When I returned from Peace Corps I started playing the “One week ago today game.” This game would consist of me marveling over how different my life was from the week prior. The first time I played it was the Friday after Thanksgiving 2007 three days after I arrived back in the states. On that day I went shopping with my friend Marie in San Francisco, changed in the store into a new pair of jeans, a stylish pink top and black trench coat and went with some funny, witty, urbane new friends out to Vietnamese food and a martini bar afterwards. The week prior to that I had been saying my good-byes to my students in a school with no running water and intermittent electricity and burning garbage in the back yard of my soviet block apartment next to a dead goat hanging from a laundry line.

After that I briefly played the “One month ago today game” but settled on the “One year ago today game.” It was a pretty fun game for a while. The stark contrasts just kept on coming. One night last October, I was wearing a formal gown driving in a taxi passed the White House leaving a statistics review session and on my way to a black tie energy awards dinner. I tried to remember what I had been doing one-year prior, probably sitting by the pond in my village watching the geese fly or cutting up Peace Corps manuals to make flash cards for my students. I played this game countless times, often with Peace Corps friends who also had the Grand Canyon between their life then and their life now.

A few weeks ago I went back and read every post I have ever made on this blog. I began posting in July of 2005, just before I left for the Peace Corps. So many things have changed in my life. But today I am reflecting on the things that have not changed, or sometimes the stories that bend back over on themselves with out the players even realizing. Today I relived a very familiar scene on the front step of my apartment building, something which happened with a very different person almost exactly one year ago today. As we swim through the Christmas season and on toward the New Year I would like to think that the circumstances of my life have changed. But I understand that I am looking at the wrong thing, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about the actions of others, about the way they choose to regard me in their lives. And I understand that this description is fairly oblique and lacking in all of the colorful detail I so like to provide my readers, but it hasn’t exactly formed a shape in my mind either. Maybe my lesson for the day is that not every single thing can be described and nailed down for all eternity on a previously blank page.

I suppose it isn’t reasonable to win the World Series of Change every year. I think, and I have observed this phenomenon in others, that I am in some ways addicted to change, to contrast, to challenge and conflict. This habit is hard to kick, contentment is some how uneasy for me because I have lived my life seeking and striving for an unnamed finish line because the thrill of the new and the hard won victory are my drug of choice. But when I observe what has happened over the last several years I see that a lot has truly changed. When I play even the “One month ago today game” I see that things are different, that I know more about the world and about myself then I did just thirty days ago but the tempered Obama incrementalism of my daily life just doesn’t feel like enough against the emotional craving the electorate has for change, for the swift delivery of the hope promised. But intellectually I know that it isn’t reasonable to feel the earth move under my flip-flops on a daily basis, the tectonic plates creep ever so slowly toward a future configuration. Some days we can feel them, some days it’s a problem, some days a disaster, scientists can even measure these things, but they can only guess when “The Big One” will hit.

Never fall in love with someone because of the way they write. People are more honest when they write, even if they are not telling the truth their words are manifestations of something veracious with in them. That much authenticity is intoxicating, enrapturing, electrifying, misleading. People do show themselves with their word choice and their characters but the private self that writes, even when you choose to send those words out into the world, is not who appears when the computer shuts off, the pen rests, the typewriter’s keys stop singing. A person will reveal a lot about themselves by the way that they write, their intelligence and humor, their patience and their love. You can’t help but know someone better through their words.

I’ve been thinking about writing and writers this week and even though I know enough not to date them I still want to be surrounded by them. I’ve been thinking about dedication to craft mostly because I joined a new writers group. I looked around DC at a couple of different groups and found one in which I was significantly dragging up the average age and one in which I was dragging it down. In both of these I was not impressed with either the talent of the writers nor the quality of the feedback they gave. My writing group back in the Bay Area set a very high bar for quality of both writing, critique and, most importantly, a sense of community.

One of the things I like most about writing groups is that it satisfies my shameless love of compliments. There is nothing better than having someone tell you are brilliant on an otherwise average Wednesday evening or that your characters really touched their heart, crystallized an allusive thought or made them laugh. I like that the time I spend alone writing can have a positive impact on someone. But what really makes these compliments carry weight (besides the fact that I wish them to be true) is the people who give them. The members of my group back in the Bay and my new group (neither young nor old, but just right) are by and large brilliant but quiet artists who take the ordinary building blocks of our world, language, faces, feelings and landscapes, available to all of us, and construct works of great beauty.

I crave this type of group because they never fail to surprise or inspire me. Some of these writers have been published and some of them will be and should be published in the future. But there are no guarantees that any of what we write will see the light of day or even the dusty back shelf of a book store. The reason that we write is that we love it. That there are certain things that are worth saying and worth exploring even if no one ever knows that this mountain has already been climbed, this terrain has been tread upon before. I think I can safely say that I am in love with the process, the rocks that get in between my toes, the mud that gets all over my clothes, the sweat rolling down the back of my neck from the exertion of it all.

 “The Russian Greatcoat” by Theodore Deppe While my children swim off the breakwater, while my wife sleeps beside me in the sun, I recall how you once said you knew a sure way to paradise or hell. Years ago, you stood on the Covington bridge, demanded I throw my coat into the Ohio- my five dollar “Russian greatcoat,” my “Dostoevsky coat,” with no explanations, simply because you asked.   From the height, the man-sized coat fell in slow motion, floated briefly, one sinking arm bent at the elbow. At first I evade the question when my wife asks, as if just thinking of you were a act of betrayal. The cigarette I shared with you above the river, our entrance into the city, your thin black coat around both our shoulders.  Sometimes I can go weeks without remembering.  

DC and I have been together for one year now and while he certainly isn't perfect, he is worth keeping around.  He can be selfish and self-absorbed sometimes and he sometimes he forgets that the rest of the world exists.  But he does care and everything he does, misguided as it can be, is for the common good.  He is a little older than I am, but it gives him character and a stately presence.  Oh DC, it so difficult to say how long a relationship will ever last, but for as long as we are together I promise to love you (though I may flirt with others)!

When I was a senior in college I broke my ankle, while walking home, stone-cold sober, from a science fair where my roommate won $500, so engrossed were we in tales of her nerdy brilliance and shrieks of joy that I did not pay any attention to the pile of tiny, trecherous rocks in my path.  The street where I broke my leg is just below greek row in the sleepy college town of Pullman, WA and everyone assumed that I had been having a grand old time, drunk and silly and clumsy when I had my little accident.  I did not often seek to correct this assumption because that year I got to thinking I was pretty hot stuff.  I looked good, I felt good,  I was studying something I loved, had many wonderful close friends and these friends and I were practically fighting off interested men (it is a fairly liberal use of the word man apply it to college seniors, but I am going to do it anyway) with sticks.  I think that it is this feeling of power, of control, of beauty and of confidence, a growing supercilious and arrogant nature that caused me to break my leg.  Something inside me knew that I needed to be humbled.  And like Achilles and Caesar, there was pride and then there was a fall.   It seems I have not learned my lesson.  But where is the rule written that you must apply a lesson once you have learned it.  I have found in life that people are excellent at forgetting, especially the unpleasant things.  And again I fell prey to my own hubris earlier this year.  As anyone who has read my blog knows, I have lived overseas and travelled more than most.  And in this time abroad, I have never had anything stolen except for two bars of Ghiradelli chocolate (a loss to be sure, but not a fatal one) and I have never lost anything of major value ( a sweat shirt, a knife, a hat).  And in a long, rambling conversation about travel and life on the other continents with my friend Ruth, I went on an on about how it was important to be smart when you are a woman traveling abroad alone.  I admitted that there was of course an element of being lucky to staying safe and keeping all of my possessions while on the road, but mostly it was my finely honed senses and strategies which clearly so many have not mastered.  In the next week after this conversation I lost a beautiful and expensive shall from my mother, locked myself out of my apartment twice, lost my access card at my office and had my ipod pick pocketed in the metro.  Though there was no physical fall this time around, I felt truly defeated and all the bravado I had felt, the audaciousness, the self-posession and poise were gone.   I had not, as I had thought, conquered the world.  I couldn't even conquer America and I hadn't figured out things that others could not master, I had been lucky.  

The opposite of hubirs is most certainly humility.  I have gotten a healthy does of that this week as well.  I bought a new dress this week, a black, v-neck, spaghetti strap dress, that fits perfectly and hits just below the knee, the perfect, dress up, dress down, a perfectly timed one-two punch of class and sex appeal.  I look good in this dress.  I have also had a very successful work week and had lots of fun with my friends and been loving the city.  I was almost beginning to feel like the city itself loved me back.  This time again the fall is not literal, but dating (one of the ultimate exercises in optimism) has provided many tiny checks on my ego.  I hope that I am beyond the physical falling onto, into or over things, though I doubt it.  The constant rising and falling of hopes in one thing, but when you add the dress, and the ferocious feeling of fabulousness that accompanies it, it is far to fall when someone is not interested.  But I will do what I have always done, hobble back up to the top of the hill, where I can see everything and hope that maybe I have gotten one or two things right, that maybe I am brazen and maybe someone will like that about me.  

This clip is from the Chris Matthew's show Hardball.  Chris was a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland in the 70s.  What I love about this clip, besides the interesting facts and beautiful shots of regions in southern Africa, is the warmth and care you can hear in Matthew's voice as he speaks about the country that he served.  Logically it would follow, or one would hope, that the people that he served would speak this way of him this way.  But what I hear from him, between the lines is all the things his country of service did for him, things that have stuck with him decades later as he continues to visit, educate people in the US and teach his family about his experiences.  It is difficult to describe this feeling without being overly sentimental but there is a deep and abiding fondness for a place that gives you so much knowledge and perspective.  

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"We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended and there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight..."

I would like to state for the record, as these posts have times and dates, that I am between my evening activities right now.  I just had a wonderful dinner at Poste and am waiting for a good friend to arrive and stay the weekend.  The weather is perfect, which always makes me want to read the deep thoughts of other.  Thank you Emmerson.  

This quote strikes me today, as I reread for the millionth time one of my favorite poems.  There is such a sense of adventure and weight and import and ceremony and knowing in the lines of this poem.  And this poem, this line about the hungry heart seeing and knowing rings true for me this week because I have spent so much time with my friends from Peace Corps.  It is truly a privilege to know them all, to watch how they slowly and quietly conquer the world with intelligence, humor, grace, wit and understanding or the desire to understand which is even more important.  It is that desire to understand, to meet others on their terms, if only for the curiosity of knowing what they might be that I think makes a good volunteer and creates compassion.  I am not really going anywhere with this except to say how lovely and interesting they all are because of how interested they are in life.  

I know from my conversations with them and the way I feel myself that we struggle with life here and I think it is because everyday our experience is contrasted against something else which we have seen and known and must think about.  But the reward for this is all the things we get to know about because we seek.  

"And sometimes, between the thick brushstrokes of what we plan to see, we glimpse the thing itself: the water sliding under its description."  -Tony Hoagland, Ingratitude for Talk 

I like to be spun around in circles.  As incredibly, phenomenally simplistic as that may sound it is very true.  Of course I prefer that the spinning be done by a tall and very handsome man who thinks the sun rises out of my golden, flowing locks, but in general anyone will do.  I realized my love for spinning and being spun while serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine.  Before I digress into tales of lands far away and things done long ago, I will state that it is a crying, screaming, sobbing shame that American men of my generation do not dance.  Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, but besides the uncomfortable, cheesy, parent forced, florescent lit cotillion I attended for a few evenings in the 7th grade or the drunken spasms of rhythm that passed for dancing in high school and college, I have never seen much dancing from people my own age in this country. It is so unfortunate that we do not dance in this country, or should I clarify that we do not dance as partners reacting to the music, because we are missing out on a great social opportunity.  We are missing a fun reason to go out on a Saturday night; we are missing a cultural dating ritual; (and, I think the argument that may be most compelling) we are missing a chance to be close to a person that we desire to be close to.  While many of my dance partners over the years have not been people that I desired, moving to the music in time with someone else, feeling the rhythm in your own body and forgetting about everything else in the room around you are truly joyous and freeing feelings.  In Ukraine, dancing is still part of the dating ritual.  Young people go to discos (yes I said “disco,” Eastern Europe is still very far behind in many respects).  The men ask the women to dance, lead them out on to the floor for everyone in town to see and do a variation on the waltz to saccharine Russian pop songs.  This waltz is not much more than a simple box step with a few turns, spins and the occasional dip.  One of the things that made my time in Ukraine so formative was the fact that, between the language and culture barrier, I never knew what was coming next.  Dancing the waltz with a tall and very handsome man with blonde hair of his own and captivating ice blue eyes is the easiest and most glorious metaphor for my experience that I could ever write.  I may have stepped on his white, woven shoes many times and taken many steps out of rhythm with both he and the music but when he spun me around again and again and again and again and again and again and again, as long as I pulled my in my core, shored it up against the structure of myself, he could never knock me over.  The ability to spin, be spun, and never fall, along with the skill to follow the music and the person leading me is a lesson I love to repeat and take with me wherever I go.  It is not that I have become a particularly good dancer but that I can follow a lead.  I could say I am a good follower, but that statement doesn’t please me.  What I have become is responsive, a good reactor to the actions of others and the conditions around me.  While I don’t waltz much anymore, one place where I can spin and be free is salsa dancing.  I think perhaps we, in certain parts of America, are saved from a life with no dancing, rhythm or closeness by Salsa which has dug its spiked heel deep into many parts of the United States.  I have come to really like salsa dancing because of the significant amount of spinning that occurs during this activity and the wonderful friend who introduced me to it.  I may save my adventures in salsa for another time.  I assure you there will be more dancing and more spinning as several of my friends have recently taken an interest in dancing and we have discovered the free Salsa lessons at Lima here in DC.  And the thing is that I know I will continue to come back for more.  The movement of salsa seems to have wormed its way into me and after I leave a salsa club my legs still move back and forth and turn, my hips still swivel, like a sailor who can still feel the movement of the sea when he steps on land.  And as for the spinning, well I don’t think I will ever want to stop testing and thrilling myself, moving and being moved in that way.  

I am not a person who has generally been a huge fan of symbols, ceremony or anything that is done for show.  And I do not tend to make a big fuss about anything.  I feel that things that have value and meaning hold those qualities intrinsically, and no amount of pomp and circumstance can make them worth any more than they are.                While I often still feel this way about my own life and American traditions, on my travels through out the world I have become fascinated with ceremony and religion and the physical things that hold value for people because I try to think about why a person or group of people do what they do and why we love old things and continue to carry on traditions.  One of my most favorite examples of cultural tradition (probably because I learned to make them) is the Ukrainian “rushnik,”  which a white cloth embroidered with usually black and red designs and words like “love” or “fate” or “freedom.”  “rushnik” means simply towel, but these towels have, even in modern times, heavy symbolism for the people of Ukraine.  The white of the towel represents life, the red represents love and the black represents death.  The “rushnik” holds value as a cultural symbol which helps define what is Ukrainian and it also holds personal meaning for people over time based on who in the family made if for then and what holidays it was used for and for how many years.  That meaning of the “rushnik” deepens over time the way that the properties in the soil where grapes grow affect the way that wine tastes and the way the flavor becomes richer and more complex.    I often wonder and worry about this type of tradition in the United States.  Diversity is one of our country’s greatest assets, but it also means that those bonding experiences and symbols can be lacking, and consequently we are not tied strongly to our neighbors and our communities.  I think this is especially true because we all ride around in cars by ourselves, listening only to music we like and news stations that we know will confirm the opinions we already hold.  I was especially thinking about symbols, togetherness and community yesterday on the Fourth of July.  My cynical side will tell me that this holiday, like so many others is just an excuse to have a party.  And not putting a whole lot of stock in symbols and things done for show, I thought I didn’t want to go see or didn’t care to see the fireworks being shot out over the National Mall here in DC last night.  Were it not for a friend dragging off the comfortable porch I was sitting on, beer in hand, surrounded by people I like very much, I would not have gone to see the fireworks and that would have been a mistake.  We didn’t make it all the way to the Mall, but to a near by grassy spot with lots of families and groups blasting music, grilling and having a grand old time.  But as it got dark and the fire works began, some small, possibly illegal displays and of course the big show over the Mall, the music was turned off and people quieted down to watch the sky explode with red, white and blue.  What is important and special about fireworks, I have decided, is that is something that well all experience together.  Whether we actually shoot these fireworks to honor our history and independence, our brave citizens in uniform, our place in the world now or just to watch pretty lights explode in the air, here in DC and across the country every person tilted their head back in awe.   And for this moment I am willing to give more credit to symbols and big displays of patriotic affection, because of their, if temporary, ability to bring people in this large, loud, gorgeous, complicated, sometimes fractured country together. 

This is what one of my students wrote on a goodbye letter to me. But then he asked me how to spell the word best. And there is a huge white-out mark through the middle of the word which is written on yellow paper. It is wonderfully ironic when a student says :" Miss Kate you is goot teacher (not a typo)."

That is right folks it is time for good bye projects in school. And I am having each student age 10-18 write me a letter on colored paper with a box marked off for where their picture will go when I develop it. The lettes are all finished and in a binder, they are soooooooooo cute and I had to pat myself on the back for thinking of this. I pained me to get rid of the work they had done. This is the perfect way to keep something from each of them.

The way in which I am getting rid of most of my stuff or my "volume" as I have come to call it, is burning. I had amassed a lot of envelopes and parcels and boxes (thanks everyone) and magazines and random paper what have you, Peace Corps manuals, old clothes etc. And it all went up in flames this past weekend. It is a very easy metaphor so I am not even going to go there. But it was a beautiful day and I was out all day with people tending their fields, building fences and my neighbor to my right was gutting a goat hung by its legs from a laundry line. It was all very kathartic (sp). I have been reducing in volume by giving stuff to the school, the hospital, friends, the second hand shop in Ternopil etc. It is really amazing that I have gained so much phyisical stuff over the past almost two years of living in my apartment. I remember aquiring most of it, little by little and never thinking about the need to get rid of it some day. I am bring very little back with me, a few clothes as it really wouldn't be appropriate or comfortable for me to travel home naked, a few books, lots of pictures, a sleeping bag and back-packing back pack etc.

This weekend I am going to say good bye to my cluster mates and my oblast mates at a party in Ternopil. It will be an action packed weekend. And the last time I will be in Ternopil in the forseeable future. I keep noticing that I am doing things for the last time here: whether it be teach, buying sunflower seed oil or seeing a particular view. I know that there is blue sky, fields, onion dome churches, rivers, sunsets and forests everywhere in the world. but these ones are now special to me.

A teacher in the teachers room yesterday asked me: "what are my impressions of Ukraine after two years?" And what came out of my mouths as a suprise as I had never really intellectualized it before but I said: "When I came here this was just a place on a map, now it is my home. It is very special to me and I have great affection for this place and these people." That got me a lot of smiles and its true. When I first learned I would be serving in Ukraine I had to search for it on a map now it is as if these place and things, sights and feelings have taken up physical space inside me.

The end of my Peace Corps Service is very near. Earlier this week I took the GRE to get me on the path to grad school. And I have spent the rest of the week doing final medical and adminstrative what have you. I will be glad to be finished with all of my admin stuff, and the details of getting rid of my things, finishing projects. But leaving is very bittersweet. I am so excited to be getting back to my family and friends, to my country and getting more education. And I am ready to leave behind bumpy soviet buses, narrow food selection and real weather, but there is really no way to be ready to leave my host family, my friends (both Ukrainian and American), the people I work with and my students. I am lucky to have so much to get back to and to look forward to but I will always be looking back to this part of the world and these people who have been a very significant part of my life. But for now I am occupied with dismantling my life, putting it in a suit case that doesn't weigh too much, and putting it back together again.

These are the two first graders who rang the bell to begin the school year.

This is a HUGE Ukrianian Flag at a Yulya Tymoshenko rally I stumbled unpon in the main square in Lviv in September.

These are carvings of Kosacks, traditional Ukrianian warriors, in the park in Ternopil.

This is my host brother Bohdan at the first bell ceremony. He is the flag carrier and the Student Body President. In addition he is one of the sweetest and funniest people that I know and he is 15 and growing on an almost hourly basis.

This was my training Cluster, left to right, Jeremey Doughty, Sharece Bunn, Andriy Chukin (our teacher), Mandi Scott (Andriy's Fiance) and of course Me. We are the only cluster that had not had anyone early terminate or medically seperated. And considering that we are all close friends and even family, I think it is no coincidence that we are all still here. Jeremey, Sharece and I are going to be Andriy's "groom's men" when he and Mandi get married next year.

This picture is a bit dark but that is my friend Travis. We were in training together. And he is holding an American Flag that flew above the his home state capital of Carson City Nevada in honor of our Peace Corps Group 29.

This is an old soviet truck still in use. Just above ths star it says C.C.C.P. Which is the abreviation for the USSR in Russian.

This is me on top of a mountain in the Carpathians (historical home of Dracula). I did not, however, climb this mountain I took a lovely ride up in something that aproximates a sky lift. But it was one of the most beautiful and serene days of my service and one of those times I felt very lucky to be in the place I was.

This is a house right by the school where I teach. The gardents in Ukriane are one of my favorite things about this country. There is never any reason to it, there is just color and texture springing up everywhere.

Don't worry I'm not really this sad. I am in Character in the Museum of Soviet Kitsch where we stayed during the second session of the International Outreach Camp.

In the museum of soviet kitsch there was one piece of true soviet HISTORY. This cup is a little blurry but it is from the opening of McDonalds in Moscow in 1990. That was a really big deal in the bridging of east and west, capitalism and communism in the first days after the collapse of the soviet union. And it was in the corner of this woman's bathroom on a shelf so high only I could se it.

My South Africans (from issues and debate) during the UN Debate on migration

Nothing spells Ukraine to me like a trunk full of produce fresh from the fields, no seriously.

WE are pretty big on group hugs at IOC. With a multi-national staff there were a lot of culture clashes and as lame as it my sound and sometimes was, we were all eventually brought closer together by the internaional language: hugging

This is Yulya and Our Issues and Debate class doing an warm up. The issue up for debate at our UN forum was the minimum standard for global migration. This version of musical chairs where a chair is taken out after each round but there are still the same amount of people emphasizes the point about distribution of resources being a reason for world migration but a reason people need to work together in order to solve the problem as all people need somewhere to sit.

This is Tom teaching my class. During our preparation for Model UN all the campers were assigned a country. These are my Moroccans learning about Iran from the "Iranian Ambassador" Tom.

This is the two of us on star day. I am Marilyn Monroe and she is Yuyla Tymoshenko.