 2 years of stuff and an 89 pound host sister to help me. By the time we were done, I was ready to just topple over and sleep on the floor. That was until I realized just how dirty the floor really was. Picture this, you are in New York, or Chicago or some other big city. Now find a building that was built sometime not too long after WWII (I am being optimistic about this date). Some of the apartments have been in families for years and are in wonderful shape with clean windows, nice carpet, and the obligatory cat sunning itself on the sill. But then you have the apartments that have been rented out cheaply to whoever needs them for however long. Students, the unemployed, Peace Corps Volunteers… Can you imagine how different those two same apartments look? I have the latter. I counted not one, not two, but FIVE different types of wallpaper in the main room/bedroom. When I turn the light on in the morning I feel like I am still dreaming. In some places there is no wall paper at all and you can see the crumbling concrete underneath. It’s very ghetto shik. The floor is some sort of red plastic linoleum with a distressing number of mysterious burns. But there is a bed and a closet so what more does a girl really need?
I have a balcony. The windows leading out to it have been painted and taped shut, as have the windows to the kitchen. I assume this is because of the super cold weather in the winter but who really knows. The balcony itself seems to cling to the face of the building through nothing more then sheer willpower and a lot of scotch tape. You think I am kidding... Two of the four widows leading to the outside world have no glass but do provide a nice breeze. I think at one time this was an open air balcony but had at some point been walled in. However, the 6 to 10 inch gaps at the corners probably let it get pretty cold in the winter. There is a nest of birds in the corner. I only go out onto the balcony to hang laundry so someone might as well enjoy it. The clothes lines are strategically hung at neck level so if you aren’t paying attention you can garrote yourself. I would call that roughing it.
I feel less guilty about not knowing much about cooking when I got this kitchen. The stove has two burners that work, two that don’t, and an oven that has not worked since Kennedy was in office. But it leans to the left so we can at least talk about politics. You have to climb under the table to turn on the gas valve manually each time you wish to cook because there is a minute leak somewhere between the valve and the stove. I am very careful to turn that bad boy off each time because I would hate to go to cook myself breakfast one morning and end up being blown through the window. All of the counters are handmade and while one of them it alright the other looks like it was made by one of my sisters modern artist friends because it has lots of funny angles and no even surfaces. I got a roll of my own wall paper and actually covered the table/counter with it because the wood was…um…not clean. Everything now has tacky plastic covers so it is all sanitary and just a touch white trashy. It is starting to feel a little more like home. Now all I need is a cat…
I joined the Peace Corps to really experience the sensation of “roughing it” and to know what is means to struggle to survive, right? Well, when I ended up in Ukraine it seemed that while I many have to lower my artificially high American standards a little, roughing it didn’t really come to mind. That was until I got my first apartment. I say first because I really hope it will not be the only place I stay during my two years here and this is why.
Can you say ninth floor? So can I, and I get a lot of practice with my Ukrainian numbers because I count each step up to the ninth floor every day as I trek up and down. Now before you ask, yes, it does have a lift but allow me to briefly describe why I don’t use this lift. It is very old. It makes more noises while it is going up then the babycias do when they hike up 9 flights of stairs. When I came to look at the apartment my host sister and I rode in the lift and managed to make the trip without incident. Then next day when we came with my distressingly large amounts of baggage to move me in, I loaded the tiny lift with bags and then wedged myself in thinking, “the fewer trips on this death trap the better”. The doors closed and I pressed the button for the 9th floor. And waited…and waited…still waiting…the lift didn’t move. And interestingly enough, even though the lift wasn’t moving, the doors wouldn’t open.
Here is a brief explanation of a Ukrainian elevator. They are very small compared to western elevators, maybe 4 feet by 3 feet. They are dark but the doors (on this lift anyway) don’t close all the way so you get some light from each floor you pass and you can wave to, say hi, and chat about the weather with people on the landings as you head up to your floor. There is no such thing as a panic button that will ring highly trained help to come rescue if you get stuck. You have to beg for help from anyone who happens to be passing by, please remember that these people speak only Russian while I on the other hand, do not. So here I am, stuck in the lift will half of my worldly belongings and having no clear escape. Thankfully, I was with other people and I watched through the crack in the doors as my babycia went for help. Meaning, she got some large burly gentleman to try and pry the doors open. That didn’t work but it did make the lift shake a lot and threaten to drop into the basement. I also got a great look at this gigantic mans sweaty and very furry chest. Next they sent my host sister to look for the handy guy, he was nowhere to be found, vacationing in Siberia or something… .but if I wanted to wait.... At this point I am starting to have visions of myself becoming the only Peace Corps volunteer to successfully complete their service from inside of an elevator. I could be the new poster child for why building upkeep and renovation is so badly needed. I had visions of my Babycia passing me traditional dishes through the gap in the doors and setting up a tube that would keep me supplied with water and borsht, the only two things you really need to live in Ukraine. Desperate, I start pushing buttons, thinking to myself, “at the very worst this thing will explode and I can at least be buried in America.” The lift begins to shake, then squeal, then sigh, then quote a little Shakespeare, then the doors opened and I jetted out of there faster then a Peace Corps volunteer headed for McDonalds.
At this point we gave up on the elevator and began to hoof it up the 9 flights to my new apartment. Well, new to me anyway. I have 2 years of stuff and an 89 pound host sister to help me. By the time we were done, I was ready to just topple over and sleep on the floor. That was until I realized just how dirty the floor really was. Picture this, you are in New York, or Chicago or some other big city. Now find a building that was built sometime not too long after WWII (I am being optimistic about this date). Some of the apartments have been in families for years and are in wonderful shape with clean windows, nice carpet, and the obligatory cat sunning itself on the sill. But then you have the apartments that have been rented out cheaply to whoever needs them for however long. Students, the unemployed, Peace Corps Volunteers… Can you imagine how different those two same apartments look? I have the latter. I counted not one, not two, but FIVE different types of wallpaper in the main room/bedroom. When I turn the light on in the morning I feel like I am still dreaming. In some places there is no wall paper at all and you can see the crumbling concrete underneath. It’s very ghetto shik. The floor is some sort of red plastic linoleum with a distressing number of mysterious burns. But there is a bed and a closet so what more does a girl really need?
I have a balcony. The windows leading out to it have been painted and taped shut, as have the windows to the kitchen. I assume this is because of the super cold weather in the winter but who really knows. The balcony itself seems to cling to the face of the building through nothing more then sheer willpower and a lot of scotch tape. You think I am kidding... Two of the four widows leading to the outside world have no glass but do provide a nice breeze. I think at one time this was an open air balcony but had at some point been walled in. However, the 6 to 10 inch gaps at the corners probably let it get pretty cold in the winter. There is a nest of birds in the corner. I only go out onto the balcony to hang laundry so someone might as well enjoy it. The clothes lines are strategically hung at neck level so if you aren’t paying attention you can garrote yourself. I would call that roughing it.
I feel less guilty about not knowing much about cooking when I got this kitchen. The stove has two burners that work, two that don’t, and an oven that has not worked since Kennedy was in office. But it leans to the left so we can at least talk about politics. You have to climb under the table to turn on the gas valve manually each time you wish to cook because there is a minute leak somewhere between the valve and the stove. I am very careful to turn that bad boy off each time because I would hate to go to cook myself breakfast one morning and end up being blown through the window. All of the counters are handmade and while one of them it alright the other looks like it was made by one of my sisters modern artist friends because it has lots of funny angles and no even surfaces. I got a roll of my own wall paper and actually covered the table/counter with it because the wood was…um…not clean. Everything now has tacky plastic covers so it is all sanitary and just a touch white trashy. It is starting to feel a little more like home. Now all I need is a cat…
Friday, July 6, 2007
Attack of the Ukrainian Babucias!
une, 26, 2007
I’m sorry if it seems like forever between each of my postings. I am finding it harder and harder to get access to the internet. I am now in my new site and have been for about 4 days. It is quite a strange experience walking around town and knowing that this is where I will be living for the next 2 years. Sometimes that thought is very exciting and sometimes it seems unbearable. Tomorrow I will be attending the graduation ceremony for all of the 11form students at my school. My host sister is among the graduates and she is just walking on clouds right now. She has been quite a big help in getting me used to the are. We have taken some walks together and she is making a point of introducing me to her friends. Yesterday evening I got stranded on a porch in the rain with her and two of her friends so I could begin the story like this. A Russian, a Ukrainian, a Jordanian, and an and American were having a cigeratte(I wasn’t smoking but many of the men here do)…It sounds like a bad joke but is was actually a very interesting conversation. Both of the young men we talked to knew enough English to be dangerous and knew Russian so using a mix of their Russian and English and my Ukrainian and English we were able to cover a variety of topics. I find it interesting that every person I meet asks me if America is better then their country. I always simply say, they are just very different which becomes more and more apparent the longer I stay here.
I have discovered, with no little fear, that almost everyone in my village speaks only Russian. My Babushka takes me out to sit with her and chat will all of the other babushka’s and many of them have never in their lives spoken Ukrainian so instead of me understanding 1 out of every 30 words it is one out of every 45. I think I have understood maybe 3 sentences that have come out of my Babushkas mouth, after that I have to rely on Charades. That being said, quite a few people get a real kick out of the fact that an American is learning Ukrainian. I am just going to really need to hit the books in order to know enough Ukrainian to understand their Russian. I think after several months I will start hitting the books for Russian as well. One thing at a time though. Speaking of time…I spoke with my coordinator today and she let me know that after graduation everything is finished, there are no more rest/summer camps and there are no summer classes so I am at loose ends. Her exact words were, “I get a rest so why don’t you”? I am going to get together with her twice a week to “learn Ukrainian” but I am not really sure what she means by that. I don’t think it involves a classroom setting because she told me to bring my swimsuit. It should be interesting. I will need to look up how to say “I’m drowning!” in Ukrainian. When I asked if there was anything I could help with during the summer she simply said that they expected me to settle in. The only problem is that I am terrified at the prospect of having nothing to do for the next 2 months. I am lonely and homesick now and at the moment don’t have any friends to “hang out with” although the dogs and cats in Ukraine are friendly. I am afraid that I will become that weird creepy American that is always moping about. On the up side, I got the grandma’s helping me find my own apartment and it looks like they may have already found one. These women can be a force to be reckoned with. Then I can be the weird creepy American moping about in her own apartment.
June 29th 2007,
Who needs German Shepard’s when you have Ukrainian Grandmothers?
In my new host family I have a Babycia who the entire family affectionately calls Ba. She is a wonderful women, she continuously tried to communicate with me even when I understood non of her rapid fire Russian (I learned Ukrainian). She constantly includes me in on everything that she does including cooking and working in her very large garden and she has made my transition into my new host family much smoother. She even helped me relocate the hamsters that I was sharing my room with when I confessed to her that they were keeping me up all night with their constant Russian squeeking. I love my Ba and my Ba loves me. In fact, she is caring to the point of being slightly ridiculous. Allow me to explain, I went for a walk to get to know my town and was gone about an hour. As I get back, Ba is just leaving to come looking for me, fearing that I had become lost. There are several other instances I could name but here is the best. I attended the graduation of my host sister Alina. Graduating from high school is one of the biggest events in a Ukrainians life, many of them never go to college so high school is a big deal. The girls dress in ball gowns the men in suits and there are singers and dancers. They put on a wonderful show. The graduation finally ends and one of the English teachers at the schools mentions that she has internet access if I would like to take advantage of it. You see, the kids were now going to Kharkiv to party and wouldn’t be back to my site until later to continue the party at the school until around 11:30 or so when the fireworks began (I told you it was a big deal). I turn to tell Ba that I will not be going home with her because I need to feed my pathetic internet addiction and I have found a local dealer. Concerned she takes this teacher aside and speaks rapidly to her for several moments. The teacher looks at me surprised and says, “she doesn’t think you can get home by yourself, do you know the way?”. I look at her, a little stunned, the town I am in has a little more then twice the number of students I had in my high school. You could blindfold me and drive me to an unknown location in the town and I could still find my way home as it only has one main street.
I said, “I think I can manage”
Ba says, “but it will be dark!”
“I am aware of that Ba.”
“What if you get lost?”
“I can follow the train tracks home” (you think I am joking but I really could)
“What if you get hit by a train?”
“I’m pretty sure I will here it coming Ba.”
“do you have a sweater?”
“I’m wearing it Ba”
Etc…
She wouldn’t let me go until the teacher agreed to find someone to drive me home after the party. I had to show her that I had the address written down on a pad in my purse.
The rest of the evening goes well, I feed my internet addiction and got to know one of my new coworkers better and we head back to the school to celebrate. Now it is tradition in my village that the graduating students party until the early morning and then go to the lake to watch the sun rise. To keep it somewhat safe the school holds the party at the school itself to make sure things don’t get out of hand. So I could have been out very late indeed. It got to be around midnight and , exhausted from using Ukrainian all day I decide to call it a night. The teacher finds me a ride home (it was the cousin of the son of somebody’s teacher etc…) and I head down the hill to my host families apartment. I approach and I see two shady looking characters in long coats standing in the rain right outside the entry to my apartment stairwell. With all of my Peace Corps safety training in mind I think of my options. I think about waiting until they leave but decide that they don’t look any more threatening then staying in the dark in the rain next to the train tracks. I go in for a closer look to assess the situation. It turns out that it is Ba and she has enlisted some of the other grandmothers in the building to wait with her until I came home. They have all been standing in the rain, probably since it got dark, waiting for me to come home. Please remember that I could have stayed out until the next morning but decided not to. I am escorted by this small army of grandmothers to my host families flat and chattered at in Russian by these tiny wrinkled women with head scarves and slippers on about the rain, and the cold, and why aren’t I wearing two sweaters. I am promptly given hot tea and put to bed rather bemused and befuddled by the whole thing. If I had decided to walk home I bet she would have killed me. She didn’t bat an eyelash when my host sister returned how late the next afternoon. I still don’t know what to make of that.
I’m sorry if it seems like forever between each of my postings. I am finding it harder and harder to get access to the internet. I am now in my new site and have been for about 4 days. It is quite a strange experience walking around town and knowing that this is where I will be living for the next 2 years. Sometimes that thought is very exciting and sometimes it seems unbearable. Tomorrow I will be attending the graduation ceremony for all of the 11form students at my school. My host sister is among the graduates and she is just walking on clouds right now. She has been quite a big help in getting me used to the are. We have taken some walks together and she is making a point of introducing me to her friends. Yesterday evening I got stranded on a porch in the rain with her and two of her friends so I could begin the story like this. A Russian, a Ukrainian, a Jordanian, and an and American were having a cigeratte(I wasn’t smoking but many of the men here do)…It sounds like a bad joke but is was actually a very interesting conversation. Both of the young men we talked to knew enough English to be dangerous and knew Russian so using a mix of their Russian and English and my Ukrainian and English we were able to cover a variety of topics. I find it interesting that every person I meet asks me if America is better then their country. I always simply say, they are just very different which becomes more and more apparent the longer I stay here.
I have discovered, with no little fear, that almost everyone in my village speaks only Russian. My Babushka takes me out to sit with her and chat will all of the other babushka’s and many of them have never in their lives spoken Ukrainian so instead of me understanding 1 out of every 30 words it is one out of every 45. I think I have understood maybe 3 sentences that have come out of my Babushkas mouth, after that I have to rely on Charades. That being said, quite a few people get a real kick out of the fact that an American is learning Ukrainian. I am just going to really need to hit the books in order to know enough Ukrainian to understand their Russian. I think after several months I will start hitting the books for Russian as well. One thing at a time though. Speaking of time…I spoke with my coordinator today and she let me know that after graduation everything is finished, there are no more rest/summer camps and there are no summer classes so I am at loose ends. Her exact words were, “I get a rest so why don’t you”? I am going to get together with her twice a week to “learn Ukrainian” but I am not really sure what she means by that. I don’t think it involves a classroom setting because she told me to bring my swimsuit. It should be interesting. I will need to look up how to say “I’m drowning!” in Ukrainian. When I asked if there was anything I could help with during the summer she simply said that they expected me to settle in. The only problem is that I am terrified at the prospect of having nothing to do for the next 2 months. I am lonely and homesick now and at the moment don’t have any friends to “hang out with” although the dogs and cats in Ukraine are friendly. I am afraid that I will become that weird creepy American that is always moping about. On the up side, I got the grandma’s helping me find my own apartment and it looks like they may have already found one. These women can be a force to be reckoned with. Then I can be the weird creepy American moping about in her own apartment.
June 29th 2007,
Who needs German Shepard’s when you have Ukrainian Grandmothers?
In my new host family I have a Babycia who the entire family affectionately calls Ba. She is a wonderful women, she continuously tried to communicate with me even when I understood non of her rapid fire Russian (I learned Ukrainian). She constantly includes me in on everything that she does including cooking and working in her very large garden and she has made my transition into my new host family much smoother. She even helped me relocate the hamsters that I was sharing my room with when I confessed to her that they were keeping me up all night with their constant Russian squeeking. I love my Ba and my Ba loves me. In fact, she is caring to the point of being slightly ridiculous. Allow me to explain, I went for a walk to get to know my town and was gone about an hour. As I get back, Ba is just leaving to come looking for me, fearing that I had become lost. There are several other instances I could name but here is the best. I attended the graduation of my host sister Alina. Graduating from high school is one of the biggest events in a Ukrainians life, many of them never go to college so high school is a big deal. The girls dress in ball gowns the men in suits and there are singers and dancers. They put on a wonderful show. The graduation finally ends and one of the English teachers at the schools mentions that she has internet access if I would like to take advantage of it. You see, the kids were now going to Kharkiv to party and wouldn’t be back to my site until later to continue the party at the school until around 11:30 or so when the fireworks began (I told you it was a big deal). I turn to tell Ba that I will not be going home with her because I need to feed my pathetic internet addiction and I have found a local dealer. Concerned she takes this teacher aside and speaks rapidly to her for several moments. The teacher looks at me surprised and says, “she doesn’t think you can get home by yourself, do you know the way?”. I look at her, a little stunned, the town I am in has a little more then twice the number of students I had in my high school. You could blindfold me and drive me to an unknown location in the town and I could still find my way home as it only has one main street.
I said, “I think I can manage”
Ba says, “but it will be dark!”
“I am aware of that Ba.”
“What if you get lost?”
“I can follow the train tracks home” (you think I am joking but I really could)
“What if you get hit by a train?”
“I’m pretty sure I will here it coming Ba.”
“do you have a sweater?”
“I’m wearing it Ba”
Etc…
She wouldn’t let me go until the teacher agreed to find someone to drive me home after the party. I had to show her that I had the address written down on a pad in my purse.
The rest of the evening goes well, I feed my internet addiction and got to know one of my new coworkers better and we head back to the school to celebrate. Now it is tradition in my village that the graduating students party until the early morning and then go to the lake to watch the sun rise. To keep it somewhat safe the school holds the party at the school itself to make sure things don’t get out of hand. So I could have been out very late indeed. It got to be around midnight and , exhausted from using Ukrainian all day I decide to call it a night. The teacher finds me a ride home (it was the cousin of the son of somebody’s teacher etc…) and I head down the hill to my host families apartment. I approach and I see two shady looking characters in long coats standing in the rain right outside the entry to my apartment stairwell. With all of my Peace Corps safety training in mind I think of my options. I think about waiting until they leave but decide that they don’t look any more threatening then staying in the dark in the rain next to the train tracks. I go in for a closer look to assess the situation. It turns out that it is Ba and she has enlisted some of the other grandmothers in the building to wait with her until I came home. They have all been standing in the rain, probably since it got dark, waiting for me to come home. Please remember that I could have stayed out until the next morning but decided not to. I am escorted by this small army of grandmothers to my host families flat and chattered at in Russian by these tiny wrinkled women with head scarves and slippers on about the rain, and the cold, and why aren’t I wearing two sweaters. I am promptly given hot tea and put to bed rather bemused and befuddled by the whole thing. If I had decided to walk home I bet she would have killed me. She didn’t bat an eyelash when my host sister returned how late the next afternoon. I still don’t know what to make of that.
Summer Camp!
June 13, 2007
Sorry for the absence of blog postings lately. I have been keeping very busy with all of the projects designed to teach Peace Corps trainees what it means to be a volunteer. I also think these projects are designed to weed out the weak of heart and instill in trainees the massive importance of getting to know the language.
There are two parts to our training as Peace Corps Trainees. The first part is to design and implement a community project. The second was to plan and run a summer camp for students. This sounds easy but don’t be fooled. Ukraine does not work the same way America does and neither do Ukrainian students.
The Community Project. Our community project was a talent show that would use presentations by the local youth groups to do two things; create awareness of the youth community and its needs and to raise money for youth programs at the one and only school in my town. In order to do this we worked with the local after school clubs, the dance club, and poetry club. We also created an English Club and a Tae-Kwon-Do club. We took acts from all of these clubs to create our show so the dance club did some dances, the poetry club read some original poetry, the English club sang a song in English, and the TKD kids got to do a little demonstration. Also, the three other volunteers at this site and I got to sing a song in Ukrainian. I believe most people thought that this was the highlight of the concert not because it was good, oh no, but because it was probably the funniest thing they have seen since the end of the cold war. Allow me to explain. Here is where things stood the day before the concert. I had a practice for the TKD kids and 3 showed up (this is ater I had been gone for 2 weeks at my visit to my new site, so they hadn’t had a class in 3 weeks), half of the English club miraculously disappeared, and we had still not memorized the lines to our Ukrainian song let alone learned the tune. The night of the concert, I get there an hour early and I have 11 kids for the TKD demonstration of which only 3 learned the demo I had planned. 2 of the kids that showed up had only attended 1 TKD class, I did some serious tutoring and decided to demonstrate with the kids so the ones who didn’t know what to do could follow me. They had so much fun strutting their stuff that in the end it really didn’t matter if it was correct or not. Then we had the English club. We had chosen a very cute song called “Baby Shark” for the kids to sing because it has actions like “Lady swimming” where they pretend to swim, and “Shark Attack” where they get to jump about like wild monkeys and bring their hands together like shark jaws. Again, this performance was a success by virtue of the children’s outstanding cuteness and the fact the most of them did know this words to the song or if not the words, at least the gestures. Who does not love an 8 year old pretending to be a great white? Finally, the crowing achievement, the Americans attempting to sing in Ukrainian. They went all out for this one. Each one of us was given a traditional Ukrainian costume to wear (I wad redressed by 4 different women until I had it on right) and we got to sing with an accordion. I sang in Ukrainian, with an accordion, in front of a native speaking audience. I will never fear any kind for public performance after this, I simply can’t imagine anything more intimidating. To say that we weren’t the best would be something of an understatement but here is the really cool part. When all of us had completely lost the beat of the song and weren’t sure how to salvage this performance, the audience started to clap and sing along with us. We finished the song together, that was pretty cool. In the end we raised about 350 Hyrvinas for the school.
TEN THINGS I LEARNED FROM SUMMER CAMP IN UKRAINE
If you give Ukrainian students a lunch break they will never return. Teaching in
a prison would be easier because you at least know that they will be there.
9. Capture the flag, a game that Americans can play for hours, will be completed by Ukrainian children in less then 15 minutes. Why you ask, because someone will go turncoat and tell the other team where their flag is and may even go get it for them. I have no idea why.
8. When told to wear “sports attire” Ukrainian girls will wear skirts, high heels, and lots of make up but they will pull their hair back into a ponytail. I really don’t understand this.
7. If Ukrainian children decide that they don’t like the game you are trying to explain to them they simply will not do it. There is no arguing, they simply turn into statues and will not move until you agree to do something else.
6. Every Ukrainian teenager knows who Eminem and Britney Spears are and they will ask you if you have met them.
5. Dancing provocatively at a discotheque is fine for teenagers but they would rather die then learn how to swing dance.
4. Teenagers are like wolves, they can smell fear and they will eat you alive.
3. Younger children are like mimes, they will do everything they see you doing, and I mean EVERYTHING. And never think you are not being watched.
2. You will never be cool enough in a teenagers eyes so don’t even try, just teach.
1. Many Ukrainians have never heard American country music and it scares them, especially John Denver. Again, I have no idea why.
Sorry for the absence of blog postings lately. I have been keeping very busy with all of the projects designed to teach Peace Corps trainees what it means to be a volunteer. I also think these projects are designed to weed out the weak of heart and instill in trainees the massive importance of getting to know the language.
There are two parts to our training as Peace Corps Trainees. The first part is to design and implement a community project. The second was to plan and run a summer camp for students. This sounds easy but don’t be fooled. Ukraine does not work the same way America does and neither do Ukrainian students.
The Community Project. Our community project was a talent show that would use presentations by the local youth groups to do two things; create awareness of the youth community and its needs and to raise money for youth programs at the one and only school in my town. In order to do this we worked with the local after school clubs, the dance club, and poetry club. We also created an English Club and a Tae-Kwon-Do club. We took acts from all of these clubs to create our show so the dance club did some dances, the poetry club read some original poetry, the English club sang a song in English, and the TKD kids got to do a little demonstration. Also, the three other volunteers at this site and I got to sing a song in Ukrainian. I believe most people thought that this was the highlight of the concert not because it was good, oh no, but because it was probably the funniest thing they have seen since the end of the cold war. Allow me to explain. Here is where things stood the day before the concert. I had a practice for the TKD kids and 3 showed up (this is ater I had been gone for 2 weeks at my visit to my new site, so they hadn’t had a class in 3 weeks), half of the English club miraculously disappeared, and we had still not memorized the lines to our Ukrainian song let alone learned the tune. The night of the concert, I get there an hour early and I have 11 kids for the TKD demonstration of which only 3 learned the demo I had planned. 2 of the kids that showed up had only attended 1 TKD class, I did some serious tutoring and decided to demonstrate with the kids so the ones who didn’t know what to do could follow me. They had so much fun strutting their stuff that in the end it really didn’t matter if it was correct or not. Then we had the English club. We had chosen a very cute song called “Baby Shark” for the kids to sing because it has actions like “Lady swimming” where they pretend to swim, and “Shark Attack” where they get to jump about like wild monkeys and bring their hands together like shark jaws. Again, this performance was a success by virtue of the children’s outstanding cuteness and the fact the most of them did know this words to the song or if not the words, at least the gestures. Who does not love an 8 year old pretending to be a great white? Finally, the crowing achievement, the Americans attempting to sing in Ukrainian. They went all out for this one. Each one of us was given a traditional Ukrainian costume to wear (I wad redressed by 4 different women until I had it on right) and we got to sing with an accordion. I sang in Ukrainian, with an accordion, in front of a native speaking audience. I will never fear any kind for public performance after this, I simply can’t imagine anything more intimidating. To say that we weren’t the best would be something of an understatement but here is the really cool part. When all of us had completely lost the beat of the song and weren’t sure how to salvage this performance, the audience started to clap and sing along with us. We finished the song together, that was pretty cool. In the end we raised about 350 Hyrvinas for the school.
TEN THINGS I LEARNED FROM SUMMER CAMP IN UKRAINE
If you give Ukrainian students a lunch break they will never return. Teaching in
a prison would be easier because you at least know that they will be there.
9. Capture the flag, a game that Americans can play for hours, will be completed by Ukrainian children in less then 15 minutes. Why you ask, because someone will go turncoat and tell the other team where their flag is and may even go get it for them. I have no idea why.
8. When told to wear “sports attire” Ukrainian girls will wear skirts, high heels, and lots of make up but they will pull their hair back into a ponytail. I really don’t understand this.
7. If Ukrainian children decide that they don’t like the game you are trying to explain to them they simply will not do it. There is no arguing, they simply turn into statues and will not move until you agree to do something else.
6. Every Ukrainian teenager knows who Eminem and Britney Spears are and they will ask you if you have met them.
5. Dancing provocatively at a discotheque is fine for teenagers but they would rather die then learn how to swing dance.
4. Teenagers are like wolves, they can smell fear and they will eat you alive.
3. Younger children are like mimes, they will do everything they see you doing, and I mean EVERYTHING. And never think you are not being watched.
2. You will never be cool enough in a teenagers eyes so don’t even try, just teach.
1. Many Ukrainians have never heard American country music and it scares them, especially John Denver. Again, I have no idea why.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Here is a picture of me with my new coordinator, Tanya. We are at a large monument in Harkiv and the statue behind us represents the mother of all of the soldiers that have faught in past wars. You can actually hear her heartbeat. The park has patriotic music playing everywhere and the "mothers" constant heartbeat to remind you of the sacrifices of all of the men/women who have died fighting in conflicts.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Swimming with the fishes and running with the bulls
March 7th 2007
Showers in Ukraine are a little different. Let us think about the word shower shall we?
S H O W E R, it seems like a good word. Not to short, not to long, not one of those weird exceptions in English spelling. All in all, not a bad word. But lets look a little deeper…this word could mean so many things. You shower people with gifts and affection. There are April showers which lead to May flowers. Bridal showers which lead to marriage etc…As well as the quick shower and the well known and loved long hot shower. Now let us look at the word “Ukrainian showers”. This word also has many meanings like relaxation after an 8 hour train ride or comfort after a really tough 8th form class where the kids looked at you like you had grown a second head when you tried to explain that “yes, nicotine IS addictive, and smoking can kill you”. However, a Ukrainian shower may also mean torture, fear, and possibly death for inexperienced Americans like myself.
First of all, lets realize that no where in the word shower does it imply that the human body should be vertical. Shower just refers to the action of the water not the position of the recipient. So in Ukrainian showers you have to sit down. Why, you ask? Well for one, the shower head is mounted around 1 to 2 feet above the edge of the tub, if it is mounted at all. Sometimes it just hangs from the faucet like a hibernating snake ready to spring to life at water pressure and smack the unsuspecting naked recipient in the back of the head. More on that later. Ukrainian bathrooms tend to be small. Ukrainian architecture is simple and compact. I can brush my teeth in the sink and shave my leg in the tub at the same time. What little space there is in the bathroom is taken up by an enormous bathtub. The tub itself is not so much wide as it is very deep. I am not sure why this is but people here, including me, wash all of their laundry in said bathtub so deep is a good thing. However, besides being deep, the bathtub is also raised up several inches from the floor so the edge of the tub is around mid thigh on most normal people. That is pretty high up, and it makes it harder to escape the bathtub in times of duress and the resulting fall particularly painful.
In order to take a shower you must first manage to understand a kolonka. If you are fortunate enough to have hot water in your house (and currently I am) but many people are not, you must light the kolonka in order to heat the water. Now, the kolonka is not on all of the time, you only light it when you need hot water and the water must be running before you light it. If the water is not running, and I mean the hot water tap, not the cold water tap sine they are covered by two separate pipes, then whatever water is in the un-flowing hot water pipe will boil, evaporate, and then make the kolonka explode. That will always add a little spice to your day. Even with it is working correctly it makes many ominous noises which I imagine are similar to what Darth Vadar must sound like when he is snoring. I learned about our kolonka on my first day in Ukraine and have only had one near death experience so far. Not too bad considering.
So here is the processes, you turn on the hot water (it is freezing cold at this point) you skitter into the kitchen where the kolonka lies in wait and you light a match, turn on the gas and light the kolonka. Making sure to light it right away because waiting to long with the gas running and then applying fire will also result in various fireworks. In that case you will need medical attention and not a shower. You skitter back into the bathroom, put your cloths into a place where you hope they will stay dry, and lever yourself over the very high edge of the tub. Now you wait for the ice cold water to warm up. At this point you adapt what I like to call the “readiness crouch”. This is necessary because the kolonka likes to mess with you. Sometimes the water will be a perfect temperature for your entire shower, sometimes it will not. Most of the time the water will fluctuate from being to hot to being okay to being too cold to okay and back again. If you are in an appropriate crouch (please remember that you cannot stand in a Ukrainian shower, there is no curtain and the shower head reaches your hip if you stand up) and can move quickly you can get wet before the water becomes too hot, get out of the way to soap up, and dash back in to rinse off before you miss a temperate cycle.
I knew none this on my first night with my host family. I had met my new family, eaten far too much excellent but rather foreign Ukrainian food, gotten settled into my room, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing shower. I was aware of the sitting in the tub thing but was prepared to tackle it. I managed to light the kolonka without a problem and vault into the tub. The water was a perfect temperature so I sat down (notice the sitting part) and turned the water to the shower. I didn’t realize that unsecured shower heads can act amazingly like giant Amazonian boa constrictors when they are not secured and water pressure is introduced. The docile looking shower head springs to life and manages to spray enough water to fill a full sized Olympic swimming pool into the tiny bathroom and clock me upside the head before I wrestle it into submission. I have managed to completely soak my clothes, my pajamas and the towel I was intending to dry myself off with. I lock the shower head in place, check the bump on my head where the shower head bit me and made liberal with the shampoo. So I have soap in my hair, on my face, and on my hands when the water suddenly turns freezing cold. Startled, I try to push myself out of the way but my hands are soapy that I only succeed in slipping and banging my head against the soap tray. I manage to back away to the safe end of the tub and stand up to avoid the hot water. Since I have soap on my face I haven’t really opened my eyes and I failed to notice that there is laundry hanging from the lines above the tubs. Did I mention that we do laundry in the bathtub and either hang it on the porch or over the bathtub to drip dry? Either way, I stand up and promptly get caught in my host sister’s hot pink bra. I try to disentangle myself without getting soap all over this laboriously cleaned laundry or into my eyes and only succeed in firmly tying my right hand to my head and looking vaguely like I am wearing a football helmet made of pink lace. The water has returned to a normal temperature and I realize that I must remove some of the soap on my free hand so I can untie myself from the Chinese torture device I have created. So I unclip myself from the cloths line, get rinsed off and release myself from my host sisters double D’s. I rinse the soap off of the bra and re-hang it believing that disaster has been averted.
Next, I tried to shave my legs…
I sat down again (how could I have been so stupid!) and pulled out my safety razor. Had I been using anything other then a safety razor I surly would have died from blood loss after this next ordeal. I have made some good progress when the water turns scalding hot. Knowing that standing up in not a very good idea, I attempt to head to the other end of the tub. Unfortunately, my legs are all slippery and I can’t manage to get to the higher end of the tub without one limb or another sliding onto the scalding water. I can’t get my feet under me either and I with lightning decisiveness I decide that this is a matter of life and death and if I don’t want to do my red lobster impression I need to escape. So in a Herculean effort, I pull myself over the edge of the tub.
Did I mention how high Ukrainian bathtubs are?
I fall for what feels like 15 or 20 feet but in reality is 2.5 or so and land on my sopping wet clothes, towel, and pajamas. Miraculously, I am unhurt so I lay there in the 1 inch of standing water I have created, soapy, naked and thanking my lucky stars that I am still alive. Then I hear it, the approaching footsteps. I had let out a blood curdling shriek when I had gone over the edge of the bathtub. My host family was coming. They must have heard the yell and the wet splash and thought I had either slipped in the tub or had turned into a mermaid. They probably didn’t know about the standing water on their bathroom floor and I suddenly as the strong desire for them not to have this particular image as one of their first impressions of me. I scramble to my feet and try and use the 2 inches of dry part on my towel to mop up my own personal swimming pool. Needless to say, that was not super successful. My host dad (of course it’s the dad) knocks on the door and says something very fast in Ukrainian. I take a guess that it is something along the lines of, “are you okay, it sounds like a naval battle in there?” and I squeak back “Ya Dobra, Ya dobra!” (I’m good! I’m Good!). He hesitates, probably seeing the water leaking into the hallway, but then heads back down the hall.
I look at the shower, I still need to rinse off but now realize that I am dealing with an entity that has proven itself to me smarter then me. I promise to sacrifice a chicken to it and I climb back in. The shower is again at a normal temperature and I rinse off, remembering to stay on the balls of my feet in a flight position. That leg will have to remain half shaved. Then I wring out my towel and pajamas, dry off (or at least become less wet) and get dressed. Then I use my towel to mop up the floor and do as much as possible to erase the damage that I have caused. All in all it takes me about an hour to take a shower that takes the average Ukrainian 5 minutes to complete. But I did learn the valuable lesson of the shower crouch. This is the very necessary position that you can use to propel yourself to safety when the kolonka decides to have a mood swing. Hello Ukraine!
May 7th,
I ate an entire fish today. I mean the WHOLE fish. My host mom has just come back from a trip to the Azur Sea and as we are sitting down for dinner she asks me if I like Sushi. Surprised, I said “yes, I love sushi” knowing that eating fresh fish in Ukraine is not really possible unless you caught it yourself or that it is a mutant fish from Chernobyl that walked itself to market. At my response my host mom heads onto the balcony and comes back with a string of whole dried fish. Basically, they take the whole fish, string a line through its jaw and let the suckers day. I am so surprised that this “sushi” that I don’t even blink when my host mom rips one of the fish off of the line and puts it into my hand. I look at it, it looks at me. It looks like it is smiling and promptly name it Flipper. This is why I never eat anything with a face. Then I watch in horror as my host mom takes her own fish and effortlessly rips its little head off. Then, holding it by the tail she peels its skin off, fins and all, like it is a banana. She then eats the thing down to its tail. I am sitting there, holding Flipper, and staring at her in horror. When my host mom notices that I haven’t laid into my fish, she must have assumed that I couldn’t get Flippers little head off. So she reached over, takes Flipper, twists his head off and puts that in my left hand. She then places the rest of him in my right hand. I look at Flippers little face, then I look at his body. This is where I had to make the conscious decision not to flip out. I thought to myself, “you joined Peace Corps to try new things, broaden your horizons, and learn about new cultures. Don’t knock it until you try it.” So…I peeled Flipper. He wasn’t half bad, I mean not something I would go out and buy myself but not horrible either. That was until I pulled a piece of fish meat off and all of (what I thought were) Flippers little internal organs fell onto the table. This was where I lost my cool, I threw Flippers head in one direction and his tail in the other and had to leave the room. My host mom was laughing so hard she probably had a fin come out of her nose. In reality, what fell out of my fish was seasoning but I only discovered that later after I had calmed down. I have been consoling myself in that fact that at least I tried it…
May 9th
It’s not running with the bulls in Pamplona but it’s close. Today, I got to meander with the cows. Jamie (another volunteer) and I were on our daily walk. I can’t jog in our town because there are a lot of dogs and they are hardwired so that anything that runs must be chased. I didn’t really enjoy that added addition to my runs, although I make great time, so instead we take walks. We were walking the other day and as we rounded a corner we merged with an entire herd of heifers. Every day, the people in our village take their cows out to graze on the communal lands outside of the town. The townspeople take turns watching the cows, my host mom who is a nurse, has already taken her turn. Each evening the two people who are cow watching, herd the cows back into town. Now once inside the town limits each cow becomes its own little homing device. The people are waiting outside their gates just like they wait for their children and as their cow comes home they simply open their gate and the cows walk in. The cows know which gate is theirs and they know how to get there. Jamie and I followed one cow around 7 different turns before it got to its gate and it never hesitated. We got to be one of the “herd” and I realized that this is as close to a cow as I have ever been. For the first time ever there were no fences it I realized that cows can be a little scary. They are awfully big up close but apparently all of our village’s cows are friendly. Some more then others. We got chased by one really friendly calf who thought we looked like its mother and we were bumped off of the road by a cow that had a serious drooling problem. I know it wasn’t rabies but one must give a large berth to a copiously salivating 2 ton animal. It made me think of the phrase, “until the cows come home”. I realized that not only do the cows come home in my village but they know the way.
May 11, 2007
So I taught my last class at my training site yesterday. It was actually a pretty good teaching day. We had a translator in class and we were going over what rights people had. The students got the chance to ask us about our rights in the US and they seemed to really enjoy finding out how things really work in America. For example, some of them didn’t know that we had to pay for our own higher education. It was a good chance for me to learn about what students think in Ukraine and a chance for them to learn about us. It was amazing how different some of the student’s opinions were. One boy thought things were getting better while another girl swore it was harder to survive in Ukraine. I can’t wait until I can understand the language better. It has been a real challenge teaching with my limited language skills but I think I am getting the hang of it. I am killer at charades now. Who else do you know that can mime “constitution”? The students at English club loved seeing all of the pictures I brought in of my family. It was funny how they paid so much more attention to the pictures of my cat then anyone else. I guess they think she is adorable as I do. My Tae Kwon Do students gave me flowers at class because they know I am leaving for my site visit soon. It was such a sweet gesture. I got lots of warm fuzzies.
Showers in Ukraine are a little different. Let us think about the word shower shall we?
S H O W E R, it seems like a good word. Not to short, not to long, not one of those weird exceptions in English spelling. All in all, not a bad word. But lets look a little deeper…this word could mean so many things. You shower people with gifts and affection. There are April showers which lead to May flowers. Bridal showers which lead to marriage etc…As well as the quick shower and the well known and loved long hot shower. Now let us look at the word “Ukrainian showers”. This word also has many meanings like relaxation after an 8 hour train ride or comfort after a really tough 8th form class where the kids looked at you like you had grown a second head when you tried to explain that “yes, nicotine IS addictive, and smoking can kill you”. However, a Ukrainian shower may also mean torture, fear, and possibly death for inexperienced Americans like myself.
First of all, lets realize that no where in the word shower does it imply that the human body should be vertical. Shower just refers to the action of the water not the position of the recipient. So in Ukrainian showers you have to sit down. Why, you ask? Well for one, the shower head is mounted around 1 to 2 feet above the edge of the tub, if it is mounted at all. Sometimes it just hangs from the faucet like a hibernating snake ready to spring to life at water pressure and smack the unsuspecting naked recipient in the back of the head. More on that later. Ukrainian bathrooms tend to be small. Ukrainian architecture is simple and compact. I can brush my teeth in the sink and shave my leg in the tub at the same time. What little space there is in the bathroom is taken up by an enormous bathtub. The tub itself is not so much wide as it is very deep. I am not sure why this is but people here, including me, wash all of their laundry in said bathtub so deep is a good thing. However, besides being deep, the bathtub is also raised up several inches from the floor so the edge of the tub is around mid thigh on most normal people. That is pretty high up, and it makes it harder to escape the bathtub in times of duress and the resulting fall particularly painful.
In order to take a shower you must first manage to understand a kolonka. If you are fortunate enough to have hot water in your house (and currently I am) but many people are not, you must light the kolonka in order to heat the water. Now, the kolonka is not on all of the time, you only light it when you need hot water and the water must be running before you light it. If the water is not running, and I mean the hot water tap, not the cold water tap sine they are covered by two separate pipes, then whatever water is in the un-flowing hot water pipe will boil, evaporate, and then make the kolonka explode. That will always add a little spice to your day. Even with it is working correctly it makes many ominous noises which I imagine are similar to what Darth Vadar must sound like when he is snoring. I learned about our kolonka on my first day in Ukraine and have only had one near death experience so far. Not too bad considering.
So here is the processes, you turn on the hot water (it is freezing cold at this point) you skitter into the kitchen where the kolonka lies in wait and you light a match, turn on the gas and light the kolonka. Making sure to light it right away because waiting to long with the gas running and then applying fire will also result in various fireworks. In that case you will need medical attention and not a shower. You skitter back into the bathroom, put your cloths into a place where you hope they will stay dry, and lever yourself over the very high edge of the tub. Now you wait for the ice cold water to warm up. At this point you adapt what I like to call the “readiness crouch”. This is necessary because the kolonka likes to mess with you. Sometimes the water will be a perfect temperature for your entire shower, sometimes it will not. Most of the time the water will fluctuate from being to hot to being okay to being too cold to okay and back again. If you are in an appropriate crouch (please remember that you cannot stand in a Ukrainian shower, there is no curtain and the shower head reaches your hip if you stand up) and can move quickly you can get wet before the water becomes too hot, get out of the way to soap up, and dash back in to rinse off before you miss a temperate cycle.
I knew none this on my first night with my host family. I had met my new family, eaten far too much excellent but rather foreign Ukrainian food, gotten settled into my room, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing shower. I was aware of the sitting in the tub thing but was prepared to tackle it. I managed to light the kolonka without a problem and vault into the tub. The water was a perfect temperature so I sat down (notice the sitting part) and turned the water to the shower. I didn’t realize that unsecured shower heads can act amazingly like giant Amazonian boa constrictors when they are not secured and water pressure is introduced. The docile looking shower head springs to life and manages to spray enough water to fill a full sized Olympic swimming pool into the tiny bathroom and clock me upside the head before I wrestle it into submission. I have managed to completely soak my clothes, my pajamas and the towel I was intending to dry myself off with. I lock the shower head in place, check the bump on my head where the shower head bit me and made liberal with the shampoo. So I have soap in my hair, on my face, and on my hands when the water suddenly turns freezing cold. Startled, I try to push myself out of the way but my hands are soapy that I only succeed in slipping and banging my head against the soap tray. I manage to back away to the safe end of the tub and stand up to avoid the hot water. Since I have soap on my face I haven’t really opened my eyes and I failed to notice that there is laundry hanging from the lines above the tubs. Did I mention that we do laundry in the bathtub and either hang it on the porch or over the bathtub to drip dry? Either way, I stand up and promptly get caught in my host sister’s hot pink bra. I try to disentangle myself without getting soap all over this laboriously cleaned laundry or into my eyes and only succeed in firmly tying my right hand to my head and looking vaguely like I am wearing a football helmet made of pink lace. The water has returned to a normal temperature and I realize that I must remove some of the soap on my free hand so I can untie myself from the Chinese torture device I have created. So I unclip myself from the cloths line, get rinsed off and release myself from my host sisters double D’s. I rinse the soap off of the bra and re-hang it believing that disaster has been averted.
Next, I tried to shave my legs…
I sat down again (how could I have been so stupid!) and pulled out my safety razor. Had I been using anything other then a safety razor I surly would have died from blood loss after this next ordeal. I have made some good progress when the water turns scalding hot. Knowing that standing up in not a very good idea, I attempt to head to the other end of the tub. Unfortunately, my legs are all slippery and I can’t manage to get to the higher end of the tub without one limb or another sliding onto the scalding water. I can’t get my feet under me either and I with lightning decisiveness I decide that this is a matter of life and death and if I don’t want to do my red lobster impression I need to escape. So in a Herculean effort, I pull myself over the edge of the tub.
Did I mention how high Ukrainian bathtubs are?
I fall for what feels like 15 or 20 feet but in reality is 2.5 or so and land on my sopping wet clothes, towel, and pajamas. Miraculously, I am unhurt so I lay there in the 1 inch of standing water I have created, soapy, naked and thanking my lucky stars that I am still alive. Then I hear it, the approaching footsteps. I had let out a blood curdling shriek when I had gone over the edge of the bathtub. My host family was coming. They must have heard the yell and the wet splash and thought I had either slipped in the tub or had turned into a mermaid. They probably didn’t know about the standing water on their bathroom floor and I suddenly as the strong desire for them not to have this particular image as one of their first impressions of me. I scramble to my feet and try and use the 2 inches of dry part on my towel to mop up my own personal swimming pool. Needless to say, that was not super successful. My host dad (of course it’s the dad) knocks on the door and says something very fast in Ukrainian. I take a guess that it is something along the lines of, “are you okay, it sounds like a naval battle in there?” and I squeak back “Ya Dobra, Ya dobra!” (I’m good! I’m Good!). He hesitates, probably seeing the water leaking into the hallway, but then heads back down the hall.
I look at the shower, I still need to rinse off but now realize that I am dealing with an entity that has proven itself to me smarter then me. I promise to sacrifice a chicken to it and I climb back in. The shower is again at a normal temperature and I rinse off, remembering to stay on the balls of my feet in a flight position. That leg will have to remain half shaved. Then I wring out my towel and pajamas, dry off (or at least become less wet) and get dressed. Then I use my towel to mop up the floor and do as much as possible to erase the damage that I have caused. All in all it takes me about an hour to take a shower that takes the average Ukrainian 5 minutes to complete. But I did learn the valuable lesson of the shower crouch. This is the very necessary position that you can use to propel yourself to safety when the kolonka decides to have a mood swing. Hello Ukraine!
May 7th,
I ate an entire fish today. I mean the WHOLE fish. My host mom has just come back from a trip to the Azur Sea and as we are sitting down for dinner she asks me if I like Sushi. Surprised, I said “yes, I love sushi” knowing that eating fresh fish in Ukraine is not really possible unless you caught it yourself or that it is a mutant fish from Chernobyl that walked itself to market. At my response my host mom heads onto the balcony and comes back with a string of whole dried fish. Basically, they take the whole fish, string a line through its jaw and let the suckers day. I am so surprised that this “sushi” that I don’t even blink when my host mom rips one of the fish off of the line and puts it into my hand. I look at it, it looks at me. It looks like it is smiling and promptly name it Flipper. This is why I never eat anything with a face. Then I watch in horror as my host mom takes her own fish and effortlessly rips its little head off. Then, holding it by the tail she peels its skin off, fins and all, like it is a banana. She then eats the thing down to its tail. I am sitting there, holding Flipper, and staring at her in horror. When my host mom notices that I haven’t laid into my fish, she must have assumed that I couldn’t get Flippers little head off. So she reached over, takes Flipper, twists his head off and puts that in my left hand. She then places the rest of him in my right hand. I look at Flippers little face, then I look at his body. This is where I had to make the conscious decision not to flip out. I thought to myself, “you joined Peace Corps to try new things, broaden your horizons, and learn about new cultures. Don’t knock it until you try it.” So…I peeled Flipper. He wasn’t half bad, I mean not something I would go out and buy myself but not horrible either. That was until I pulled a piece of fish meat off and all of (what I thought were) Flippers little internal organs fell onto the table. This was where I lost my cool, I threw Flippers head in one direction and his tail in the other and had to leave the room. My host mom was laughing so hard she probably had a fin come out of her nose. In reality, what fell out of my fish was seasoning but I only discovered that later after I had calmed down. I have been consoling myself in that fact that at least I tried it…
May 9th
It’s not running with the bulls in Pamplona but it’s close. Today, I got to meander with the cows. Jamie (another volunteer) and I were on our daily walk. I can’t jog in our town because there are a lot of dogs and they are hardwired so that anything that runs must be chased. I didn’t really enjoy that added addition to my runs, although I make great time, so instead we take walks. We were walking the other day and as we rounded a corner we merged with an entire herd of heifers. Every day, the people in our village take their cows out to graze on the communal lands outside of the town. The townspeople take turns watching the cows, my host mom who is a nurse, has already taken her turn. Each evening the two people who are cow watching, herd the cows back into town. Now once inside the town limits each cow becomes its own little homing device. The people are waiting outside their gates just like they wait for their children and as their cow comes home they simply open their gate and the cows walk in. The cows know which gate is theirs and they know how to get there. Jamie and I followed one cow around 7 different turns before it got to its gate and it never hesitated. We got to be one of the “herd” and I realized that this is as close to a cow as I have ever been. For the first time ever there were no fences it I realized that cows can be a little scary. They are awfully big up close but apparently all of our village’s cows are friendly. Some more then others. We got chased by one really friendly calf who thought we looked like its mother and we were bumped off of the road by a cow that had a serious drooling problem. I know it wasn’t rabies but one must give a large berth to a copiously salivating 2 ton animal. It made me think of the phrase, “until the cows come home”. I realized that not only do the cows come home in my village but they know the way.
May 11, 2007
So I taught my last class at my training site yesterday. It was actually a pretty good teaching day. We had a translator in class and we were going over what rights people had. The students got the chance to ask us about our rights in the US and they seemed to really enjoy finding out how things really work in America. For example, some of them didn’t know that we had to pay for our own higher education. It was a good chance for me to learn about what students think in Ukraine and a chance for them to learn about us. It was amazing how different some of the student’s opinions were. One boy thought things were getting better while another girl swore it was harder to survive in Ukraine. I can’t wait until I can understand the language better. It has been a real challenge teaching with my limited language skills but I think I am getting the hang of it. I am killer at charades now. Who else do you know that can mime “constitution”? The students at English club loved seeing all of the pictures I brought in of my family. It was funny how they paid so much more attention to the pictures of my cat then anyone else. I guess they think she is adorable as I do. My Tae Kwon Do students gave me flowers at class because they know I am leaving for my site visit soon. It was such a sweet gesture. I got lots of warm fuzzies.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Sorry for the black out folks but I have been assigned to PST (pre-service Training) in a tiny town in Central Ukraine that has no internet so you will be getting the last three weeks of my blog in one glorious lump. I have had some emotional ups and downs and it is probably better that I have had time to reflect (and edit!) my blog material any way. This will probably be standard procedure for the next three months so don’t be alarmed it if appears that I have fallen off of the face of the earth. I’m still here they just don’t have internet accesses. I at least hope to have a cell phone by the 7th or so, so family and friends can reach me. I miss you guys, don’t think I don’t love you because I haven’t called!
March 27-28th - So I made it to Kyiv…Finally. It has taken us more the 5 extra hours to arrive at staging. Both of our flights were late and when we finally arrived at the airport in Kyiv over 30 of the volunteers, myself included, were missing one or more of our pieces of luggage. Apparently, our plane was too heavy and they left a large portion of our luggage in Frankfurt, those efficient Germans. We watched them load our plane with over 20 dogs but I guess all of our worldly belongings weren’t as important at Fido. I kind of agree but there were some volunteers who were a little alarmed. And the worst part was that once we made it to Kyiv the Lufthansa folks made us fill out a bunch of forms letting them know that they had lost our luggage BUT we had to wait in line for, not one, not two, but THREE hours before we could submit said forms. We all sat clustered in line leaning drunkenly against each other and finally gave up and we sat of the floor. Then we realized with revulsion that we were stuck to the floor and decided to stay there until the third world war because that the rate the line was moving we were going to be there until the U.S. Marine Corps came to get us out. Apparently everyone of us senseless Americans do not know how to properly fill out a customs form, because it is oh so self explanatory. As each person came up to them they would glance at our form and then, with a grand flourish, tear the labors of the last half hour, in half and make us fill it out again as they watched. Of course it would have been too easy for them to explain the form to all of us at once and we could make corrections but maybe the Germans aren’t that efficient after all. When I finally made it to staging, 5 hours late, having been up for 20 hours, and still missing a piece of luggage they let us know what language we would be learning. When I discovered I was learning Ukrainian I broke down and cried I was so disappointed (I was selfishly hoping for Russian). I am not normally a super emotional person but today has been pretty rough.
March 31st - I have made it through staging and am on my way to my host site. I will spend three months at this site living with a Ukrainian family and taking language and cultural classes. The town I am in is very small, with one school, a population of 2100 people and no internet ( I admit it, I am addicted to the internet, but the first step is admitting you have a problem. I had not expected to be so isolated from my family). My host family is very nice. There is a mother Nina(ніна), father Yura (юрій), and two sisters, Kristina (крістіиа) and Tamila (таміла). (you have no idea how long it just took me to write those in the Cyrillic alphabet, it’s gunna be a long two years!) Kristina speaks some French and Tamila knows some English so I am not totally lost but there is definitely a lot of charades going on. My host parents think I am far too skinny, they demonstrated this by pointing at me and pointing at a match and saying “Ni, Ni pohano” (ні ні погано) this means “no, no bad!” And at every point I am told to “Yeasty” (їсти) meaning eat! My new favorite and most necessary Ukrainian phrase is “Ni halodna” or Not hungry!
April 2nd – So the first day of classes is a little daunting. There was four hours of language class and one hour of technical training (meaning how to teach). We also walked around the town, it took an impressive 30 minutes, and made a map with the names of places on it. During hours 3-4 of the language lessons I just sat in the corner and drooled as my brain shut down to protect itself from the onslaught. I came home and took a nap, woke up, and realized that I had forgotten everything I had learned that day. I am foolishly hoping it will come back by tomorrow. We are expected to create a community development project in this town (something we can do to improve the town, so if you have any ideas, let me know) and I should be teaching classes in Ukrainian by week four. Am I a little doubtful that this will ever happen? Maybe, but I have two weeks left to find out and you never know, I certainly learned the Ukrainian word for bathroom real quick so maybe the pressure will be good for me.
I will be honest and admit that I am thinking about coming home. Ukraine is not what I expected. It is beautiful, and rough, and the people are wonderfully strange(in a good way). But it is very, very foreign. It is most certainly not home, and I really don’t know if I could live away from my family for 27 months. I am going to give it a few more weeks and we shall see.
April 6, 2007
I have had a very busy last few days. We are having language classes everyday for 4-5 hours. On top of that we have made a trip to the school in our town and the mayors office. We were able to have a meeting and visit with the school principal, vice principal and vice-vice principal and the mayor. That is one of the nice things about a community this small. Everyone knows everyone else and they are willing to bend over backwards for us. One of our little field trips today involved going into a store and asking how much milk, bread, butter, salt, and chocolate were. This may seem like a simple task to you but please remember that we had to ask this in Ukrainian and I have been studying the language for 5 whole days. The store keeper was super nice and patiently answered all of our questions, haltingly asked in broken Ukrainian. It still took us about 20 minutes and I think more this one Ukrainian got a laugh out of us trying to read the labels on products trying to figure out what was butter etc…Milk in Ukraine comes in a bag not a bottle so it is harder to locate things then you would think.
I did make my first language faux pas. We had a “parents night out” where all of the volunteers and their host families get together and have a little party. The bar provided the liquor and I learned several new things like
1. Men always pour the drinks. My host dad Yura came and since he was one of the few males he kept getting up to pour liquor for women at the other end of the table. He seemed to love the attention but it was hard having to ask the nearest male to pour me a soda.
2. If a bottle is empty it gets put on the floor. An empty bottle on a table is apparently bad luck.
3. My host Mom brought a whole bag of food. She produced the entire meal, except the salad, out of this little bag at her feet. It was like sitting next to Santa Claus. They even borrowed a cutting board and knife from the bar to cut sausage and cheese. Apparently this is often done to keep the costs of eating out down and isn’t that unusual.
4. When the music starts playing, everyone dances. Yes, EVERYONE. I was out there jamming with my and the other volunteers host parents. And some of the parents, especially the ones liberally doused in Vodka, really enjoyed the dancing. My host mom can really cut a rug. Sarah, one of my fellow volunteers said to me this was one of the weirdest parties she has ever been to but she was having a great time. I agreed in both cases.
Now here is where my little faux pas happened. In my defense, the Ukrainian word for hot is hotsuvate (Haatsyouvatte). I was hot from dancing and went to sit down, announcing proudly in what I thought was perfect Ukrainian, “Ya hotsuvate” or what I thought met “I’m hot”. Now, it does mean “I’m hot”, but in an entirely different way. As in,“ I’m a total hottie…” My host dad laughed so hard he had to sit down. Oops.
We have lost our first Cluster mate (cluster is the group of people you assigned to the same town with, there are/were five people in my cluster, Adam, Sarah, Jami, Jake and myself). Adam decided that the Peace Corps wasn’t working for him and he has decided to go home. He apparently has a lady friend he is missing quite a lot. I understand where he is coming from. I hope that his friends and family understand that it is harder to do this then most people realize and that there is no shame is deciding that it is not the right choice for you. I wish him the best of luck, I hope his is successful in whatever he decides to do. I imagine that it is almost harder to leave then it is to stay. The Peace Corps is quick and he was picked up this afternoon. The driver also told us that he is the third volunteer to leave from our original 73.
April 8, 2007 Eastern Orthodox Easter
I woke up at 2:30 am this morning to attend an Easter service with my host mom and sister. We bundled up in our warmest cloths and covered our heads with scarves. All done in silence so as to not wake my host father. My host mom brought out two baskets filled with dyed eggs, salt, and homemade bread. These are “real” Easter baskets. At 15 till 3 we headed to the church. As we got to the street I could see other women and men, bundled against the cold and carrying their baskets, trudging towards the tolling church bells. It was still dark and you could hear the mummer of voices as people greeted each other with “Cristos vos Creste” and replied “Voyesta nos vos creste”. There are not street lights in our town and people seemed to move like cats in the dark. We reached the church in our tiny little town, it is built to hold maybe 70 people if they all stand. There were at least three hundred people there. They had all formed a circle facing in, surrounding the little blue structure which was identifiable as a church only by the little white crosses painted by the door.. We placed out baskets in the circle and headed into the church. There was much crossing oneself in the orthodox fashion, meaning top, bottom, right, then left. The choir was singing something beautiful if a little out of key and the priest in his brilliant red and white would punctuate the singing with something chanted in Ukrainian to which all of the parishners would reply in unison or cross themselves. We only stayed in the church for a few minutes and then headed back outside so others could come in. As we took our place in the circle you could hear people greeting each other, checking the contents of each others baskets and in general waiting for something. Almost half of the population of the town was at the church in the middle of the night, waiting. A small boy darted out of the church and disappeared into the crowd and then the bells began to ring. They were so close you could feel them in your bones. The entire circle crossed themselves in unison and then lit candles to place into their Easter baskets. I couldn’t tell but I think they were symbolic offerings of some kind? For fifteen more minutes we waited in silence and then the bells rang again and the priest came out of the church. With a line of people following him with fresh loaves of bread and the little boy carrying a picture of Jesus the priest walked around the entire church blessing everyone with holy water. Little boys were recruited to run in and fill up the bucket because it kept getting empty. We weren’t sprinkled with holy water, we were doused. It was so cold that the water on my glasses began to frost up but people turned their faces to the priest to be blesses and then silently drifted off with their baskets to share their blessed food with their families. We returned home and went back to bed, just like the whole thing had been a dream.
April 13, 2007
Allow me to try and explain the Ukrainian bus system to you. In Ukraine there are busses that travel between towns. They are not very frequent because busses are in short supply and many are in various states of disrepair. All of them play loud music and are driven by people named Sergi. At least all of the ones I have been on. The busses are very popular because many people in Ukraine do not have a car and even if they did, gas is very expensive so it is cheaper to ride. To ride in a Ukrainian bus you need to have a linebackers training, a surfers balance, and no need for personal space. Picture this, you see the bus which is either 5 minutes early of half an hour late (I have never experienced a bus that has been on time but I have only been here for 3 weeks so it could happen). What was a crowd of 5 people has suddenly swelled to 30 people and all of them must get on that bus. The bus comes and it is full, but that does not matter, the driver stops anyway and the carnage commences. You use your linebacker training to dodge around every slower or less agile person to get a place near the front of the group, there are no lines in war! Next your elbows come in to play, and you push your way to the front of the group, trampling anyone foolish enough to get in your way and throwing elbows in all directions. You of course try and soften any blows you aim at the elderly or children because that would just be rude. You are finally stopped by a babuca (grandmother) who is clutching her purse like a weapon and has unconscious would be-riders scattered around her. She can go first of course because you respect your elders and you know she has a brick in her purse and she isn’t afraid to use it. Grandma totters on the bus and you scurry on behind her. You only make it to the stairs and your rear end is still sticking out of the bus door. That does not matter because someone you have never met before grabs your butt and pushes it in for you and an amazing 12 other people squish themselves on the bus. The bus door closes and pinches your tush, or maybe it was the person next to you. By next to you, I mean you are packed to tightly that you can tell who is Jewish and who is not. You yelp at the pinch and the bus driver, Sergi, winks at you and spits out of his window. The bus begins to move and you commence surfing. Surfing is necessary because the roads in Ukraine are not the best. If a vehicle is coming from the other direction they play chicken with the bus until one of them flinches. The loser must swerve off of the road because it is not wide enough for two vehicles. The result is some severe swerving and a little bus offroading. This can be fun if you close your eyes and imagine you are on a rollercoaster or Disney ride, anywhere but on a bus. At each stop the driver opens the door again in the vain hope that some one will get off, no one does(they couldn’t even if they wanted to) and miraculously, more people get on. At this point you are twisted into the less know yoga pose known as, iamtryingtobreathandgetawayfromthecreepyguy/girlnexttome.
The bus begins to reach destinations and people who have been trapped in the crowd on the bus since Stalin’s time try in vain to get of. A lucky few do. We reach the final stop and the bus driver gets out of the bus, opens the door, and begins to pry people out of the bus like sardines from a can. As the crowd thins you breath a sigh of relief, or gasp for air, depending on your position. You also get to realize whose hand that was…You get off of the bus and commence with your day. I rode the bus twice today and I fell like I should get a medal. Our ride home was so crowded that our teacher Natasha got up close and personal with a cute man she had never met before, Jami had to hug Jacob and accidentally groped him when she tried to catch her falling purse, Sara had to stand on one foot like a flamingo for a good portion of the 40 min. trip because there were so many other feet there was not place to put hers down and I got to get so close to a support pole I could imagine what some strippers felt like. We had a pretty good laugh about it.
April 19, 2007
Since my town is so small there is no barber or salon to speak of. Because of this, many of the town members come to my host dad to get their hair cut. Yesterday, this happened for the first time since I have been here. My host dad did two, very military like, haircuts for my host moms cousin and nephew. He then gave my host mom a trim. Then he comes up to me and say (I don’t really know what he said but I think it was something like this), “do you want me to take a little off the top, the military look is really in this year?” I politely declined and began to back slowly towards my room. Holding his WWII era hair clippers he followed me and must have said something like this, “it won’t hurt, you will look just like Demi Moore in GI Jane!”. At this I squealed like a little girl and began running around the apartment hiding behind various members of my host family. I was finally able to hold him off by threatening to paint him with my host sisters’ hot pink nail polish. It was a pretty funny evening.
Top 5 things I have learned so far about Ukraine.
In Ukraine it is considered bad luck to cross a persons path with an empty bucket. I have no idea why
In Ukraine it is unlucky to whistle indoors or outdoors, it invites bad luck. However, your host family really doesn’t mind it you sing “Rogers and Hammerstein” at the top of your lungs. You are American, they expect you to be a little weird.
When hand washing clothes it is vital to make sure you rinse out the soap thoroughly even though the water is ice cold. Clothes that are hung out to dry with detergent in them turn funny colors and take on new and interesting shapes more resembling modern art then your favorite sweater.
If you go jogging in Ukraine people will look to see what you are running from, not seeing anything they will check to see if you are on fire. Dogs in Ukraine do not understand joggers, what they do understand it that anything that is running should be chased. There are a lot of dogs in Ukraine.
There is more then one way to cook a potato, in fact there are hundreds of way to cook them and I am about halfway through trying all of them.
Nothing tops off a meal of Borsht like a good old American Snickers Bar.
If you thought a Latin Catholic mass was hard to follow, try a Latin Mass where the translations are in Ukrainian.
Ukrainian women do things in high heels that make tight rope artists look like total wusses.
Ukranian mothers will feed you, it doesn’t have to be your mother. If you are skinny and American they think you are starving and will feed you whether you want to eat or not.
The cats in Ukraine are super cute and fuzzy but they are not really domesticated. They will chase you just like the dogs do. But, unlike the dogs, they know what to do with you if they catch you so you should run really really fast or prepare to be shredded.
April 21, 2007
I taught my first class in Ukrainian yesterday. To say that it was not stellar is probably an understatement. I got to the front of the class and all of the words that I had painstakingly looked up and practiced flew out of my head. I was teaching healthy Lifestyles and I forgot the word for lifestyles. Not my most shining moment. Then I attempted to write it on the board and the chalkboards on Ukraine are ridiculous! I would have needed a jackhammer to leave a mark on this thing, chalk just wasn’t cutting it. I am trying to dwell on the fact that I have only been in Ukraine for 4 weeks and have only been learning Ukrainian for 3 so hopefully the teachers and students will give me some leeway. The Ukrainian students were very nice and actually seemed to enjoy correcting our pronunciation so it wasn’t all bad. I just have no idea how I am supposed to teach dental hygiene next week with my limited language skills. There are going to be some interesting charades going on. How does one act out “gingivitis”?
On a side note. I was “talking” with my host dad yesterday and, in order to ask a question involving what kind of animal I was currently eating, I ended up running around the kitchen with my index fingers pointing up from my ears like horns and saying moo. This lead to my host dad and I swapping the Ukrainian/English work for all of the common barnyard animals. We commenced with lots of barnyard noises and animal impressions. Apparently, I do a great chicken impression and my host dad does a killer duck quack. We both ended up in giggles at the kitchen table. While I don’t really remember any of the names I learned it was quite a fun time.
March 27-28th - So I made it to Kyiv…Finally. It has taken us more the 5 extra hours to arrive at staging. Both of our flights were late and when we finally arrived at the airport in Kyiv over 30 of the volunteers, myself included, were missing one or more of our pieces of luggage. Apparently, our plane was too heavy and they left a large portion of our luggage in Frankfurt, those efficient Germans. We watched them load our plane with over 20 dogs but I guess all of our worldly belongings weren’t as important at Fido. I kind of agree but there were some volunteers who were a little alarmed. And the worst part was that once we made it to Kyiv the Lufthansa folks made us fill out a bunch of forms letting them know that they had lost our luggage BUT we had to wait in line for, not one, not two, but THREE hours before we could submit said forms. We all sat clustered in line leaning drunkenly against each other and finally gave up and we sat of the floor. Then we realized with revulsion that we were stuck to the floor and decided to stay there until the third world war because that the rate the line was moving we were going to be there until the U.S. Marine Corps came to get us out. Apparently everyone of us senseless Americans do not know how to properly fill out a customs form, because it is oh so self explanatory. As each person came up to them they would glance at our form and then, with a grand flourish, tear the labors of the last half hour, in half and make us fill it out again as they watched. Of course it would have been too easy for them to explain the form to all of us at once and we could make corrections but maybe the Germans aren’t that efficient after all. When I finally made it to staging, 5 hours late, having been up for 20 hours, and still missing a piece of luggage they let us know what language we would be learning. When I discovered I was learning Ukrainian I broke down and cried I was so disappointed (I was selfishly hoping for Russian). I am not normally a super emotional person but today has been pretty rough.
March 31st - I have made it through staging and am on my way to my host site. I will spend three months at this site living with a Ukrainian family and taking language and cultural classes. The town I am in is very small, with one school, a population of 2100 people and no internet ( I admit it, I am addicted to the internet, but the first step is admitting you have a problem. I had not expected to be so isolated from my family). My host family is very nice. There is a mother Nina(ніна), father Yura (юрій), and two sisters, Kristina (крістіиа) and Tamila (таміла). (you have no idea how long it just took me to write those in the Cyrillic alphabet, it’s gunna be a long two years!) Kristina speaks some French and Tamila knows some English so I am not totally lost but there is definitely a lot of charades going on. My host parents think I am far too skinny, they demonstrated this by pointing at me and pointing at a match and saying “Ni, Ni pohano” (ні ні погано) this means “no, no bad!” And at every point I am told to “Yeasty” (їсти) meaning eat! My new favorite and most necessary Ukrainian phrase is “Ni halodna” or Not hungry!
April 2nd – So the first day of classes is a little daunting. There was four hours of language class and one hour of technical training (meaning how to teach). We also walked around the town, it took an impressive 30 minutes, and made a map with the names of places on it. During hours 3-4 of the language lessons I just sat in the corner and drooled as my brain shut down to protect itself from the onslaught. I came home and took a nap, woke up, and realized that I had forgotten everything I had learned that day. I am foolishly hoping it will come back by tomorrow. We are expected to create a community development project in this town (something we can do to improve the town, so if you have any ideas, let me know) and I should be teaching classes in Ukrainian by week four. Am I a little doubtful that this will ever happen? Maybe, but I have two weeks left to find out and you never know, I certainly learned the Ukrainian word for bathroom real quick so maybe the pressure will be good for me.
I will be honest and admit that I am thinking about coming home. Ukraine is not what I expected. It is beautiful, and rough, and the people are wonderfully strange(in a good way). But it is very, very foreign. It is most certainly not home, and I really don’t know if I could live away from my family for 27 months. I am going to give it a few more weeks and we shall see.
April 6, 2007
I have had a very busy last few days. We are having language classes everyday for 4-5 hours. On top of that we have made a trip to the school in our town and the mayors office. We were able to have a meeting and visit with the school principal, vice principal and vice-vice principal and the mayor. That is one of the nice things about a community this small. Everyone knows everyone else and they are willing to bend over backwards for us. One of our little field trips today involved going into a store and asking how much milk, bread, butter, salt, and chocolate were. This may seem like a simple task to you but please remember that we had to ask this in Ukrainian and I have been studying the language for 5 whole days. The store keeper was super nice and patiently answered all of our questions, haltingly asked in broken Ukrainian. It still took us about 20 minutes and I think more this one Ukrainian got a laugh out of us trying to read the labels on products trying to figure out what was butter etc…Milk in Ukraine comes in a bag not a bottle so it is harder to locate things then you would think.
I did make my first language faux pas. We had a “parents night out” where all of the volunteers and their host families get together and have a little party. The bar provided the liquor and I learned several new things like
1. Men always pour the drinks. My host dad Yura came and since he was one of the few males he kept getting up to pour liquor for women at the other end of the table. He seemed to love the attention but it was hard having to ask the nearest male to pour me a soda.
2. If a bottle is empty it gets put on the floor. An empty bottle on a table is apparently bad luck.
3. My host Mom brought a whole bag of food. She produced the entire meal, except the salad, out of this little bag at her feet. It was like sitting next to Santa Claus. They even borrowed a cutting board and knife from the bar to cut sausage and cheese. Apparently this is often done to keep the costs of eating out down and isn’t that unusual.
4. When the music starts playing, everyone dances. Yes, EVERYONE. I was out there jamming with my and the other volunteers host parents. And some of the parents, especially the ones liberally doused in Vodka, really enjoyed the dancing. My host mom can really cut a rug. Sarah, one of my fellow volunteers said to me this was one of the weirdest parties she has ever been to but she was having a great time. I agreed in both cases.
Now here is where my little faux pas happened. In my defense, the Ukrainian word for hot is hotsuvate (Haatsyouvatte). I was hot from dancing and went to sit down, announcing proudly in what I thought was perfect Ukrainian, “Ya hotsuvate” or what I thought met “I’m hot”. Now, it does mean “I’m hot”, but in an entirely different way. As in,“ I’m a total hottie…” My host dad laughed so hard he had to sit down. Oops.
We have lost our first Cluster mate (cluster is the group of people you assigned to the same town with, there are/were five people in my cluster, Adam, Sarah, Jami, Jake and myself). Adam decided that the Peace Corps wasn’t working for him and he has decided to go home. He apparently has a lady friend he is missing quite a lot. I understand where he is coming from. I hope that his friends and family understand that it is harder to do this then most people realize and that there is no shame is deciding that it is not the right choice for you. I wish him the best of luck, I hope his is successful in whatever he decides to do. I imagine that it is almost harder to leave then it is to stay. The Peace Corps is quick and he was picked up this afternoon. The driver also told us that he is the third volunteer to leave from our original 73.
April 8, 2007 Eastern Orthodox Easter
I woke up at 2:30 am this morning to attend an Easter service with my host mom and sister. We bundled up in our warmest cloths and covered our heads with scarves. All done in silence so as to not wake my host father. My host mom brought out two baskets filled with dyed eggs, salt, and homemade bread. These are “real” Easter baskets. At 15 till 3 we headed to the church. As we got to the street I could see other women and men, bundled against the cold and carrying their baskets, trudging towards the tolling church bells. It was still dark and you could hear the mummer of voices as people greeted each other with “Cristos vos Creste” and replied “Voyesta nos vos creste”. There are not street lights in our town and people seemed to move like cats in the dark. We reached the church in our tiny little town, it is built to hold maybe 70 people if they all stand. There were at least three hundred people there. They had all formed a circle facing in, surrounding the little blue structure which was identifiable as a church only by the little white crosses painted by the door.. We placed out baskets in the circle and headed into the church. There was much crossing oneself in the orthodox fashion, meaning top, bottom, right, then left. The choir was singing something beautiful if a little out of key and the priest in his brilliant red and white would punctuate the singing with something chanted in Ukrainian to which all of the parishners would reply in unison or cross themselves. We only stayed in the church for a few minutes and then headed back outside so others could come in. As we took our place in the circle you could hear people greeting each other, checking the contents of each others baskets and in general waiting for something. Almost half of the population of the town was at the church in the middle of the night, waiting. A small boy darted out of the church and disappeared into the crowd and then the bells began to ring. They were so close you could feel them in your bones. The entire circle crossed themselves in unison and then lit candles to place into their Easter baskets. I couldn’t tell but I think they were symbolic offerings of some kind? For fifteen more minutes we waited in silence and then the bells rang again and the priest came out of the church. With a line of people following him with fresh loaves of bread and the little boy carrying a picture of Jesus the priest walked around the entire church blessing everyone with holy water. Little boys were recruited to run in and fill up the bucket because it kept getting empty. We weren’t sprinkled with holy water, we were doused. It was so cold that the water on my glasses began to frost up but people turned their faces to the priest to be blesses and then silently drifted off with their baskets to share their blessed food with their families. We returned home and went back to bed, just like the whole thing had been a dream.
April 13, 2007
Allow me to try and explain the Ukrainian bus system to you. In Ukraine there are busses that travel between towns. They are not very frequent because busses are in short supply and many are in various states of disrepair. All of them play loud music and are driven by people named Sergi. At least all of the ones I have been on. The busses are very popular because many people in Ukraine do not have a car and even if they did, gas is very expensive so it is cheaper to ride. To ride in a Ukrainian bus you need to have a linebackers training, a surfers balance, and no need for personal space. Picture this, you see the bus which is either 5 minutes early of half an hour late (I have never experienced a bus that has been on time but I have only been here for 3 weeks so it could happen). What was a crowd of 5 people has suddenly swelled to 30 people and all of them must get on that bus. The bus comes and it is full, but that does not matter, the driver stops anyway and the carnage commences. You use your linebacker training to dodge around every slower or less agile person to get a place near the front of the group, there are no lines in war! Next your elbows come in to play, and you push your way to the front of the group, trampling anyone foolish enough to get in your way and throwing elbows in all directions. You of course try and soften any blows you aim at the elderly or children because that would just be rude. You are finally stopped by a babuca (grandmother) who is clutching her purse like a weapon and has unconscious would be-riders scattered around her. She can go first of course because you respect your elders and you know she has a brick in her purse and she isn’t afraid to use it. Grandma totters on the bus and you scurry on behind her. You only make it to the stairs and your rear end is still sticking out of the bus door. That does not matter because someone you have never met before grabs your butt and pushes it in for you and an amazing 12 other people squish themselves on the bus. The bus door closes and pinches your tush, or maybe it was the person next to you. By next to you, I mean you are packed to tightly that you can tell who is Jewish and who is not. You yelp at the pinch and the bus driver, Sergi, winks at you and spits out of his window. The bus begins to move and you commence surfing. Surfing is necessary because the roads in Ukraine are not the best. If a vehicle is coming from the other direction they play chicken with the bus until one of them flinches. The loser must swerve off of the road because it is not wide enough for two vehicles. The result is some severe swerving and a little bus offroading. This can be fun if you close your eyes and imagine you are on a rollercoaster or Disney ride, anywhere but on a bus. At each stop the driver opens the door again in the vain hope that some one will get off, no one does(they couldn’t even if they wanted to) and miraculously, more people get on. At this point you are twisted into the less know yoga pose known as, iamtryingtobreathandgetawayfromthecreepyguy/girlnexttome.
The bus begins to reach destinations and people who have been trapped in the crowd on the bus since Stalin’s time try in vain to get of. A lucky few do. We reach the final stop and the bus driver gets out of the bus, opens the door, and begins to pry people out of the bus like sardines from a can. As the crowd thins you breath a sigh of relief, or gasp for air, depending on your position. You also get to realize whose hand that was…You get off of the bus and commence with your day. I rode the bus twice today and I fell like I should get a medal. Our ride home was so crowded that our teacher Natasha got up close and personal with a cute man she had never met before, Jami had to hug Jacob and accidentally groped him when she tried to catch her falling purse, Sara had to stand on one foot like a flamingo for a good portion of the 40 min. trip because there were so many other feet there was not place to put hers down and I got to get so close to a support pole I could imagine what some strippers felt like. We had a pretty good laugh about it.
April 19, 2007
Since my town is so small there is no barber or salon to speak of. Because of this, many of the town members come to my host dad to get their hair cut. Yesterday, this happened for the first time since I have been here. My host dad did two, very military like, haircuts for my host moms cousin and nephew. He then gave my host mom a trim. Then he comes up to me and say (I don’t really know what he said but I think it was something like this), “do you want me to take a little off the top, the military look is really in this year?” I politely declined and began to back slowly towards my room. Holding his WWII era hair clippers he followed me and must have said something like this, “it won’t hurt, you will look just like Demi Moore in GI Jane!”. At this I squealed like a little girl and began running around the apartment hiding behind various members of my host family. I was finally able to hold him off by threatening to paint him with my host sisters’ hot pink nail polish. It was a pretty funny evening.
Top 5 things I have learned so far about Ukraine.
In Ukraine it is considered bad luck to cross a persons path with an empty bucket. I have no idea why
In Ukraine it is unlucky to whistle indoors or outdoors, it invites bad luck. However, your host family really doesn’t mind it you sing “Rogers and Hammerstein” at the top of your lungs. You are American, they expect you to be a little weird.
When hand washing clothes it is vital to make sure you rinse out the soap thoroughly even though the water is ice cold. Clothes that are hung out to dry with detergent in them turn funny colors and take on new and interesting shapes more resembling modern art then your favorite sweater.
If you go jogging in Ukraine people will look to see what you are running from, not seeing anything they will check to see if you are on fire. Dogs in Ukraine do not understand joggers, what they do understand it that anything that is running should be chased. There are a lot of dogs in Ukraine.
There is more then one way to cook a potato, in fact there are hundreds of way to cook them and I am about halfway through trying all of them.
Nothing tops off a meal of Borsht like a good old American Snickers Bar.
If you thought a Latin Catholic mass was hard to follow, try a Latin Mass where the translations are in Ukrainian.
Ukrainian women do things in high heels that make tight rope artists look like total wusses.
Ukranian mothers will feed you, it doesn’t have to be your mother. If you are skinny and American they think you are starving and will feed you whether you want to eat or not.
The cats in Ukraine are super cute and fuzzy but they are not really domesticated. They will chase you just like the dogs do. But, unlike the dogs, they know what to do with you if they catch you so you should run really really fast or prepare to be shredded.
April 21, 2007
I taught my first class in Ukrainian yesterday. To say that it was not stellar is probably an understatement. I got to the front of the class and all of the words that I had painstakingly looked up and practiced flew out of my head. I was teaching healthy Lifestyles and I forgot the word for lifestyles. Not my most shining moment. Then I attempted to write it on the board and the chalkboards on Ukraine are ridiculous! I would have needed a jackhammer to leave a mark on this thing, chalk just wasn’t cutting it. I am trying to dwell on the fact that I have only been in Ukraine for 4 weeks and have only been learning Ukrainian for 3 so hopefully the teachers and students will give me some leeway. The Ukrainian students were very nice and actually seemed to enjoy correcting our pronunciation so it wasn’t all bad. I just have no idea how I am supposed to teach dental hygiene next week with my limited language skills. There are going to be some interesting charades going on. How does one act out “gingivitis”?
On a side note. I was “talking” with my host dad yesterday and, in order to ask a question involving what kind of animal I was currently eating, I ended up running around the kitchen with my index fingers pointing up from my ears like horns and saying moo. This lead to my host dad and I swapping the Ukrainian/English work for all of the common barnyard animals. We commenced with lots of barnyard noises and animal impressions. Apparently, I do a great chicken impression and my host dad does a killer duck quack. We both ended up in giggles at the kitchen table. While I don’t really remember any of the names I learned it was quite a fun time.
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