Thanks to everyone who donated to our Library Project. We got all the funding we needed and we start implementing the project this week! I'll keep you all updated as we move forward!

This month was kept busy with lots of celebrations, most recently a marathon Thanksgiving weekend. I celebrated twice, in two different places, in only three days! First on Thanksgiving Day I traveled the 5 hours east to Sumy, the oblast center in the next oblast over from me. Even though I go to Sumska Oblast all the time (Konotop, the nearest big city to me is an hour and a half bus ride away and is in Sumska Oblast) I had never been to Sumy itself. I didn’t see much more than the apartment of the people I was visiting, but at least I can say I’ve been there!

The meal was great, almost everyone who lives in Sumska Oblast was there (15 people!), and it was a goodbye party as well for Dave, Rebecca, Suzy, and Evan all who were leaving within days of Thanksgiving. We shared a huge meal of roasted chicken (turkey is tough to find here) and all the side dishes we love, and then spend the night hanging out together: drinking, playing cards, copying and watching movies. Pretty much a typical Peace Corps evening!

The next morning I got up early and headed to Kyiv where I met up with Carey and (after a delicious dinner of Turkish food) we hopped on a train to Rubizne where our friends Michael and Lauren live. This was my first time headed “way east” into the area of the country famous for coal mines, big industry, and closer ties with Russia. Michael and Lauren live in the eastern most oblast in Ukraine, Luhansk, and it literally sticks right into Russia.

We arrived mid-day the next day (after a 15 hour train ride!) just in time for yet another amazing Thanksgiving meal, this time even complete with a turkey! In the evening we all headed over to Michael and Lauren’s church where, with the help of some other PCVs, they put on a concert in honor of Thanksgiving. The next day we lounged around, in honor of how much we ate, and that night Carey and I got on another overnight train, this time headed back to site.

Believe it or not, my Thanksgiving plans are not over! Carey is hosting Thanksgiving number 3 this Saturday, so I think I better not eat at all in preparation!

Over the last month, I’ve suddenly started to feel a little nostalgic. It actually hit on my birthday, although it had nothing to do with my birthday. I took the bus to Konotop (the nearest big city to me) to meet up with another PCV because she had some shopping to do and said we could grab lunch for my birthday. I’ve taken the bus to Konotop tons of times, and it looks about the same as taking the bus anyplace in Ukraine (at least this part of Ukraine) but for some reason everything looked a little different this time.

As I drove past all the little farms and houses, passed the horses tied up on the road, and we slowed to let the cows cross, I was very aware of how “old hat” all these things were to me. This is my life. It’s not new or exciting anymore, it’s comfortable. But as the comfort set in, the realization hit me that it would all be ending very soon! I haven’t yet decided when I’m leaving Ukraine, but it will probably be around the 19th or 20th of May. The very latest I can stay on my visa is the 26th of June. And while, as winter sets in, May and June may seem far away, the reality is, it’s only 6 months away! So the firsts have all passed by, but now the lasts are setting in, and the nostalgia with it. I plan to come back and visit, but I don’t know when, and the reality is, it will never be the same as my time living here. Visiting, even to places where you have family and friends, is not the same as the settled feeling of living someplace.

That night, when I got home I got a call from my closest Ukrainian friend here in Korop, Vita. It just so happens that her grandmother and I share the same birthday and they wanted to invite me out to the village where her grandmother lives to celebrate. So, 5 minutes later (literally) I was in the car on my way to Vyshenki, another village in our rayon. Again, the nostalgia hit. How many times have I sat in Vitya’s (Vita’s boyfriend, yes it is confusing!) car on my way to the sauna or the river or some other village? And besides the nostalgia I had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for these two friends of mine. And not only them, but their extended families and friends. Without knowing anything about me, from the first moment I arrived in Korop, they had taken me into their lives and made me a part of their family. They didn’t just invite me out to the café and want to “spend time with me.” They invited me to share important family moments in their lives, like a grandmother’s 70th birthday party. And it’s those moments that have shaped my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer and my experience of Ukrainian culture. Driving home that night (on our way to another friend’s house to watch a big soccer game on TV) I realized how different my time here in Ukraine and in Korop would have been Vita and Vitya. They gave me the Peace Corps experience I wanted, the chance to really experience a different culture and understand the people here. I will be forever grateful for all they have given me.

My friend Kyle came to visit a few weeks ago and he's a much better blogger than me, so I thought I would share his entry here... I would recommend using the link and going directly to his blog so you can see the photos and all that!

A Day With Family

from Don't Escape Reality. Change It. by Kyle Taylor

Throughout my years traveling and living abroad I have sometimes passively and sometimes actively found or acquired “parents” and “family.” There are, of course, my birth parents. Then there is my “DC Mom” in the form of Aunt Robin. Then there’s my Belgian family from when I studied abroad and my Shanghai parents - Jim and Deb - from when I was living in China. Most recently, I acquired John and Lois as my London “Rotary parents.” Needless to say, having the change to connect with an old friend from college and meet her “Ukrainian parents” from Peace Corps sounded like a wonderful time.

As usual, it started with a two-hour mini bus ride from Kiev to Chernihiv northeast of the city. It involved detailed instructions from Gretchen that included things like: “When you get off the metro, turn left and go through the doors and down the escalator into the station. You'll go through a turnstile to exit. Once you're out the doors, turn right. The first set of doors on your right is the entrance back into the metro, so walk past that. After that you should see a set of stairs going up. Take those stairs!” That is, it was an adventure.

Upon arrival we met up with her 14-year-old, 6 foot 2 host brother Aleksei who would act as tour guide extraordinaire. Gretchen had just set him up with an email address and the usual sibling bickering was happening. “No, you write the email and I’ll proofread it,” she said. “No, you jut write it. It will be much faster,” he countered. “But it’s YOUR thank you letter. YOU have to write it,” she reiterated. “But it’s hard and I don’t want to,” he pouted. “Oh, alright,” she coalesced. The only thing missing was some name-calling and hair-pulling.

After towning around and seeing the six million churches as well as a canonization in action Gretchen suggested we nip back to her host parents’ place “just to grab her bag.” Yeah right (in a very good way). Two minutes in the house and we’re all staying for dinner. I’ve also been invited to spend the night “but not in Gretchen’s room, silly. No boys allowed!” Gretchen is in her late twenties. I mention in passing that I’d like to see a village and ten minutes later we’re trudging through town to catch our bus to the village where Gretchen’s Ukrainian grandparents grew up. She and I look like American tourists. Meanwhile, Mom looks like she’s about to head down the catwalk in Milan.

Mid wander through the village we approach a farm and see a man waving at us. “Do you know him,” I ask her. “Oh yes, that’s my uncle. He lives here. He is also a communist, but don’t say that to him.” And the day just got way more interesting (as if it wasn’t before). We pop in to say hi, everyone is introduced, I stand there with a smile plastered on my face while they all talk in Ukrainian. After he gave us enough apples to feed a small country, we head for the cemetery and cow pastures to literally “watch the Cows come home” and come home they do. In fact, they march out of the pastures in a single file line, walk right through town to their house then “moo” until someone comes and opens the gate. Seriously. It’s remarkable. How come Ukrainian cows are so much smarter than American cows?

We get home just in time for dinner. I bring a bottle of vodka as a “thank you” without knowing Ukrainian tradition states that a gift of vodka must be finished completely with the guest present. Thank goodness I bought the smallest bottle! We talked about home and family, we picked on Aleksei, we drank vodka. And when it was all over we ate an upside down sweet apple cake thing that was simply divine. My bus departure time was fast approaching, which meant a quick - albeit sad - farewell with tidings of good luck, an open invitation and, hopefully, an adopted set of Ukrainian parents as long as Gretchen doesn’t mind sharing!

I love Ukraine.

My current project with the library started way back not long after I had arrived at site. The library was listed as one of my “partner organizations” on the official paper Peace Corps gave me, so I pushed my counterpart to introduce me to the Director. I grabbed a young student who wanted to practice English with me and had one of my first official meetings as a PCV in Korop.

The meeting was great, I met with the whole staff and they had lots of ideas for projects and things they needed. Unfortunately not long after that meeting my translator left for school in Kyiv and I started to get busier with my green tourism stuff. I stopped by the library occasionally and told them I wanted to work with them, but I needed a translator and some more time. Finally 9 months later, with my language a little better, the Internet Club done, and no new projects on the horizon, I went back. My friend Vita works in the same building so she came to the first meeting with the whole staff.

When I had met with the staff the previous summer they had outlined a variety of needs ranging from a new building, internet access for patrons, and new popular books. I found that that the library basically hadn’t acquired any new books for almost 20 years, since before independence was declared! I thought the lack of new books was the most approachable problem, but I needed to think about it.

A few days later I accompanied my friend Vita, her boss, and the Director of the library on a trip around our Rayon to visit the Culture Buildings and libraries in the other villages of the Rayon. In our discussions Vita pointed out another problem the library suffered from: most young people (defined as age 14-25 in Ukraine) didn’t use the library resources and were not interested in the library. And idea started to form in my head about how these two needs could be combined. Wouldn’t it make sense that if there was more popular literature (and other resources young people were interested in) more young people would use the library?

I proposed an idea to the Director, to create a resource center aimed at young people including more popular literature, internet access, and possibly some kind of young person’s book club. She said they actually already had a young person’s club and we could build on that. Suddenly the project was taking shape.

The biggest hurdle I had to overcome was the fact that none of the staff knew anything about project design and management or grant writing and I think it scared them a little. At one point the Director called over to the Oblast library in Chernihiv and the leadership there encouraged her to apply to a grant for more legal books in their library. Apparently there was money from the government for projects like this. I asked if the library needed those resources and she said no, but that this was a good grant to write. That statement right there gets to the heart of the problem of grant writing in Ukraine. Many organizations are more concerned with where the money is than what their organization actually needs! I told her to forget about what there was money available for and focus on what the library actually needed, and I would help find money for that problem. Luckily she trusted me and we moved forward with our youth center.

In many ways this project was a picture-perfect Peace Corps project. The director and staff had no experience with project planning or where to even begin, but they were willing to put in the work. So I gave them the Partnership Grant Handbook in Ukrainian and a copy of the SPA grant I had written for the Internet Club in Ukrainian and told them just to try and see what they could get. I said I would come back a week later and pick up what they had done. And that’s what I did, I came back a week later with my flash drive, took home what they had worked on and translated it into English. That first draft was interesting… the budget was almost an exact copy of the budget from my SPA project even though the project was totally different and the goals and objectives need a ton of work. But she had done a great job writing the background information and for never having done anything like that before, it was a great start. I went back and talked through some of my concerns with her. I explained about the differences between goals and objectives, how objectives need to be “SMART” (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-sensitive), and how it’s important to come up with a plan to monitor our objectives and make sure we achieve our aims. I also explained how it was important to look very carefully at the budget and to actually research prices, because if we asked for too little money we would run into a problem, but if we asked for too much it might be hard to raise it all. Iryna (the Director) was extremely responsive and so we fell into a kind of pattern. Handing documents back and forth on flash drives and quick meetings where I would give her advice on how to improve the project plan, but she would go back and do the work herself.

Finally we got to a place where I thought the project plan was strong. We had come up with some good objectives, a reasonable budget, and an action plan. I took the project plan and wrote the partnership grant and this time it was my turn to give things to her to look at. She looked over documents, found a couple mistakes, we fixed them, and we were set! The only left was to submit the grant!

That’s where I’m at now, the grant has been submitted to Peace Corps and we are waiting for the money. The Partnership Grant program is different from most grant programs, because there is no pot of money we are writing the grant for. Rather the Partnership Program acts as a go-between between the PCV (and their organization) and donors. All the money from the project needs to be raised. And that’s the phase we are in now, recruiting donations so we can implement our project! If you are interested in donating or you know anything who might be, you can visit this link and donate right online. All donations are tax deductible! I promise I’ll keep posting updates on this blog on how the project is going so you can stay updated if you donate!

I was looking back and realized the last time I posted photos links was March! And I certainly have taken lots of pictures since then! Here's the links, for those who are interested!

Turkey - Istanbul Part I

Turkey - Istanbul Part II

Turkey - Fethiye Part 1

Turkey - Fethiye Part 2

Turkey - Selchuk Part 1

Turkey - Selchuk Part 2

Turkey - Izmir

Turkey - Istanbul Part 3

Chernihiv January 2009

Jessie's Birthday 2009

Korop in March 2009

Oleksiy's New Bike

Superbowl 2009

Visiting in Sarah in Chernivsti

Kamianets-Podilskyi

Densa April 2009

Korop Rayon Tourist Route

Melissa's Visit Part I

Melissa's Visit Part II

Russian Language Refresher

Korop Tourist Route Vita's View

The Parents Meet the Parents

Budapest!

Dani in Dresden

Berlin

Good Times in Ktop

Independence Day in Uzhgorod!

Poland! Take 1

Poland! Take 2

Ukraine in Review

A Classic Fall Day in Korop

When my site first applied for a Peace Corps Volunteer they said it was because they wanted me to work on Green Tourism. So, when I arrived a spent a lot of time working with a team to put together a project plan for green tourism in Korop. The eventual goal was to apply for a Small Projects Assistance Grant from Peace Corps, but when I told them our project didn’t qualify they stared at me open mouthed and dropped the project. I tried to find other funding sources, but they weren’t interested. I think they were under the assumption that they could pretty easily get $5000 from Peace Corps, not realizing the restrictions on the grant program.

So, Green Tourism fell to the back burner a bit. I continued to work with my friend Vita on the project (she works at the Department of Culture and Tourism) but we weren’t doing any big projects or writing grants or anything like that. Luckily, this fall, that has changed. The green tourism program has been revamped, and through the NGO I’ve been working with, we are even writing a SPA grant to support the program.

The big green tourism project has lots of elements: designing “tourist routes” (driving, hiking, boating, skiing) throughout the rayon, opening a tourist information center, designing a website, opening up rooms in people’s houses tourists, re-developing handicraft skills, etc. My SPA grant is focusing on just one thing though - training people to work in the green tourism industry. We wrote a grant (which just got approved last week!) to provide a 10 day training to 30 unemployed persons from Korop Rayon on green tourism. We are bringing trainers in from Chernihiv, our oblast center. Our goal is to train 30 people (out of 75-100 applicants) and have 20 of them working in the industry by next summer.

This project is in its very early stages (like I said, the grant got approved last week) but we plan to hold the training in January, so I’ll put more updates up here as we go!

My big project last year was opening an Internet Club with a new NGO in my town the “Regional Development Agency of Korop.” This NGO is not my official organization (which is the local village council) but was started in part by my counterpart (the secretary of the village council). We wrote a grant to obtain money from Peace Corps (which actually comes from USAID) to start an Internet Club in my town. Not only would this be the first public computer or internet access in Korop, but it also was to serve as a social enterprise for the NGO. For those that don’t know, a social enterprise is a fundraising tool for non-profits. Basically it’s a for-profit business but all the profit from the business is turned over to the NGO as a charitable contribution. So, we wrote the grant last winter, it got approved, and we started our work. We repaired a space (which also houses the NGO) and put in 4 new computers plus wifi internet. We ran into a few small bumps in the road, but mostly the project went off without a problem. We closed out the grant and got final approval that the project was complete last month. To tell the truth, I’m a little skeptical how well the club is working. My worry in the project was that no one would use it, but everyone said I was crazy and an Internet Club would get tons of use. I’m there two hours a day every weekday and I rarely see people using the computers. But my Director claims they are used, just not when I’m there (which is reasonable, I’m there when everyone is at work or school). We’ll just have to wait and see if it gets more use!

Last year, as some of you may remember, I had an English Club at the school. English clubs are probably the single most popular project undertaken by Peace Corps Volunteers in Ukraine, regardless of their project sector (mine is Community Development). When I got the club started last fall I had a huge group of kids. We mostly played games, watched movies, etc. My goal was to get them using English without feeling like they were in a classroom. It seemed to work well, but as spring came around the kids started to drop off with other commitments and by the end of the year I only have 2-3 students coming. This year the head English teacher decided not enough kids were interested and we decided not to do it again. To be honest, I wasn’t totally disappointed. I knew I didn’t want to be a TEFL volunteer when I applied to Peace Corps and this just backed that up… I’m much more comfortable designing projects and writing grants with an organization than I am working with a group of students! One great thing did come out of the English Club though, although I can’t take credit for it. One of the students in my club was accepted into the FLEX program which is a program through the US State Department that sends kids from former soviet states to America for a year to live with a family and attend high school. The application process is intense: three rounds including a written test and two interview rounds, and of course the program is extremely competitive. For someone to get chosen from my small village is a big deal!

Well, I’ve been here over a year and a half now, and I thought some of you might like to read about what I’ve accomplished here besides traveling all over Eastern Europe and hanging out with my friends. As part of my determination to be better about blogging, I thought I’d spend this week giving some quick updates on the projects I’ve worked on at site as well as some of the work I’m doing with Peace Corps on a larger scale. Enjoy!

Well, it’s official. I’ve become a bad blogger. And I’m sorry to those of you who look forward to these entries and don’t get one for months and months. I guess the fact is, I’ve been here in Ukraine now for over a year and a half and there’s just less exciting to write about! But regardless, my early new year’s resolution is to start blogging more. So here’s my start!

A few weeks ago I had an unexpected visit from a friend from college and it reminded me how much fun you can have when you don’t plan for it… the unexpected is sometimes even more fun because you didn’t know if was coming!

Kyle is a friend from college. We were never super close, and he was a few years behind me in school, but we’ve kept in touch a little and our paths have crossed from time to time. And of course, we have managed to keep in touch through the wonder of facebook. And it’s thanks to facebook that I have this story to tell!

A few weeks ago I has nothing better to do (as is often the case) so I was browsing facebook. I noticed Kyle’s status message: “Heading to Chernobyl Saturday.” I thought goodness that means Kyle is coming to Ukraine! I send him a quick message to find out when he was coming and how long he’d be here, thinking maybe I could try to meet up with him in Kyiv for a day. It was literally Wednesday or Thursday and he was coming that very weekend, so I didn’t have high hopes but we emailed back and forth a bit and he (being the adventurous person that he is!) decided he would meet in Chernihiv (my training city) for the day on Sunday. He said he wanted to see a different city besides Kyiv and it would be easier for me to get there than to go all the way to Kyiv. So, I gave him very detailed directions on how to catch the bus and where to get off and Saturday night I headed to Chernihiv myself to crash with my family before (hopefully!!) meeting up with him Sunday morning.

Amazingly he managed to make it to Chernihiv and he, my host brother, and I headed out to explore the city. Both Kyle and I were headed home that night, so I figured we would see the sites, grab lunch, and that would be that. As I explained that to Kyle he said, that sounds great, but can we go see a village after that? That stopped me in my tracks. There are plenty of villages around Chernihiv but I have no idea about the bus schedules or where they are or how to get back to Chernihiv. Plus, it would seem a little meaningless to just go see a random village. But I told him I would think about it.

The best solution I came up with was for Kyle to come back to my site with me and spend the night, but that would mean a 3 hour bus to Korop, seeing the village in the dark, and then getting up at 5am the next morning to catch the bus to Kyiv. Kyle said he’d have to think on that, so after seeing the sites in Chernihiv and getting lunch we decided to head back to my host parents house so I could grab my stuff and he could think on it.

When we got there Oleksiy (my host brother) had explained to my parents what we were thinking and Oksana (my host mother) said she had a “proposition” for us. She would accompany us to a nearby village (15 minutes by city bus) where her grandparents were buried and show us around, then we would all come back and eat dinner together before Kyle and I headed home. It was perfect, Kyle would get to see a village accompanied by someone who actually knew the village and could show us around, plus as a bonus he’d get to eat with my host family! All in all, a much more “true Ukrainian experience” than I had anticipated Kyle getting when

we decided to meet in Chernihiv!

And the visit to the village couldn’t have been more perfect. As we were walking around Oksana talked about the village and its history and general history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Then she said, that’s my uncle’s house, and that’s my uncle! Suddenly we were meeting her uncle (and later his mother-in-law). We got to see the cows coming home from the pasture, plus of course ducks, turkeys, geese, goats, etc. All elements of my daily life but very quintessential Ukraine and an unexpected treat for Kyle. We walked around for two hours and even I learned a lot that I didn’t already know!

To tell the truth, the day ended up being one of the best I’ve had here in Ukraine! The whole day was unplanned, but like I said it’s just proof that sometimes you have more fun when you don’t realize it’s going to happen!

Here’s a link to a fantastic video Kyle put together of our day in Chernihiv!

(Note, this same text went out in an email, so if you are on my emai list, don't feel the need to read it twice!)

The big news in Ukraine right now is the Swine Flu. It’s finally come to Ukraine, and come with a vengeance. If you ask the Ukrainians, its worse here than in other countries, but I’m not sure I agree with that. Regardless, the government and the people are acting like its true! Last Friday they cancelled school and all public gatherings for 3 weeks. That means no concerts, no movies, and no political rallies (the January 2010 presidential election kicked off two weeks ago). Can you imagine all public gatherings across the entire United States being cancelled for three weeks? Suddenly cancelling school for three weeks with no warning? The chaos that might ensue? And the severity of crisis that would need to be in place to cause that? And yet here (at least in my town) things seem to be moving along as normal, just like with the gas and economic crises that have hit since I arrived here. I just went out to the post office and saw my first face mask on a person in town, which is apparently a common site in the west, and my friends are telling me I shouldn’t go to Kyiv or to Chernihiv because it’s “not safe,” but that’s about it!

The only effect the crisis has had on me is that I’m supposed to be in Kyiv right now for a SPA Committee meeting, but Peace Corps has cancelled all official events until further notice. We’re also “strongly encouraged” not to leave our sites until further notice. Hopefully we’ll get an update on that today! My friend and I are a little worried because we’re supposed to take the GRE together next Tuesday in Kyiv, but if we’re not allowed to leave site or (worse) transportation gets shut down, we’ll be stranded! I had been planning on visiting my family in Chernihiv this weekend and I’m thinking of heading over there early so that if we do get locked down I’ll be “trapped” there with them rather than in my town!

Who knows how much further this crisis will go. The west is already in “quarantine” (I’m not totally sure what that means), and I have a feeling the whole situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Check back on my blog for updates!

I’ve now been living in Ukraine for almost 19 months. I’ve been at site for 16. So, life here as become kind of… ordinary. Shopping at the bazaar, fishing at the river, hunting mushrooms, going to the sauna, things that may have felt a little unnatural at the beginning of my service are just a part of my daily life now. At this point, it’s tough to surprise me. And yet, last Thursday I was out jogging and had one of the craziest experiences I’ve had in my whole time here!

A little background. I like to go out jogging or walking in some fields just outside of town. There’s a road that heads out of town, you cross a little wooden bridge and the road turns to dirt. This is the way to the Desna River, some lakes, a one or two small villages I think. All along this road there are turn offs in the fields where people cut across to get to the lakes to picnic or hang out. This is also where they sometimes graze the cows. I like it because, especially this time of year, there’s not many people out there and I don’t get as many stares (running is not something people here do) as I would running through town.

Anyway, I was on my way back from a loop I like to do, on the main road headed back towards the bridge into town when some guy came up the road (rather quickly) on horseback. I see horses here on almost a daily basis, pulling carts, things like that, but I’d never seen anyone on horseback. What was even stranger, he pulled around in front of my and stopped, and even got off his horse! Then he started talking (In English): “Hi, my name is Yura.” I said “Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” and he looked a little confused and said “I speak little English.” So, I switched to Ukrainian, complemented the English he had used, and told him we could talk in Ukrainian, although my Ukrainian wasn’t great either. He told me he had a “proposition” for me (which in Ukrainian doesn’t have the same connotations as in English!), that he wanted to work on a project with me. At this point I had a little moment of self-realization when I realized how many people really did know who I was and how recognizable I was! But I got over it and told him I was listening!

He started talking about a small village that was down the road some more. He said there was a big area of free land and then he said some word I didn’t understand, so I told him that. Then he started talking about mountains. Now, not many of you reading this have seen where I live but it is flat-lands all the way, no mountains to be found anywhere. So I double checked that I understood and he said, “Yes, mountains, like in America.” It was clear I wasn’t totally getting what he was saying, so he drew a picture for me. He pointed to it and said “Green tourism!” The picture was of a roller coaster! He said because of the big highway from Kyiv to Moscow (which is about 20 km from my town) people would come through and we could attract tourists. The first thing I said was “That’s not green tourism; it may be tourism but not green tourism!” After that I didn’t really know what to say. Building a roller coaster in my little village in Ukraine?! At that point it must have been obvious that I was a little skeptical of the idea because he asked “You don’t think it’s a good idea?” I covered myself by telling him I wasn’t sure I totally understood the idea (which could actually be the truth, maybe I totally misunderstood him!!) and that he should come by the NGO where I work and we could discuss it more. He then asked if I wanted to go for a ride on the horse, and after I managed to get out of that, he was on his way.

I kept walking back towards my house and the more I thought about the experience the stranger and stranger it seemed. As I write this blog entry now, the whole thing seems more like I dreamed it than it actually happened! Just goes to show, no matter how much time has passed, there will always be things that surprise me here!

Now that I’m settled home after all my crazy summer travels, I thought my faithful readers might like an update on what I’ve been doing here at site. (Yes, the point of my Peace Corps service is to work on projects in my community, not travel all over Eastern Europe.)

As most of you know, my big project last year was an Internet Club that would serve as a social enterprise for the NGO I work with. We received a SPA Grant last fall, received the money in the spring and got to work. The club was supposed to open in May but we had a few set-backs and it opened sometime in June. I haven’t been around much this summer, but the club is open and running now. Unfortunately we ran into a few snags with the electric company so we can’t advertise the club yet, but we’re hopeful once we do, usage will pick up!

In addition to the Internet Club project I’ve got a few other projects going on. Way back when I first got to site one of my partner organizations was supposed to be the library. I went for a meeting with them last summer, but nothing really came of it because I was focusing on the Green Tourism initiative with my organization and I didn’t have a translator for working with the library. This past spring though, I decided to go back to the library and see if they were still interested in working with me. They were and we started brainstorming ideas. One of the biggest (and I thought most pressing) needs they had told me about was new, popular literature for their collection. They hadn’t gotten many new books in almost 20 years. In addition my friend Vita told me that one problem facing the library was that young people (defined about age 15-25) were not using the library enough. I thought we could combine these two problems because more popular literature would help attract more young people to the library.

We decided to make the project a “Young People’s Analytical and Information Center.” Basically a center that will attract more young people to the library, where they can use resources like the internet and computers to supplement their school work, and where they can meet to learn about things like being active citizens and transitioning into their own household after they graduate. The library already has an existing young person’s club that will be folded into the center and will include fun things like book clubs as well as educational sessions on other topics.

In many ways, this project was a poster child for Peace Corps service. The director of the library has no project or grant writing experience, but was willing to put in the work. Often Peace Corps volunteers end up doing most of the work for writing grants with just a little input from their local project team. But that wasn’t the case here. I outlined how to design a project (goals and objectives, action plan/timeline, budget, monitoring and evaluation) and Iryna, the director of the library used examples I had given her and actually wrote out the project plan herself. We would meet every week or two and she would give me a new portion of the project plan, I would translate it into English (don’t be too impressed, I have a computer program that does most of the work for me) and give her some notes (for example, objectives need to be more specific and measureable) and then she would work on it and come back again. This is really what Peace Corps service should be about, because she was learning how to write the project herself (now, whether when I’m gone she’ll be able to replicate the steps, I’m not sure).

I decided that we should apply for a Partnership Grant, a different Peace Corps Grant program than SPA, which I had applied for for the Internet Club, so I took the project plan that she put together and wrote out the grant. Once I finished the grant I translated it into Ukrainian and will give it to her for a final review before submitting it to Peace Corps. Of course, I showed up there last week to give her the final grant and get her final okay, and she’s on vacation! I’m not sure when she’ll be back. Typical Ukraine. So the project is on hold until I can track her down and get her final approval.

I’m also still working with the NGO “Regional Development Agency of Korop” that I did the Internet Club project with. The Director of the NGO Anatoliy is full of tons of ideas and excitement and is constantly bringing me new ideas and plans. He’s got many things going on, but we have two projects we’re working on together. The first is the Green Tourism initiative they originally brought me to Korop to work on. We have a big project plan including opening a tourist information center, mapping tourist routes, and advertising, but what we’re focusing on right now is building up the industry as a local economic stimulus. We’re writing another SPA Grant, this time to fund a series of trainings for local citizens on how they can work in the tourism industry in Korop. The trainings will include basics of running a business and specifics of working in green tourism and will be open, through application, to anyone in the Korop Rayon who is interested.

In addition we’re also working on something very close to my own heart, a volunteerism initiative in Korop. We’re starting small, trying to attract volunteers for the NGO, but we plan to build it up, eventually into a kind of “Volunteer Time Bank” where people can trade volunteer hours for things they need or what done.

Thinking about all these projects, and how long it took to get the Internet Club up and running, the 8 months I have left here seem like not much time at all! But I’m glad to be busy and feel like I’m making a difference, even a small one, here in my community!

Okay, now on to Krakow. Most people, when you ask about where to visit in Poland say Krakow, not Warsaw, so Danielle and I were looking forward to all the city had to offer. Luckily, the weather cleared as we took the 3 hour train ride south to Krakow so we hoped we would have good weather for our 3 days there.

First, we met up with a friend of Danielle’s from grad school. She had flown down from where she lived in Norway for the weekend to visit another friend and we all met up to start exploring. We headed over to Castle Hill and took a look at the unique architecture of the castle (this one looked a little more like a castle, but I would still call it a palace!). The whole compound includes lots of different buildings, and they look a bit like they were thrown together throughout different times in history, which I think in fact they might have been!

After a dinner of typical Polish food we headed out on a search for some cider for Danielle (her drink of choice) but came up empty so we decided to go to a random little bar we walked by. Since real mixed drinks are so expensive in Ukraine I decided I was willing to spend some money and get a fancy girly drink at a bar while in Poland. Claire got some local vodka and Danielle convinced the barman to give her some Bailey’s in hot chocolate (instead of coffee) and I, remembering that Alison has said Caiperinas were popular in Berlin decided to see how they made them in Poland. After the Caiperina I decided I should probably order something a little more Polish so I started looking over the menu and we discussed the options. We happened to be basically the only people in the bar so the barman (who spoke fabulous English by the way) came over and offered to help. He said he’d bring me something that wasn’t on the menu but would be very good. I figured why not, so I told him to go ahead and bring it!

About half an hour later the guy came back with a plate full of shots. He said they were a specialty and were on the house. Just goes to show it pays to walk into a nearly empty bar, the bartender gets bored and pays you extra special attention! He told us the shots were made with some super high proof vodka (he showed us the bottle and he wasn’t kidding) and there was some other stuff in it, but I didn’t catch what it was. We downed a shot each and they really weren’t that bad. I decided maybe Ukraine has hardened me to vodka and I could handle anything! But in reality I think the shot didn’t have too much of the high proof vodka in it. We made it through another shot each and decided it was time to call it a night. Claire was leaving at 3am to get to the airport to fly home and Danielle and I needed to be up early the next day.

The next day was Auschwitz for Danielle and me. As depressing as it sounds, Auschwitz was the reason I wanted to come to Poland. After studying the war and the Holocaust for so many years, I had always wanted to go to a concentration camp, see what happened, and pay tribute to it. Rather than pay 100 zloty we decided to go the adventurous route and take a local bus out to the town. We missed the first bus but managed to catch a second one and made it out to the museum site just as an English language tour was starting. It’s hard to put into words anything about the experience. Everyone knows what happened there and knows the significance of the site. The biggest thing that struck me though was actually something the tour guide said as we were leaving. She said the entire site has been preserved because only a few years after the end of the war survivors of Auschwitz asked for the site to remain untouched as a memorial to all that had happened there. I was impressed with their foresight and strength. Rather than get angry and want to destroy any trace of what had happened there, the people who had survived the horrors could step back from and realize that the best way to honor the memory of the people who had died there was to leave the place as it was so future generations could walk the same ground and remember what happened there. Here are some of my pictures from the visit:

The next day we decided to take the advice of a friend of Danielle’s, who was from Poland, and go to the Salt Mines outside Krakow. I was a little hesitant because it sounded very touristy and kitsch but everything we read about it said it was incredible, plus it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and I figured UNESCO would never lower themselves to kitsch. After our basically successful trip on public transport to Auschwitz we decided to do the same to the Salt Mine. We didn’t have quite as successful an experience this time around, but once we found the mini bus (we only had to ask for directions a couple times!) the people on the bus kindly ushered us there and told us where to get off to go to the mine.

The guidebooks and Danielle’s friend were right. The mines were incredible. It was almost more like a strange underground art museum than anything else. They had set up exhibits along with way with wax figures showing how the mine worked, but the most incredible things were the sculptures throughout the mine. Everything was made of salt rock and made by the miners who worked there. There was even an entire church where people can hold weddings. Definitely worth the trip.

Our final day in Krakow we decided to hold true to our West Hartford heritage and headed over to the Jewish Quarter. We explored the area a little, saw one of the old synagogues, and even found bagels before heading back to the hostel to grab our bags and head to the train station for our ride to Kyiv!

As promised, here are some more details on my recent trip to Poland with Danielle. And most important, pictures!

First we met up in Warsaw. We only had about a day and a half in Warsaw and unfortunately the weather wasn’t great, but our first afternoon we managed to get to the top of this big clock tower:

And get some nice views of Warsaw. Maybe it was the weather, but the views were not exactly what I would call picturesque, but they certainly showed of Warsaw as the business and political capital of Poland, which it is:

The next day we braved the horrible weather and explored the old town. What’s interesting about Warsaw is that much of the city was destroyed during WWII, but the old part of the city has been entirely rebuilt to look as it did before the destruction. I think one of the most moving things for me was this statue of a child who took up arms, along with much of Warsaw, during the Warsaw uprising against the Germans:

After an organ concert at the man church in the old town, we decided it was time for lunch and headed towards and old “milk bar” our guidebook recommended. As I said in my previous entry, milk bars are old cafeterias that date back from communist times where people could get cheap, filling food. We figured it was a good place to get typical polish food. After some problems with ordering, not surprisingly they don’t have everything all the time, we both ended up with some soup and some crepe-style pancakes with different fillings to warm us up on the cold rainy day. I ordered what was called “borscht with beans” only to discover that the Polish definition of borscht is a little different than the Ukrainian. Theirs is just a beet broth, not quite the same effect as the stew-style “your spoon should stand up in it” borscht I make at home.

In the afternoon we decided to stay indoors so we explored the castle in the old city (more like a palace in my opinion):

And then went to the Warsaw Uprising Museum to learn about the local uprising against the Germans in WWII.

That night we had a nice dinner of sleek looking but pretty cheap Chinese food and headed back to the hostel to pack up and head to Krakow the next day!

Well, I’m finally, officially, back from my crazy summer of traveling and meetings and trainings and everything else. My final trip was a long anticipated trip with my oldest friend Danielle to Warsaw and Krakow in Poland. And I discovered something very interesting there. I speak Polish! Okay, well maybe not speak, more like understand. And not that much. But still! It was quite a shock and a nice surprise for Danielle and me as we were navigating through some places that didn’t have much English!

Here’s the deal. I’ve always been told that Polish is pretty similar to Ukrainian. At least that’s what Ukrainians say. Of course they say it’s the same as Russian and it’s totally not, so I didn’t have much hope. But I arrived in Poland and of course started sounding out words I saw I signs and listening (Polish, unlike Ukrainian and Russian uses an alphabet similar to English). And I realized I recognized a lot of the words! A lot of the basic every day words were the same, especially the food.

It came in particularly handy when we walked into this old “milk bar” in Warsaw. Milk bars are a throw-back from community times where people come in and there are a few set basic menus items, you order at a counter, pick up at another counter (where you can peer behind the old tile and see women running around huge metal vats and pans), and drop your plates at a third counter. Quick, cheap, and easy. And in Polish, or so we thought. I spent a good 5 minutes trying to decipher the menu up on the wall before the lady came over and handed us a menu in English. Where I discovered I’d actually been right about a lot of what I ready! If only I had actually needed it…

I didn’t need the language much. English isn’t as prevalent in Poland as it was in many of the other countries I’ve visited, but we were certainly able to get around. And understanding doesn’t do much good when you don’t know how to ask questions or ask for help. But it made me feel good when I heard people talking and could recognize some of what they were saying. In fact, I think I understood more Polish than I do Russian! Maybe time to start a new language?

More on our trip to come (maybe with pictures!) soon I hope!

Well, summer is officially over. Tomorrow is “Day of Learning” in Ukraine, which is the first day of school all over the country. September is here and after a crazy summer of traveling, visits, trainings, and meetings, I’m ready for fall. The truth is though, my summer isn’t quite over. I have one more vacation before I really will settle down, a trip to Poland where I will meet my oldest friend Danielle. We’re going to spend a few days in Warsaw and Krakow before heading back to Ukraine and I’ll show her around Kyiv for a few days. Then I’ll finally be back at site and “back to the grind” as they say. And to be honest, I’m really excited about it.

I guess this is another “change” like those I discussed in my last entry. Last summer I couldn’t wait to get out of town. I loved going to Kyiv to get my city fix and just getting away from site. But this summer I got my fill of travel. I haven’t spent two straight weeks at site since June (or maybe earlier!). Every time I come home from a trip I feel like I’m just getting ready for the next one. Don’t get me wrong, I had an amazing summer. I had so much fun traveling and was so happy to see Melissa and my parents. And I can’t wait for this trip this week, Poland is the place I most wanted to visit when I found out I was coming to Ukraine and Danielle and I have been planning this trip since I first got in country, way before any of my other visits were planned.

But still, I can’t wait for the regularity of being at site for a long time. The chance to settled back into a routine, work on the MANY projects that seems to be coming my way (see next entry) and enjoy my favorite season as the days get cooler (although shorter too!) and things get back to normal. Hopefully a more regular schedule and a settling down of things will also mean I’ll be able to blog with more frequency that I was able this summer. So, keep watching for updates!

Looking back to a year ago, when I had been at site only a couple months, the changes are unbelievable. I mean, most of the changes are expected and not surprising. But still unbelievable.

Of course, a year later my language is better. But I never thought it would be this much better. Don’t get me wrong, my language isn’t quite as good as some of my friends, and I certainly could be studying harder, but I suddenly came back from my crazy summer and I’m having all my meetings in Ukrainian, where before I left I usually tried to have a translator around. It’s harder, of course, I don’t get everything and it takes longer to go through things, but I go to work everyday and have discussions with my project manager about all our different projects and his ideas and everything. All in Ukrainian.

And that brings me to another change, and the biggest change from a year ago. A year ago I was pulling teeth to get meetings and project ideas. They had an idea, but we were having trouble getting it off the ground, getting together for meetings, etc. I would spend most of my day sitting at my computer trying to find things to do. Suddenly, that has totally changed. I’m now working more with a different organization, an NGO in town, that is partnered with my official organization, the Village Council, and the difference between the two situations is drastic. The director of the NGO, who was my project manager for my Internet Club project and is acting basically as my counterpart at this point is full of idea after idea. I’ve gone from struggling to get meetings to being asked to come in at other times and phone calls on weekends with questions. I’m still trying to decide which is better, but I’m leaning towards the latter. Probably because after a year of virtual boredom at work, its nice to feel so needed as to get multiple phone calls when I’m home on Sunday (of course, that doesn’t stop me from pushing off the work until I come into the office on Monday).

Another obvious change, like the language, is my ease of living in Ukraine. A year ago a trip to the store took planning and nerve calming. I had to think about what I needed, what words I might need, worry about annoying the shop keepers, holding people up with my bad language, etc. But now life is easy. Well, not always easy, but much easier. The shop keepers know me in my town and my language is better so traveling to the store is actually fun! And even outside of town I’m comfortable enough with the Ukrainian way of life that traveling around the country is pretty easy. Even buying train tickets has finally stopped scaring me!

I think most of my group is going through a bit of a shock right now. Summer is over and suddenly we’ve hit our last year in Ukraine. Were all leaving in May or June, so that was our last summer in Ukraine. And we’re heading into our last fall, our last New Years, etc. It seems weird to say “last” since it’s only the second of two, but, at least for me, there is a very final feeling to some things. 9 months suddenly seems very short. But then I think of all the changes that have occurred in the last year, and I think… 9 months is almost another year! How much more will change before I leave here?!

As I mentioned, this summer I went to Russian Language Refresher instead of Ukrainian Language Refresher. Why, you may be asking, would I choose to go to Russian when I had studied Ukrainian? Well, there are a number of reasons for that answer. The easy answer is, I couldn’t go to Ukrainian Refresher because it was when Melissa was visiting. So that left me with the choice of no Refresher, or going to Russian. Obviously I wouldn’t go to Russian Refresher just to go, but as I said in some earlier entries, I had (kind-of) started studying Russian. I always wanted to study Russian when I found out I was coming to Ukraine and in addition to that most of my town speaks a mix of Russian and Ukrainian called Surgik that strongly favors Russian.

So, to Russian refresher I went, with only a vague understanding of the alphabet (yes, there are about 6 letters that are different from Ukrainian) and a few random words I had picked up from my own Russian studies and talking to people in town. Luckily my friend Heather was coming who had also studied Ukrainian and they told us there would be a group for beginning speakers.

We arrived, got settled in our room, and went to the first big group gathering. Luckily at the large gatherings they usually ask one of the advanced speakers to translate so while I could understand barely a word that was being said, I got a translation!

This Russian Refresher was technically a camp and summer camps in Ukraine are still very much in the old soviet militaristic style, so we were broken into “platoons” and the first thing we had to do was go back with our platoons (of about 10 people) and come up with a captain, an emblem, a song, a motto, etc. All in Russian of course, so first we had to learn those words.

Luckily Heather and I were in the same platoon, but we were not in the same language cluster (half the platoon) and quickly learned that we were not in a group of people who were all new to the language. There was only one other people who had also studied Ukrainian and was now switching languages.

Our first task in learning these words was a pretty typical language learning task, we had a list of sentences and we needed to fill in the words on a flip chart. So a few people took turns writing in the words and then they were like, “Gretchen, your turn!” I turned to the flip chart and thought to myself, “I can’t even read this words, least of all know what they mean!” Heather and I were both a little overwhelmed!

We mentioned to our teachers that we were overwhelmed though, and then to the Language Coordinator and she said she’s put together a special “Russian for Ukrainian Speakers” session during the optional session time the following afternoon. Other than that though, we had to stumble through with the others! Granted, the groups they had put us in were the novice and lower intermediate speakers, but still, they had all studied the language and we hadn’t!

So Heather and I decided we would stick together and do the best we could. And we made it work! We signed up for all beginner classes, with as few students and possible and came prepared to ask questions. Since we both have a good grasp on Ukrainian grammar the Russian grammar came pretty easy to us once it was explained, but it was a good review for the other students in our classes who have a harder time grasping the initial concepts. By constantly asking for different Ukrainian words in Russian were able to slowly build our basic vocabulary and learn some of the key words that are different from Ukrainian.

I still can’t speak much Russian. But I can understand a lot more of what I hear around me, which I think is an important first step. Hopefully now that I’m home and settled (for a least a little while) I’ll be able to start studying the language a little more and maybe learning to speak it a little!

Another story from Melissa’s visit. Well, less a story a more an observation. I don’t think anyone would argue that people change and adapt in different situations. Sometimes the adaptations are small and unnoticeable, even by the person themselves. Until of course something comes into play that brings the change into consciousness.

I’ve never been someone to “rock the boat” so to say. Never ask a lot of questions of someone or something, don’t really like challenging people or their ideas. And I think being here in Ukraine has made me even more that way. I’m dealing with a different culture plus a language barrier so it’s usually easier just to let things go. Even something as simple as not knowing what something is on the menu. In the states, I’d probably ask, but here it’s easier just to order something else rather than try to ask the question (or actually the harder thing is understanding the answer!).

Anyone that knows Melissa though, knows she is the complete opposite. Just one of the many ways we are complete opposites. And so for her coming to Ukraine she had even more questions and comments than usual because everything was so new to her. And it was easy for her to ask the questions. She just asked me in English! I was the one who had to translate it into Ukrainian and try to understand the answer and say it back to her!

All her question asking did a lot more than make me realize how “unquestioning” I was though. First, she asked a lot of good questions of people like my host family and others that I had never asked and I learned a lot about them and about Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Even more importantly, I realized how good my Ukrainian had really become. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still far from perfect. And everyone still answers me in Russian. But for the first time I could really tell that people were answering me in Russian. And I felt comfortable asking all her questions, whether it was what was the best thing on the menu (I don’t think Ukrainian waitresses are used to giving advice!) or do you have those socks in white, I asked all her questions and was actually able to have conversations with people and get her answers!

So, Melissa, if you are reading this blog entry, thanks for all your questions! :-P

Well, I don’t think anyone would be surprised if I said my best friend’s visit to Ukraine was one of the most anticipated events since I’ve arrived in Ukraine. I was counting down the date for months and in the days before I thought her arrival would never come! Finally she arrived, but only after two sleepless nights in a row. Of course, I’ve now discovered that those sleepless nights were not totally just to blame on my anticipation for Melissa’s arrival. Let me veer away quickly from the story of Melissa’s trip to tell another funny (in retrospect) story.

Last October my friend Amy came to visit. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer from Georgia and flew over to Ukraine for a week to visit. We did the same quick visit I do with everyone: Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Korop. In Kyiv we stayed at a hostel and after the first night I woke up the next morning with some things that looked like bites or something all over me and I flipped out and thought there were bedbugs or something in the bed. We stayed there one or two more nights and the bites got worse, but we never found any signs of bedbugs and both Amy and I decided I was just crazy.

Well, this time with Melissa I stay at the same hostel. In fact, I stayed there the 3 nights before she arrived as well, because I had mid-service medical and I decided it would be easier just to stay at the same place and switch rooms. It was deathly hot in Kyiv that week and I was excited about Melissa’s arrival, so it was to be expected that I wouldn’t sleep too well, but that first night I didn’t sleep at all. Just lay awake all night. And it wasn’t just excitement. Within a few hours of getting bed (I watched a movie before bed) I had these big welts all over my body, like big mosquito bites. I couldn’t believe, it was happening again!

Luckily I was in Kyiv for my mid-service medical check-up so I figured I would mention it to the doctor when I saw her. I also happened to wake up in the morning with a totally puffy eye that was half closed over so I could barely see and figured I would mention that to the doc too. But by the time I saw the doctor all the bug bites were gone and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my eye!

The next night, as soon as I went to bed, I started to itch again. At this point I decided maybe it wasn’t bugs. I remembered what had happened last time I was at the hostel and figured maybe I was allergic to the sheets or something. And so, even though it was like 90 degrees I put on my jeans, socks, and a fleece sweater with my hands in the pockets, I covered my pillow with my towel and finally I was able to sleep. I had figured the problem out! But I was schedule to stay at the hostel another 4 nights that week plus the following weekend when Melissa and I came back to Kyiv!

Well, if one thing Peace Corps Service has taught me, it’s to work with what I have and deal with the rest. So with a combination of paper sheets from the doctor and towels I was able to make it through the rest of the trip with minimal hives! The sad thing is, I really like that hostel, but I guess I can’t stay there anymore unless I want to carry my own sheets!

I feel like recently most of my blog entries are just me apologizing for not writing in a long time. And this time I’ve been more delinquent than usual. But this time I also have a better excuse than usual. Literally for the last 7 weeks I’ve been traveling for this meeting or that training or having people visit and showing them around. I’ve been home three times in those 7 weeks and for no more than 3 nights any given time. And two of those times were when people were visiting.

I won’t bore you with all the details on all I did, I think if I was reading this blog that’s the last thing I’d want to do. Quick recap though:

First I traveled to Kyiv for my mid service medical appointment and very anxiously awaited the arrival of my best friend, Melissa, for almost a two week visit. We explored Kyiv, Korop, and Chernihiv for two weeks before I sadly sent her on her way. That same day I headed straight to Russian Language Refreshes (yes, you read that right: Russian!) for four days of immersing myself in a language I never studied! Then I headed home for the weekend before heading back to Kyiv again for a SPA Committee Meeting and this time to anxiously await the arrival of my parents for their visit to Ukraine. My parents and I did a mini version of what Melissa and I did, Kyiv, Korop, and Chernihiv, including a “Parents Meet the Parents” stay in Chernihiv with my host family. After visiting my host family all 3 of us headed on a 25 hour train to Budapest where my mom had a conference and dad and I explored the city. After 4 days in Budapest I headed to Dresden to meet up with Dani, my Spanish host brother from high school, who is living in Dresden, Germany for a year, and finally on to Berlin for a few days where I met up with Alison Valtin, a friend from Choral Arts, and her family, who are living in Berlin for the summer!

Obviously I have lots of thoughts, observations, and musings from all these travels, but so as not to overwhelm the reader, I’ll divide them into separate entries. So stay tuned! 

(written 6/22/09) I don’t have anything particularly interesting to report on right now, but this will likely be my last blog entry for a while so I thought I’d updated you all on the projects I’m working on and why I won’t be able to write for a while!

First, my projects. I’ve currently got five different “projects” I’m working on, which are at various levels of activity. My biggest project which I’ve talked about quite a bit is the social enterprise Internet Club, which is now officially open, although we still need to do some advertising to get customers. I’m also still working on green tourism, the reason Korop applied for a Peace Corps Volunteer, although in a pretty unofficial way. I’ve been working with my friend Vita a little, mostly just providing some networking activities and support. For example, Tolya, the director of the NGO I work with said he wanted to meet with Vita to discuss the green tourism project. We all met together last week and pretty much for an hour and a half they talked and I tried to follow the conversation. I clearly didn’t need to be there, they could have met on their own. But would they have met? I’m not sure. So maybe that’s why I’m here? I’m not really sure! Lol!

I’ve also started working with the library a little more seriously, as I mentioned in a previous entry.

We’re doing a project to help the library get more popular, up-to-date literature and bring more young people to the library.

I’m still working with the NGO that wrote the grant for the internet club as well. They have lots of big ideas about projects, but I’m hoping before we move forward with any new projects to do some strategic planning with them so they can focus their efforts a little more. Also, since I’ll only be here another year, it will give them a path to follow after I leave!

Last to mention is actually my first official project that I started here as a Peace Corps Volunteer and that’s my English club. The English club is on hold for the summer, but will probably start up again in the fall.

Now to why I won’t be able to write for a while. Tomorrow I head off on 5 weeks of traveling, meetings, trainings, etc. with only a few days back in Korop here and there. I’m headed to Kyiv tomorrow for a mid-service medical appointment with the doctors, and them my best friend, Melissa is arriving from DC on Thursday!!! We’re going to spend the weekend in Kyiv and then head back to my site, hopefully via Konotop (the nearest big city to me) where she can meet some other volunteers and we can check in with the new volunteer, Jud, who just arrived there last Thursday! After a couple of days at my site we’re going to head to Chernihiv to see my host family for a couple of days and then back to Kyiv for the weekend before she takes off.

The day she leaves Russian Language Refresher starts. Yes, you read that correctly, RUSSIAN language refresher! You all know I studied Ukrainian but I started studying Russian as well. To be honest, I haven’t been very good about it, but I can’t go to the Ukrainian Refresher, because it’s when Melissa is here, and I figured what better way to kick off my Russian studies than a training! I’m pretty terrified though, because most everyone else there will have studied Russian! Although they promise me there will be a group for language switchers like me!

At the end of Language Refresher I plan to head back to Kyiv for at least a night to celebrate my friend Shaun’s 25th birthday and then back to site for a couple of days. I’ll spend those days crazily reading SPA grants before I head back to Kyiv only 3 days later for SPA Committee, and then my parents arrive on the last day of the Committee Meeting!

My parents and I will do a mini version of what Melissa and I are doing, Kyiv, Korop, Chernihiv, before heading to Budapest a week later together. My mom has a conference there and my dad and I are tagging along!

Finally, after 3 days in Budapest I’ll take the 24 hour train back to Konotop by myself and get back at site, just in time for August to start!

I’ll try to keep you updated on my adventures along the way, but if you don’t hear from me for a while, just think of all the fun I’m having and go out and enjoy your summer too!

The weekend was my first full weekend home in quite a while, so I had big plans to clean and do laundry. Most important on the list were defrosting my fridge and cleaning my sheets. I realized though, that I would be traveling for about 6 weeks straight in the end of June and all of July and it might be better for me to do those two things the very last weekend before I headed off for a month and a half.

So, I spent Saturday alternating between transferring stuff to my new computer, cleaning, and watching Bones. I felt a little lazy (although I did clean my bathroom and vacuum!) but it was nice to have a relaxing day!

Friday morning I woke up very glad it was Friday! I had a relatively busy day (for Peace Corps standards) scheduled. I had a 10am meeting with my friend Vita, who is working on green tourism, and Tolya, the director of the NGO I’m working with, because Tolya wanted to see how he could help with green tourism. I also wanted to get back to the library (for the 4th time!) so see if I could get the documents to the director there. I had tutoring too. 3 meetings in one day are unheard of in my schedule!!

The morning passed pretty quickly, with my checking my email and the news and 10am came quickly. I sent a quick text to Tolya to tell him we were meeting at my office and then at about 9:55am got a call from Vita that she couldn’t meet. This is pretty typical in my experience; about half the meetings I schedule get cancelled or postponed, often many times. So, I sent Tolya another text telling him we’d have to reschedule and thought about what to do with my free time. I figured I’d head over to the library and see if I could finally catch the director, and I also wanted to print all my fellowship application materials so I could mail them back to the states.

I headed over the library and finally she was there! I passed off the documents to her and we set up a time to meet the following week after she had a chance to look at them. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before what I’m working on with the library so I’ll take a second to do so here.

When I first arrived in Korop the library was listed as one of my partner organizations, so I had a couple of meetings with them when I first arrived, but my language skills were not very good and I didn’t have good access to a translator, so nothing really ever came of it. As I hit my one year anniversary here though, I realized I had a lot of free time and should probably try to build that relationship up again. I went back again, and with Vita’s help have starting working on a project with them.

One of the problems they identified is that they don’t have any money to purchase newer, popular literature that people wanted to read. Vita also pointed out that it was a problem that young people don’t use the library much. I thought these two problems might be interconnected, because if the library had more popular literature, younger people might be more interest in coming to the library. We decided to build on an existing club they have for young people, by purchasing new books, getting a computer for them to use and offering things like books clubs and more frequent meetings. The resources will be available to anyone who uses the library, but will be focused on people in their late teens and early 20s. We’ve decided to write a Partnership Grant for the project, which is a Peace Corps Grant that depends on donations from friends and family back in the states to fill the grant, so I can promise you you’ll be hearing more about the project in the future, when I start soliciting donations!

After meeting with Iryna, I printed my fellowship documents and the computer store and headed back to my office. I hit up the bazaar, since it was Friday but surprisingly there were no strawberries to be had! I did get some delicious cherries though. With all my traveling around and meeting the morning passed very quickly and lunch time arrived before I knew it! I headed home for lunch and then back to the office afterwards for my tutoring with Tanya. On my way home from tutoring I stopped at the store for some sour cream, yogurt, and bread, and then spent the afternoon playing with my new computer!

The evening was spent as usual, dinner, a bath, and some TV watching on my computer!

Thursday my alarm went off at 3:30am and unlike most days, I was surprisingly awake. Maybe I should wake up at 3:30am more often! In the summer it’s not so bad, it’s actually already light out here at 3:30 so it doesn’t feel quite so much like you’re waking up in the middle of the night.

Why was I getting up so early, well, I was headed to Kyiv for the day. As I’m sure most of you know, Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine. Ukraine is a huge country (about the size of Texas) compared to other European countries, so PCVs proximity to Kyiv varies. For me it’s 4-5 hours depending out I go, which means it’s possible to make it a day trip, but it’s a long day.

I have a few different options to get to and from Kyiv. Once a day a bus runs back and forth direct to Kyiv. It leaves Korop at 5am arriving outside Kyiv around 9am and leaves Kyiv at 3:30pm arriving back in Korop around 7:30pm. Even though it’s the fastest way and it’s more convenient to take only one bus, I tend not to use this option because of the timing. 5am’s not the most fun time to get on a bus in the morning, and usually I can’t make it to the Peace Corps office for 10am meetings anyway, because even once the bus arrives in Kyiv, I need to take the metro to the other side of the city to get to the Peace Corps office. Plus, the bus arrives right in the middle of rush our, so I’m crammed on the metro. And when I say crammed, I mean CRAMMED! Especially not pleasant if I have bags with me, which I often do.

When I have a 9 or 10am meeting, I usually prefer to cough up the money to stay in Kyiv the night before and travel through Chernihiv. Buses run from Korop to Chernihiv 7-8 times a day (3 hours) and then marshurtkas leave Chernihiv for Kyiv every 10 minutes or so (another 2 hours) so I can go pretty much any time of day I want.

This time though, I wanted to go just for the day so I didn’t have to miss too much work, didn’t have to pay to spend the night, and most importantly, didn’t have to take an annual leave day! The purpose of my trip to Kyiv was to meet up with Carey, who was traveling back from the states, and pick up a new computer I had bought and she was carrying back for me. I was very excited!!

So I arrived in Kyiv and headed to the officer where I was going to hang out until I met up with Carey. I wasn’t sure when she was coming in, so I just browed the internet in the computer lounge and hung out with other volunteers who happened to be in the office. One of the nice things about having so many PCVs in Ukraine (about 300) is that there’s almost always someone in the office, usually someone I’m at least a little bit acquainted with, so there’s usually someone to hang out with, go eat with, etc.

Finally Carey arrived with my new computer! Her mom was with her, who I was looking forward to meeting, and we all headed out to grab lunch and catch up a little. After that I didn’t have much time, if I was going to make it back home that night, so I stopped in to say hi to my Regional Manager and the headed back out to reverse my trip into Kyiv that morning. I finally made it home about 7pm that night (the bus driver that day was super speedy!) and collapsed. I was very glad I had forced myself to cook on Wednesday because all I had to do was heat the soup for dinner. After dinner I thought about playing with the new computer, but I was so exhausted I barely touched it. Watched a couple episodes of Bones and headed to bed!

Wednesday morning start the same way most every morning starts. Didn’t want to get out of bed, ate breakfast, went to work where I followed my email/facebook/news checking routine.

Once my morning routine was done, I headed back to the library to see the director, who hadn’t been there the last two times I had gone to see her. But alas, I was told she has gone to the bazaar. See, Wednesday is what we call “big bazaar day” in our town. The market in our town is right across from my office building and it made of up lots of little stalls of people selling different things. On an average day it will pretty much be empty. Maybe one or two food stalls open. We technically have a bazaar three days a week, Wed, Fri, and Sun, which means more stalls open and there’s a place inside where you can buy meat and cheese and things like that. But Wednesday is the big day. If you need something from the bazaar, Wednesday is your best bet. Our small, quiet village suddenly explodes on Wednesday morning with cars parked up and down the main street into town, people walking around buying things, and this time of year the “cheep cheep cheep” of lots of baby chicks lined up for sale.

I knew I had a busy morning ahead of me, so I told them I’d try to stop back by, but wasn’t sure if I’d really make it. See, Wednesday was the day for my fellowship application. The deadline was Friday and I wanted to get it in before then, in case anything went wrong and Thursday I was heading to Kyiv all day so Wednesday was it. Had to get the written statement done.

So, of course in procrastination I made my own bazaar trip first. I usually keep a running list of things I need and pop into the bazaar on all three days to see if they have what I need, and of course, Wednesday is my best bet. What I was most looking forward to was the strawberries. Ukrainian strawberries are amazing and they suddenly appear in early June and they’re everywhere. I hadn’t seen them in Korop yet, but I figured they would be there on bazaar day and indeed they were! Almost all the babas were selling them. I also needed some more borcht making materials, so I stocked up on beets and cabbage from the babas too. (Interestingly, potatoes, beets, and carrots are harder to come by than other more exotic fruits and veggies because everyone has them at home so no one needs to buy them… but on bazaar days the babas sell them, so that’s when I get them!)

Finally my shopping was done and I knew I couldn’t procrastinate any more, so I sat down at my computer and continued from the three paragraphs I has already written the day before. As I expected the more I wrote, the easier the thoughts flowed and suddenly I was done! I was at exactly three pages, the limit, and was pretty happy with what I wrote so I decided to take that as a sign. After a little proofing and re-reading I set it aside and decided I would go ahead and email it that day because if I held on to it I would just obsess over it and it probably wouldn’t get any better. I finished just in time to head home for lunch!

After lunch I got the application sent off and then debated getting things done or just relaxing. I knew I was heading to Kyiv the next day for a long day and as much as I wanted to just be lazy and do nothing, I knew that I would be happy with myself if I cooked and had some food prepared for when I got home from Kyiv. So, I spent the afternoon making more borcht to put in the fridge, ate dinner, took a bath, and headed to bed.

Tuesday morning I woke up knowing I had to go to work. So of course I wanted to stay in bed. But I rolled out of bed, ate my usual hard boiled eggs, yogurt, fruit and bread for breakfast and headed to work. I had one major goal for the day: get some work done on my application for a fellowship for grad school in 2010. The application itself was pretty easy but I had a three page written statement that had been eluding me for the past week. I also wanted to stop by the library to drop off some documents for the director for a project we’re thinking about doing.

So, I arrived at work and started my usual morning routine. I arrive at 8am, plug in my computer and my cell phone for internet (my org has internet but for some reason can’t connect it to my computer) and first check my email and facebook. This took a little longer than usual, since I hadn’t officially checked my email since Friday (I check it at home but tend to do most of my email work at work). Once I’ve seen what everyone is up to on facebook I switch that to my google reader page and catch up on the news and friends and families blogs. So I read some more about all the different crises going on in Ukraine (economic, political, gas…) and then moved on to my second news source of the day, the NY Times. I perused those headlines and then decided it was time to get down to work.

The hardest thing about writing a person statement is that first sentence and first few paragraphs. You need a good start and nothing was coming to me. After sitting there for a little while with nothing coming to me, I decided to head over to the library and see if Iryna was there to get the documents from me. Yes, I was procrastinating, but with something that I needed to do anyway, so I felt it was justified.

Well, Iryna wasn’t there (this was the second time I had stopped by and she wasn’t there!) but my friend Vita, who works in the building, said she would be back the next day so I headed back to work. Now, there was nothing left but to write! I managed to eek out 3 paragraphs or so but by that time it was 1pm and time for me to head home. This is my normal schedule, I work at my office from 8am-1pm and then “work from home” (since I barely have any work to do at work, working from home means doing laundry, cooking, and watching movies) after lunch. So I headed home for a lunch of borcht.

Since it was Tuesday, I had tutoring after lunch, so I headed back to my office at 2pm for tutoring. It was quite a session, we’re in the chapter that deals with time and dates and all that fun stuff, and Tuesday’s session we worked on the proper way to say dates. You’d think dates would be pretty easy and something I had mastered a long time ago. But you’d be wrong. See there are cardinal numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) and ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). That’s just like in English, and it’s used much the same, for dates we use ordinal. The nominative case of the ordinal number has 4 different endings depending if it’s male, female, neutral, or plural (so 1st is перший, перша, перше, or перші depending on noun). Normally when you say a date you use the neutral nominative ordinal. (1st would be перше). When it’s a special date though, like a birthday or a holiday you use the genitive of the ordinal, not the nominative. So, if my birthday was the first, I would say першого. Adding in the year makes things even more complicated. If you’re just talking about the year, you use the nominative male form. But if you’re saying the month and day before the year, you have to use the genitive form for the last number of the year. Plus, they say out the year like “(One) thousand nine hundred seventy sixth year.” So, for example January 21, 1976 would be said like this: двадцять перше січня, тисяча дев’ятсот сімдесят шосого року.

Here’s a break down of that date:

двадцять – Twenty (cardinal)in nominative form

перше – First (ordinal) in nominative neutral form

січня – January in genitive form

тисяча – Thousand (cardinal) in nominative form

дев’ятсот – Nine hundred (cardinal) in nominative form

сімдесят – Seventy (cardinal) in nominative form

шосого – Sixth (ordinal) in genitive form

року – Year in genitive form

We finished the lesson by learning how to say “IN” such and such a year something happened. That’s the locative form and changes everything yet again. Seem so easy now?

After tutoring I headed home and did a little more laundry and settled in for the evening with a Bones marathon. Not sure if I mentioned it in any earlier entries, but Carey just gave me this show and I’m totally addicted!!!! Took a break for more borcht for dinner, went back to my marathon, and headed to bed!

Monday morning I woke up and of course didn’t want to get out of bed. I actually had a feeling I didn’t have to work that day. The Peace Corps staff schedule had said it was a Ukrainian holiday, but no one had mentioned anything to me. I went back and checked the “Seasonal Calendar” I had put together when I first got to site, and it didn’t say anything about a holiday though, so I headed to work.

You know how people say it’s funny how a chain of events works? Like, you make one decision to do something and it affects a whole other set of events? Well, I should have taken my trash out to the dumpster that morning which would have meant walking the back way to work but it had rained the day before and the back way involved a muddy dirt road and I was wearing a dress, so I decided to wait and throw my trash away later. So I walked the “through town” way to work. As I was walking around my building, my friends Vita and Vitya pulled up in Vitya’s car and hopped out at the store. Vita got out and said hi to me and said they were headed to the village for the day. I asked why she wasn’t going to work and she said “Silly Gretchen, it’s a holiday!” Yeah, so I was right! I didn’t have to work! So I turned around and headed home, mad I hadn’t gotten to sleep in, but still happy for the free day! Had I gone the back way I wouldn’t have seen her and I would have ended up going to work! I probably would have eventually realized that I didn’t have to work, but the truth is, it’s hard to tell sometimes. My coworkers come and go and miss days and I see no pattern to it whatsoever, so unless they tell me it’s a holiday (which I’ve found they don’t really do anymore!) I never really know!

So, I headed home, excited for my free day. I changed back out of my dress and into my “house clothes” (a Ukrainian norm that I LOVE!) and forced myself to be at least a little productive with my free day. After climbing back into bed and reading for a little while, I decided to do laundry since it wasn’t raining (at least yet) and it was warm enough that the clothes might actually dry by the end of the day. Doing laundry here isn’t quite a simple as in the states, which I’ve discussed in other blog entries. Boiling the water itself can take 45 minutes to an hour, plus waiting for it to soak, and rinsing it and ringing it out, so by the time I was done with that I was heading towards lunch time (borcht). After lunch I allowed myself to relax and watched some TV on my computer until dinner (yes, borcht) and after dinner I took a bath, another time-consuming event that takes all evening (boiling even more water than for laundry!!).

In Ukraine the week actually runs from Monday – Sunday, but since in America it starts on Sunday and most of you all reading this are Americans, I thought I’d start there.

Sunday morning I woke up after a rough night in a hostel in Kyiv. With my crazy insomnia I pretty much hate sleeping in dorm hostels, but its way cheaper than any other option, so I suck it up. Why was I in Kyiv you ask? Well, Saturday I had an Environmental Working Group Committee Meeting in Kyiv and there’s no way to get back to my site after the meetings end so I’m stuck for the night. So, I slept in a little and then got up and took a nice long hot shower. That’s one nice thing about visiting Kyiv, the hot showers. The only time my hair really gets clean is when I’m visiting someone or in Kyiv and I always try to make the shower my very last thing before heading home, so I can put off my bucket bath that much longer!

But, I eventually had to get out of the shower and I packed up my stuff and headed home. For me, traveling to and from Kyiv is a combination of lots of little modes of transport. There is one direct bus from my town to Kyiv each day, but it leaves Korop at 5am, so I usually opt to sleep in, and the one heading out of Kyiv doesn’t get to Korop until 7:30pm at night, and if I have the option, I like to get home a little earlier.

So first I walked the 30 minutes from the hostel to the train station where I hopped on the metro to head to the other side of town. Luckily the metro wasn’t too crowded, since it was Sunday morning, because it was already starting to get hot and muggy. I rode the metro to the last stop on the red line, Lisova, where marshrutkas to Chernihiv are always waiting. You just hop on, find a seat, wait for it to fill up, and they’re off, which is nice for getting between Kyiv and Chernihiv. 2 hours later and the marshrutka dropped me off in the center of town, right outside a popular PC Trainee hang-out, Два Гуся (Two Geese) a café with wifi. I figured since I was right there I’d pop in and see if any of the trainees were inside and indeed, one of my Adopt-A-Cluster girls was there! So we chatted for a few minutes (they’re done in two weeks!!) and I headed on my way.

I hopped on a local marshrutka to the train station and was disappointed to see they had raised the fare again! When I arrived in Chernihiv the marshrutka price was 1 griven and while I lived there, they raised it to 1.50. Now it’s 2! Not surprisingly, the bus was nearly empty as I think everyone is now opting for the 75 kopek (a griven is like a dollar, a kopek is like a cent) trolley buses!

I arrived at the train station, walked over to the bus station and was thrilled to see a bus to Korop sitting there! I have the bus schedule from Chernihiv on my computer, but I always forget to check it and will inevitably just miss one and have to wait two hours. But I ran inside bought a ticket and was off just 15 minutes later! I even had time to grab a quick candy bar (healthy lunch, I know) and some water! The bus remained pretty empty the whole ride so I got two seats to myself the whole time and just popped in my ipod and looked forward to getting home and relaxing!

I made it to Korop by later afternoon and on my way home popped into the store to get some frozen chicken so I could make my biweekly pot of borcht that evening. And of course I picked up some other essentials, bread, eggs, and syharki, which are like little croutons that you eat like chips. I know, it sounds weird, but come and visit and try them. Delish!

Headed home and got settled. Scrambled some eggs for dinner (my second most frequent meal after borcht) and settled into borcht making. As I said before, I make borcht like two times a week, so it’s become pretty second nature to me, but it does take time. Mostly it takes time because I have to boil the frozen chicken and depending on the size of the piece, that can take 45 minutes or even over an hour. While the chicken boils I grate the carrots and beets (which is WAY easier because I bought a mixer last month!!!) and chop the potatoes and onions. When the chicken is done I pull it out to cool and add the potatoes to the broth. Then I fry up the veggies in some oil and add those to the pot. I let that boil a little while I separate the chicken meat from the bone and then I add the chicken, some tomato paste, and spices to the soup. Then I chop up some cabbage, add that to the pot, and let it simmer until the cabbage is soft.

So, with all that, borcht cooking too most of my evening. Then I settled in to a couple episodes of Bones (which Carey has gotten me TOTALLY addicted to!!!) and headed to bed!

So, back when I first arrived in Ukraine and again when I first arrived at site, I wrote detailed “week in the life” blogs about what I was doing. I promised everyone I’d do another one when I’d been here a year. I’ve been putting it off, because many weeks, well, honestly, I don’t do much! I remember thinking to myself when I first got here how much I’d have to write once I’d been here for a whole year, how many projects I’d have! The last few weeks have been a little busier, though, and the fact is, one year has come and gone and my one year at site is fast approaching, so here we go, the following entries will show you a week in my thrilling life!

This past weekend I went out west again, to Chernivsti (not to be confused with Chernihiv, where I trained) to visit a friend who is (sadly!) finished with her service and headed back to the states next week. The visit was great, and you can see photos on facebook soon, but this entry is about my trip home.

As some of you know, I live in a little village that is a bit of a transportation black hole. We have a train station, but it’s way outside of town and trains only arrive and depart twice a week (Fri. and Sun.) and only go one place, a village called Altynivka about 30 km from here. We have lots of buses though, to Chernihiv, our oblast center, surrounding villages, and Konotop, the nearest big city. So, unlike most Peace Corps Volunteers in Ukraine my transportation usually involves buses. The only time I take trains is when I’m going someplace on the other side of the country.

So, while most PCVs are train experts by one year in, I’m still a bit of a train novice. I’ve taken them a number of times now, but surprisingly, never alone (well no overnight trains alone). The beginning of this trip was no different, as my friend needed to be in Kyiv, so we took the 14 hour train ride back to Chernivsti together.

The end of the trip was different though, I was returning home all on my own. My very first solo overnight train trip! So, even though I’ve done plenty of train travel with other people, I was a little nervous to be alone. Not nervous about safety or anything like that, more nervous about stupid things like sharing the seat with someone I didn’t know, being stuck with 3 loud guys who would annoy me (maybe that is a safety thing), etc. And nervous about killing 14 hours of time all alone!

I was ready with a months worth of back issues of The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor, and had my ipod fully charged, not to mention snacks, and so I boarded the train ready but still a little nervous! The train left at 10:30pm at night, so there wasn’t much time before bed. There was only one lady in my kupe and she kindly helped me up onto the top bunk and handed my stuff up to me and that was pretty much it. We didn’t talk much. An hour or so later (after we were in bed) two more ladies got on. I had a typical night on a train, not really sleeping (although I’ve discovered that I do in fact prefer kupe to platzkart… if you want to know what that means let me know!).The next morning I woke up (rather early!) to the three ladies talking and eating down below.

Here’s a little sidebar about train travel in Ukraine: you hear these stories about how when people travel on the train it’s not unusual for them to share food and drink with their fellow passengers, even though they don’t know each other. I have never experienced this but it could be because I a) haven’t traveled much on trains, b) have always traveled with friends, or c) usually travel platzkart.

So, as soon as the ladies realized I was awake they told me to come sit with them and offered me coffee, which I turned down and then tea, which I accepted (and somehow ended up with coffee…). They started asking me questions and talking to me. My phone rang, so I went back up to my top bunk and talked with a friend a while, and then they started handing me more food and wine. So, after getting off the phone I decided I should head back down and talk with them some more. The whole day went like this! They kept feeding me and talking to me. Told me to go ahead and sit on their beds. They told me all about themselves and that I should come visit their towns. One lady even gave me her contact info and told her I should come and stay with her next time I was in town! All in all, you couldn’t ask for a more perfect 14 hour train trip, especially for my first time!

I’ve been thinking recently about my Peace Corps experience versus what I expected. Its something I’ve thought about a lot over my service, but was renewed by a recent blog entry my friend Shaun wrote (http://shaunlyons.blogspot.com/2009/04/letter-writing-during-peace-corps.html) and the fact that I got (somewhat) high-speed internet in my apartment yesterday. I’ll be honest, when I first envisioned my Peace Corps experience I totally bought into the cliché living in a mud hut in some little village where I would work hard outside all day and communication with the “outside world” (America) and my family and friends would be a highly anticipated and rare occurrence.

The reality is, my educational and professional background almost guaranteed me a placement as a “community development” volunteer, working on some kind of NGO/municipal/business development. And those placements tend to be in the more developed Peace Corps countries. NGO development means working with NGOs or other community organizations to build their capacities to do good work in the future. This means training them on things like fundraising, strategic planning, organizational practices, etc. More sitting at a computer than plowing fields. If you took a snapshot of me doing my job here as a peace corps volunteer and set it next to a photo of me doing my job at CCEH or CASW it would be impossible to differentiate between the two unless the photo happened to catch one of my Ukrainian language textbooks on my desk or some of the documents on my coworkers desk.

And placement in a more developed country (and sitting at a computer all day!) means communication is easy and accessible. I check my email every day, carry a cell phone everywhere, and am in constant contact, no different from home. Now I even have high(er) speed internet at my apartment so I can be in even more communication with home, download American television and movies, etc.

The question I’m grappling with though is “Is this okay?” What I expected from my Peace Corps experience was to be immersed in a new culture and cut off from American culture for two years. And yet for the past year, when I only had slow, expensive “pay per kB internet” through my cell phone, I pined for high speed access at home. Partially because it would be easier and more reliable than using the cell phone, but honestly mostly because I wanted to download TV episodes and movies. (The single most popular pastime at large PCV gatherings, aside from drinking, is to exchange movies and TV.) My friend Carey and discussed this issue at length and decided that the desire was there because there was the opportunity. She has internet at home, as do many PCVs and I wanted it because it was a possibility. Had I been in a hut in Africa, where there was no possibility of internet, I wouldn’t have desired it.

But that still doesn’t make it okay. How can I be getting that immersion experience if I’m watching the latest episode of “The Office” only a day after all my friends at home? A different friend Cary has been trying hard to avoid watching too much television because he feels it hinders his language learning ability if he’s watching TV in English. But I don’t have a TV or radio to watch or listen to Ukrainian television (which half the time would be Russian anyway, by the way). If I wasn’t watching a movie in English I would be reading a book in English. I guess technically I could be studying Ukrainian during my free time, but I have a lot of free time! A girl can only study so much! As it is I study both Ukrainian and Russian almost every day! I could be out talking to people in Ukrainian, but I do that as well.

Should I been cutting myself off from all this technology and communication just because that’s what I expected from Peace Corps? Will it really help me be better immersed? Or is this just a different, more globalized and developed Peace Corps experience than I expected? My life is not that different than many Ukrainians who also download music and movies and are very influenced by American culture (albeit dubbed in Ukrainian or Russian). I don’t know if I have an answer. But something to think on as I begin the second half of my service here in Ukraine!

When you think about applying for the Peace Corps, or read about it or see it mentioned in moves and things like that, I think a pretty similar pictures comes into most people’s mind. The task in the photos might differ, the landscape, the dress. But it’s pretty much the same idea. Some idealistic American working or playing or learning happily with some locals while having a truly cultural experience, whatever that may mean for whatever country that volunteer is in. There are just certain things you think of as “the Peace Corps experience.”

The fact is, there are moments where I really feel like a Peace Corps volunteer, but they are rare. Usually, even when I’m having truly cultural experiences, it just seems like my life. None of this out of body “I am a Peace Corps Volunteer” moments that I expected. And, as I’ve been here longer, as I would expect, more of my life seems like just my life and less like a Peace Corps volunteer’s life.

But this weekend, I had a Peace Corps Moment. I went out to “our spot” on the Desna River with my friends. It was the first time we went out since last fall. The day was like any other, we ate way too much, drank lots, lay out in the sun, etc. Finally, as the sun was setting at about 7:30pm we all filed back into the cars to head back home. This time we had a new addition to our party, Рекс (Rex) the family dog. Rex sat on the lap of his owner, a traditionally soviet looking man in the front seat. Honestly, this could have happened anywhere in the world, but for some reason that moment just struck me and I had one of those out of body experiences. Oh my gosh, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer!

Apparently this country profile ran in the Guardian newspaper this past weekend. For those that want to know more about the basics of Ukraine, this sums it up in only a few sentances! I recommend actually going to the website to see the photos and all that...

Taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk/country-profile/ukraine

Country profile: Ukraine

The Guardian, Saturday 25 April 2009

Potted history of the country: Kyivan Rus, the 9th century East Slavic state that would also give rise to Russia, was partly situated on the territory of modern day Ukraine. The Mongols sacked Kiev in 1240. The following centuries saw the country controlled by Lithuania and then Poland, before being split between Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. From 1922, it was part of the Soviet Union, until independence in 1991.

At a glance

Location: East-central Europe

Neighbours: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldavia

Size: 233,090 square miles

Population: 46,221,981 (27th)

Density: 198.3 people per square mile

Capital city: Kyiv (population 1,732,082)

Head of state: President Viktor YushchenkoHead of government: Prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko

Currency: Hryvnya

Time zone: Eastern European time (+2 hours)

International dialling code: +380

Website: kmu.gov.ua

Political pressure points: Ukraine has been in a state of constant political turmoil since the Orange Revolution in 2004. The two leaders of that uprising, President Viktor Yushchenko and prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, are now entrenched foes. Russian speakers in the east form a large and disgruntled minority.

Population mix: Ukrainian 78.13%, Russian 17.34%, Belarusian 0.57%, Moldovan 0.54%, Crimean Tatar 0.52%, other 2.9%

Religious makeup: Orthodox Christian 23%, other Christian 10%

Main languages: Ukrainian, Russian

Living national icons: Eugene Hütz (singer and actor), Milla Jovovich (model and actor), Andriy Shevchenko (football), Artur Ayvazian (rifle shooting), Vitali Klitschko (boxer)

Landscape and climate: Ukraine is dominated by fertile plains that are crisscrossed by large rivers, such as the Dnieper, which flow into the Black Sea. Ukraine's climate is mostly temperate continental, tending towards Mediterranean in Crimea and along the southern coast.

Highest point: Hora Hoverla 2,061 metres

Area covered by water: Less than one square mile

Healthcare and disease: Ukraine has one of the fastest growing HIV/Aids rates in Europe. Rates of TB are 10 to 12 times higher than in developed countries. Alcohol and substance abuse rates are also high. Healthcare spending is reasonable at 7% of GDP, but efficiency is low and trained personnel are in demand.

Average life expectancy (m/f): 62/73

Average number of children per mother: 1.2

Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births: 18

Infant deaths per 1,000 births: 24

Adults HIV/Aids rate: 1.4%

Doctors per 1,000 head of population: 3.1

Adult literacy rate: 99.7% (m 99.8%/f 99.6%)

Economic outlook: Bad. Analysts say the economy is close to collapse after prices for steel, which makes up 40% of Ukraine's exports, collapsed as a result of the global financial crisis.

Main industries: Coal, electric power, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, machinery and transport equipment, chemicals, agriculture, food processing

Key crops/livestock: Grain, potatoes, sugar beet , other vegetables

Key exports: Steel, iron, chemical-related products, processed foods, mineral products, machinery, cereals

GDP: £54,372m (47th)

GDP per head: £1,162

Unemployment rate: 6.4%

Proportion of global carbon emissions: 1.13%

Most popular tourist attractions: Cities of Kiev and Lviv, Odessa, the Black Sea Coast, the worlds longest trolleybus route along the Crimean Peninsula to the town of Yalta

Local recommendation: The 16th-century Hansaray, or palace of the Crimean Khans at Bakhchisaray.

Traditional dish: Borscht (beetroot and vegetable soup)

Foreign tourist visitors per year: 18,900,263

Media freedom index (ranked out of 173): 87

Did you know ... Ukraine suffered the world's worst recorded nuclear accident in 1986 when reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 80 miles north of Kiev, exploded.

National anthem:Ukraine's glory hasn't perished, nor her freedom Upon us, fellow compatriots, fate shall smile once more Our enemies will vanish, like dew in the morning sun And we too shall rule, brothers

I’ve mentioned Ukraine’s role in WWII before, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the “Liberation Army.” As I’ve said before, Ukraine was a major front during WWII. We, as Americans, think of the two fronts simply as the European (France) front and the Japanese front, but the reality is, the European war was happening on two fronts simultaneously. The Germans were advancing through France, but at the same time were advancing the other direction, across Ukraine, in an attempt to take Russia and Russia was also fighting the Germans. (The man at the museum here in town wanted it made very clear to me that during WWII Russia and America were allies.) Some of the worst atrocities against Jews occurred in Ukraine where anti-Semitism was already a problem before the Germans advanced. Battles were fought all over Ukraine (including around where I live) so not only were soldiers killed, but many civilians were caught in the cross fire.

An interesting addition to the story though is the Liberation Army. Many Ukrainians, unhappy with their ties with Russia formed their own units to fight for the freedom of Ukraine. As the article below shows, there were actually four separate armies fighting each other across Ukraine. As through much of its history, Ukraine was fighting against both Russia and Poland for its own independence while the Germans and the Allies were fighting on its soil.

The article was taken from http://www.rferl.org/content/Ukraine_Marks_Anniversary_Of_Battle_Between_Liberation_Army_Soviets/1614454.html

Ukraine Marks Battle Between Liberation Army, Soviets

April 23, 2009

RIVNE, Ukraine -- Ukrainians have marked the 65th anniversary of the largest battle between the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UPA) and Soviet troops during World War II, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports.

At a place called Hurbi, near the town of Rivne, 5,000 UPA fighters from the Bohun division clashed with 30,000 Soviet Red Army and Interior Ministry troops (NKVD) from April 22-25, 1944.

A special commemoration ceremony was held in Hurbi on April 21.

UPA veteran Dmitro Avdeev told RFE/RL that thousands of soldiers from both sides were killed during the fighting, including his two brothers and several friends.

He was wounded and was later sentenced to 25 years in jail by the Soviets.

The UPA fought against Nazi German forces, the Polish underground army, and Soviet forces. It was disbanded in 1949 but some units continued operations until 1956.

Well, for some reason last Friday I got an unprecedented 9 pieces of mail all in one day! (And it all arrived at once too, because I had just checked on Wednesday and didn’t have anything. About half was subscription periodicals and Peace Corps mail, but I still wanted to give a public “Thanks” to everyone who has been sending me packages and mail since I arrived!

In light of that, and since two of the pieces of mail were packages, I wanted to post some new info about sending packages to Ukraine that came from the Peace Corps staff, for those thinking of sending packages in the future.

Based on my own experience, the USPS is the best way to send things. They have a flat rate envelope for $12.95 that my parents always use that usually gets here in a quick week! And even bigger packages have come through USPS with no problem (only two things I’ve received have been opened at customs and I still got everything in the box or envelope. And I’ve had no problem receiving food, but maybe that will change (never send home-made food, always packaged, and leave it in the package). My recommendation is just to use USPS and write “gift.” If they ask for specific, list big items like books and generalize like “books and candy” or something like that.

Also, I think sometimes things come easier if you address them in Ukrainian, so here's my address (both ways) again:

Гретчен Упхолт

А/С 1

Смт. Короп, Чернігівська Обл.

16200

Україна

Gretchen Upholt

PO Box 1

Korop, Chernihivska Oblast

Ukriane 16200

Here’s the PC info:

Due to the recent changes in Ukrainian customs regulations, we strongly discourage you from using express mail services (such as DHL, FedEx, TNT, UPS, EMS, MeEst etc.) when sending mail to Ukraine. The new customs regulations provide for mandatory customs processing of all express mail sent via these services, regardless of the declared value. If you elect to use any of the express mail services please remember that you are responsible for clearing the item with customs and this will require a trip to Kyiv.

United States Postal Service (USPS) is believed to be the most convenient way to send mail from the U.S. to Ukraine. If the declared value does not exceed $200.00 and the total weight is less than 50 kg, then you should be able to get your mail at your local post office without having to pay duty fees. It is also necessary for the shipper to apply the following statement: "Goods for personal use.”

Please keep in mind that customs officers are authorized to change the declared value of mail. For example, if 10 baseball bats are sent to you and the declared value is $199.00, a customs officer may increase this value to $250.00, and you will have to pay duty.

Please do not indicate anywhere in the address or on the package that it is for official use or project related (i.e. Youth Development Project). Remind the sender to use your basic address with no additional titles or modifications to the address. In such cases, Customs workers can identify the package as “Official” and require the recipient to pay a fee.

Ukrainian Customs Law does not allow foodstuff, medicines, money or jewelry to be sent across the border. Parcels containing these items CANNOT be cleared through Ukrainian customs and will be sent back. For full list of prohibited items, please contact Ivan Nykforuk, General Services Assistant.

Please remember that PC Ukraine may not accept mail or packages for PCVs. Please do not send items to the office address. Peace Corps Ukraine staff will not be able to clear packages for you through customs.

As my faithful followers may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging as much over the last couple of months. At least compared to how I blogged when I first got here. I could blame it on being busier, but the fact is, I was busier during training than I’ve ever been a site and besides rare days (and even more rare weeks) where I’m pretty busy, I have plenty of time to blog. But the things is, as I’ve been here longer and longer, my daily activities become less “adventure” and more just, well, daily activities! My languge, cultural adaptation, and time here have made most activities old hat, and when I know how to do things, there’s less chance for something to go wrong or an exciting story to come out of it.

Last Wednesday though, I was reminded that even in the safe harbors of my every day life, surprises may still appear. The event that actually trigged this thought was rather small, but since it got me thinking, I thought I would relay it.

Wednesday is our “big bazaar day” here in Korop. We have a market, or bazaar three mornings a week: Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. But Wednesday is the big one. That’s when the most vendors come and set up tents and people come from all the surrounding villages to shop. So, I usually find myself on Wednesday morning out at the bazaar checking out anything I’ve discovered I needed in the previous week. Almost every Wednesday I stop at one particular woman to buy chicken, I stop at the fruit ladies (who are there every day) to stock up on apples and oranges (and bananas if available!) and I usually make a pass by the babas (short for бабуся in Ukrainian or бабушка in Russian, which technically means “grandmother” but all older ladies are given that term) who are lined up selling veggies on all three bazaar days.

Here’s the thing about Ukrainian vegetables. Beets, carrots, potatoes, onions and cabbage are a staple in every Ukrainian’s diet. But the official fruit and veggie ladies rarely sell them because most Ukrainians (or their families) grow them themselves. I’m often given these by friends, but when I’m not, I need to buy them. Plus, even when the fruit ladies have them, I like to shop from the babas because besides their dwindling pensions, it’s their only source of income. The most hard-core of the babas line up in a particular place every week and I’m usually in need of something they have so I have gotten to know a couple of these ladies and buy from them every week. Each individual baba's wares usually change each week so I end up buying from whoever had what I need.

This past Wednesday though, I needed cabbage and no one had any. Of course they tried to sell me their onions and carrots and dried apples and beans, but I didn’t need any of that (and I’ve become every good at saying “Мені треба тільке...” (“I only need…”) and not being tempted to buy what I don’t need!). So I ventured down to another row of ladies further in the bazaar, who I had never bought from before. I spotted some cabbage and asked how much it was. They told me and I said, okay, I’ll take the little one, how much. And they said something that I totally didn’t understand.

Now, my language still isn’t great, but shopping I’ve pretty much got down. I ask the price in Ukrainian, they tell me in Russian, I can usually understand it anyway if I don’t I ask them to repeat and I understand the second time. So I was a little confused and started to get a little nervous. I mean, not only did I not understand, but these were not people I knew. These ladies didn’t know I was the “Американка” and they needed to speak slowly and help me!

Finally I figured out they wanted me to take the cabbage over to one of the little food stands and ask them to weigh the cabbage in order to figure out how much it would cost. See, when I buy from my normal babas I tell them what I need and they tell me the price, simple as that. They’ve usually pre-weighed the carrots and beets into kilogram or two kilo bags and pre-weighed the cabbage and marked the weight. So, this needing to weight the cabbage was a new thing (especially confusing since I could see a little hanging scale in one of the ladies bags!). But, I figured what choice do I have? And of course, the stand the ladies had gestured to was very crowded (as most of the bazaar is on Wednesdays) with people. I had no idea what to ask and was terrified the lady was going to be like, “Why should I weigh this cabbage for you when you’re not buying anything from me and never have!” (I tend to go to the same few stands when I buy things and the owners have gotten to know me.) Or worse, say the above to me in Russian and I wouldn’t understand!

But, with the adventurous spirit I’ve maintained here, I marched up there and said “Вага будь ласка.” (“Weight, please.”) and handed her the cabbage. Well, she just grabbed it and weighed it, no problem at all! Then of course she shouted the weight and moved on to the next customer. I thought I heard her say “Кіло десять” (which would mean kilo ten (grams)) but I grabbed a quick glance at the scale and I thought it was over 200 grams (instead of the 10). So either I saw the scale wrong or heard her wrong. As I walked the 5 steps back to the babas I pondered which I should say. I figured I would go for the low side of things (it was more likely I saw wrong than heard wrong) and if the babas were like, “No way, that’s way to low!” I could just apologize and blame it on my lack of language skills.

So, I walked over and said “Вона сказала кіло десять” (“She said kilo ten.”) and waited for a reaction. The woman just said (not in these exact words!) lets make it an even kilo, 2 hryvnia. And that was that, I had my cabbage! All that worry for nothing!

Like I said, not a big crazy adventure, but it showed me that even in my daily life, which I’ve become quite comfortable in, there are new experiences lurking around every corner!

Glossary:

Бабуся (ba-boo-sia) – grandmother

Бабушка (ba-boo-shka) – grandmother (Russian)

Мені (meh-nee) - I

треба (tre-ba) - need

тільке (till-kee) – only

Американка (Ah-mer-ee-kan-ka) – American girl

Вага (va-ha) - weight

будь ласка (bood las-ka) – please

Кіло (kee-low) – Kilo (short for кілограм or kilogram)

Десять (des-yat) - ten

Вона (vo-na) - She

сказала (ska-zal-ah) – said (feminine past tense of сказати, to say)

Today I got an email from a friend at home wanting to know more about the Orange Revolution that occurred here in Ukraine in 2004. The Orange Revolution is one of two events in recent Ukrainian history that Americans might recognize (the other is the poisoning of current president Victor Yushenko, which was a related event). I ended up spending 45 minutes talking about the history and the current political situation in Ukraine, so I thought I might copy my email here for those that might be interested. (Elizabeth, I basically copied this word for word from the email I sent you, so no need to read it again!)

Let me try to explain some of the background and current situation for you. I have to warn you, I have a hard time understanding all of this, so some of it might not be totally accurate, but it will give you an idea! In the 2004 election Yankovich and Yushenko were running against each other for president. Yankovich is from the Party of Regions, a party that's popular in the east and has strong ties with Russia and the Russian population in Ukraine. He was backed by the current president before the election, Kuchma. Yushenko started his own party "Our Ukraine" basically as a change party to challenge Yankovich and Kuchma. Tymoshenko joined with Yushenko and together they overcame corruption and election fraud through the Orange Revolution and Yushenko went on the win the presidency.

Tymoshenko (whose also has her own bloc, a combination of smaller parties) was named Prime Minister. Since then though, Yushenko and Tymoshenko's relationship has fallen apart. He dismissed her as Prime Minster, and Yankovich became Prime Minster, then he called for another election and Tymoshenko won again, and he called for a third election in as many years last fall, but it never happened.

Over time Yushenko has repeatedly signed laws diminishing the role of the president in an attempt to maintain a coalition government and remain in power. Right now his approval rating is at like 3% (I actually read that in an article this morning). At this point it seems like the Orange Revolution and all it stood for is just a memory. Yushenko wasn't able to do much that he promised. Corruption is still a problem in business and the government basically isn't able to function, aside from Yushenko and Tymoshenko fighting all the time. And that was before the economic crisis hit.

The crisis has at least taken away some of the attention from the non-functioning government, but unfortunately they are not able to get themselves together and do something about it. Banks across Ukraine are failing and all the leaders can do is point fingers about whose fault it is. The next presidential election is expected to be held in January 2010 so at this point I'm starting to see more news articles looking to the next election. Yushenko's presidency has been dismissed and it seems like no one is expecting anything out of the government until the next election. There are 3-4 major players in the upcoming election right now: Tymoshenko, Yankovich, and two new comers (one more prominent than the other). The more prominent is a liberal and he's coming in third in the polls right now. The other is a conservative who is considered anti-Russia (somewhat popular in the west) but also anti-Semitic. Here is a good article giving some information about these two newcomers: http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=34749&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=468dbf848e.

So, that's kind of the situation now, I hope that helps a little! Or maybe it just made you more confused! lol! The upcoming election is just starting to make the news here, so it will be interesting to see how things play out. This is the first presidential election since the Orange Revolution and since that gov't seems to have failed so much it may be that the "change" platform wins again, although this time the change may simply be back to the way things were pre-2004. Only time will tell!

If you are really interested in the Orange Revolution and figuring out Yushenko, Tymoshenko, and Yankovich, I can recommend a book to you. It's a bit academic, and I don't think it does a very good job of staying impartial, but it does a great job of outlining the situation in Ukraine before the 2004 elections and who all the players are. (There's even a glossary with names and terms that you can refer back to to keep it all straight.) It's called "Ukraine's Orange Revolution” by Andrew Wilson. Here's an Amazon link to it: http://www.amazon.com/Ukraines-Orange-Revolution-Andrew-Wilson/dp/0300112904/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237966254&sr=8-2.The book is a bit expensive, but you might be able to find it on inter-library loan.

Another resource I've seen is a DVD documentary. For those in CT, I think my mom has it in the Pax Educare library, so you can ask her about it. It's less about the politics of the Revolution and more about how it managed to remain peaceful, but it made some good points, if I remember correctly.

I’ve written some here about the power of the English language. Obviously this is not a new idea, but its something living here in Ukraine has made much clearer to me and I’ve been thinking about in the last couple of weeks.

No one would argue that English is the language of the world. When we were in Turkey we were on a mini-bus with travelers from all over the world (in this case Korea, China, and France) and were all easily able to share our stories and communicate: in English.

Living in Ukraine has made me even more aware of the power of English, in a variety of ways. Most obvious is the fact that English is taught in all the schools. Every student in Ukraine studies English, usually for 6 or 7 years. And that is true of the majority of countries of the world.

English is becoming as necessary for students who want to go on to higher education and high paying jobs as it is for American students. In fact in some countries English isn’t even considered a “foreign language.” I met some girls in Kyiv from Norway who in school studied Norwegian, English, and a foreign language of their choice. When I met them they were on vacation from where they live in Poland. They are there in medical school, in an English language program. They were able to study in Poland under a new EU law that honors medical degrees from any EU country. Most people think of the study of English allowing foreigners to travel to England or America to live and work. But even in the EU, a union certainly not dominated by an English speaking country (I’m not sure anyone could argue that any one country holds a dominance over the EU) English opens doors to students to live, study, and work in other non-English speaking counties.

And even here in my little village in Ukraine, where very few people speak conversational English outside of English teachers and a few individuals (mostly young), the English language is present in the everyday life of most of the people I meet, because of the prevalence of American products and their awareness of American society. Some examples:

Half the music that blares out of my coworker Yura’s speakers all day is in English.

Even though my coworkers’ computers systems are in Russian, many of the words are cognates or even just written in English when they are using the computer. At least once a week Yura and my other coworker Pasha are on some website or another where they need to know English. They even needed English to update their ICQ, a Russian messaging system like AIM or Windows Live.

The internet is completely dominated by English and the Roman alphabet. All addresses are in roman letters. Today I was searching for bank braches in Chernihiv, my oblast center, in Ukrainian on the bank’s website. When I didn’t know a word all I had to do was hover over the link and it would appear at the bottom of the page i.e. “http://www.ukrbank.com.ua/branches.”

Many health and beauty products available in Ukraine are American brands. If you look at the front of my toothpaste tube you wouldn’t even know I had bought it in Ukraine. It says “Colgate Total,” “12 hours protection,” and “Whitening” in English right on the front with not a Cyrillic letter to be found. Only by turning it over and reading the tiny letters on the back would you know you hadn’t bought it in America (well that and the exorbitant price tag!). Shampoo, conditioner, soap, all the names are in English. Helpful for me but that means your every day Ukrainian becomes familiar with terms like “whitening,” “shine,” “curl,” etc.

And all of this English has gotten me thinking. First it got me thinking the big question: how did America become the country everyone turned to for products and services? I think that question is too big to answer here. But it leads to other questions. Yes, America is right now the single world superpower. But there are plenty of other fully developed high power countries. What is someone in say, Germany, had invented Microsoft instead of Bill Gates? Would we all be struggling with interpreting German words when out computer malfunctioned? Or what if the Internet had first taken off someplace like Russia. Would all web addresses be in Cyrillic instead of Roman characters? Or, even if these things had happened in other countries, would English still be the dominate language because of the whole America superpower thing? It seems kind of like the “chicken and the egg” problem and thinking about it too hard makes my head start to hurt!

A more interesting question though, is how this phenomenon affects us as Americans. The fact is that, simply because I had the fortune of being born in America, I can travel the world without ever having to learn another language. When I travel places, people from other countries know all about my culture. They study Thanksgiving in school, they listen to Fall Out Boy and Britany Spears on the radio, and when they go to the movies or turn on the TV they’re usually watching a Hollywood blockbuster dubbed over in their native language. And of course they know who the American president is. They even know the candidates as far back as the primaries! (In my English club last week we discussed “news” and used old newspapers and magazines to find articles about different topics. They had no trouble recognizing Hilary Clinton by sight. How many of you (be honest!!) have even heard of Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian Prime Minister? I know I hadn’t before coming to Ukraine.)

As an American, when I arrived in Ukraine people were fascinated by me. They wanted to meet me, talk to me, and ask me what I thought of Ukraine and about American culture. I can’t imagine nearly as many people being so excited and interested if a Ukrainian arrived in the town I grew up in in CT. The fact is, immigrants arrive in America every day from all over the world. America is the destination. People want to go there and leave their home country.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to generalize. There are plenty of Americans who are knowledgeable and interested about the world and its cultures. And there are plenty of people all over the world who have no desire to move to America. (In fact, there are clearly people who have a strong hated for America and all it stands for.) But I think I can safely argue that the scales will always fall on more people want to be in America and more people knowledgeable about America. And of course, more people knowing English. Although English is not the most spoken language in the world and some people have argued that its place in global business is falling to other languages such as Mandarin, I don’t think the power that the English language and America hold over the world will be gone any time soon.

(Side bar, as I write this I’m half listening to my coworkers listening to the news on their computer and hearing the words “dollar” and “American.”)

Okay, now back to how this phenomenon has affected us as Americans. I think it has allowed our citizens to become woefully unaware of the world around them. This global economic crisis has showed us that an awareness of the world is becoming more important every day as the economy becomes more globally dependent. While students in most countries study their own language, English, and often a third language (fourth, fifth…) most school systems in America don’t even require a second language. Most of the world news Americans are aware of, and what makes the top stories on the news is stories about Iraq and Afghanistan, and then it’s only what’s happening with the American troops that are there. In general we’re a very self-centered nation and the world addiction to America has just fed that egocentricity.

So, I guess the point of all these ranting and raving is that I’m really grateful for the fact that I’ve had the chance to experience more of the world. And when done right, Peace Corps really offers Americans the chance to counteract the Americanism they hold. We are provided language and cross cultural training and (although not everyone follows this) encouraged to work in the country’s language rather than being dependent on translators and people that speak English. Not always an easy task (I’ll speak from experience) but I think the point is less about actually functioning in the native language and more about making the effort whenever possible. By living away from other Americans and only with locals we are much more easily able to learn about local culture, politics, etc. than if we lived in a big expat center like the capital. Not only do I feel like I’m a better world citizen for knowing these things, I also think I’m a better American for being able to see how America is perceived by the rest of the world. I’m not denouncing everything America has to offer by any means, rather I think my experience (along with other experiences I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life) have made me more aware and grateful for all the advantages being an American gives me, and I hope that I can share that appreciation with other Americans at home.

I feel as bit as though I'm spending more time posting photo links and newspaper articles up here than actually writing, but I thought some of you might be interested in the article below. I've mentioned Holodomor a few times on this blog. For those that don't remember, it's the collectivization and famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine and other rural Soviets 75 years ago. A new memorial was just erected in Kyiv and this article just ran in the New York Times discussing it. Unfortunately it's one of many tragic world events (which Ukraine by no mean has a monopoly in) that is vastly ignored in the press and in history books.

A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions

KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.

Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.

The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame, seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.

“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.”

The concrete memorial was dedicated last November, the 75th anniversary of the famine, in a park in Kiev, on a hillside overlooking the Dnieper River in the shadow of the onion domes of a revered Orthodox Christian monastery. More than 100 feet tall, the memorial will eventually house a small museum that will offer testimony from survivors, as well as information about the Ukrainian villages that suffered.

In the Soviet Union, the authorities all but banned discussion of the famine, but by the 1980s the United States and other countries were pressing their own inquiries, often at the urging of Ukrainian immigrants.

In response, Communist officials embarked on a propaganda drive to play down the famine and show that the deaths were caused by unforeseen food shortages or drought. Professor Kulchytsky said he had been given the task of gathering research but concluded that the famine had been man-made.

“I became convinced that everything was not as I once thought,” he said.

He refused to falsify his findings and instead released them publicly, escaping punishment only because glasnost had begun under the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The famine is known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor — literally, death or killing by starvation — and the campaign to give it recognition has played a significant role in the Ukrainian quest to shape a national identity in the post-Soviet era. It has also further strained relations with the Kremlin, another of the festering disputes left by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange Revolution of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered because he wanted to decimate the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out aspirations for independence from Moscow.

The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said Professor Kulchytsky, who is deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kiev.

Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the horrors of that time.

“It is difficult to bear,” he acknowledged. “The documents about cannibalism are especially difficult to read.”

Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially quarantining and starving many villages.

“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”

In recent years, Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, has regularly spoken out about the famine, and has even sought to make denying it a crime. Ukraine has asked other countries to recognize the famine as genocide and to establish memorials. One is being built in Washington.

In Kiev, the memorial has started to become a pilgrimage site.

“Of course, it is needed,” said Hrigory Mikhailenko, 75, a construction executive from central Ukraine who stopped by during a business trip. “So many people died. Four members of my family. It’s very important to note what happened. That is why Russia is pressuring us.”

Russia has spurned the memorial. Instead of attending its dedication, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, sent a letter to Mr. Yushchenko accusing him of using the famine to discredit Russia.

“We do not condone the repression carried out by the Stalinist regime against the entire Soviet people,” Mr. Medvedev wrote. “But to say that it was aimed at the destruction of Ukrainians means going against the facts and trying to give a nationalist subtext to a common tragedy.”

Last month, Russian historians and archivists sought to bolster the Kremlin’s case, issuing a DVD and a book of historical documents that they said demonstrated that the famine was not directed at Ukraine. Many of the documents were translated into English, underscoring how the two countries are waging their fight on an international stage.

Professor Kulchytsky said the Kremlin feared that if it conceded the truth, Russia, considered the successor to the Soviet Union, could face claims for reparations. Still, he said he would not ignore misstatements by the Ukrainian side, either.

For example, President Yushchenko has said that as many as 10 million Ukrainians died, while Professor Kulchytsky believes that the figure is 3.5 million.

Nor is the professor enamored with the design of the memorial, saying that he would have preferred some of the other proposals. But he said there was no doubt that the country had to be reminded of its history.

“I know many people, including famous people — smart, intellectual people — whose relatives, grandparents, died in the famine, and they speak out harshly against focusing on Holodomor,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “They consider it not a part of the present. But how can we be quiet about what occurred? Our people were the victims of a great crime.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 16, 2009, on page A11 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/world/europe/16kiev.html?_r=5

One of my favorite places we went in Turkey was a small village called Kaya outside of Fethiye. Some of you may be familiar with a book out at stores now called “Birds Without Wings” that takes place near Fethiye, in a town we were told is based on the town of Kaya.

First, a little about “Birds Without Wings,” for those who have not read it. The book tells the concurrent story of a number of characters with two main story lines. First, the life and rise of Ataturk, who would become the first leader of Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time the author is relaying the lives of the people in a small (fictitious) village outside the town of Fethiye.

I will be the first to admit, my Turkish history is not great, and still isn’t great even after reading the book and visiting Turkey, but one of the main points of the story is the relationship between the Turks (or Ottomans as they were known as before the fall) and the Greeks. (Note, if you know this history better than me and can make any corrections, please let me know!!) After World War II, the Ottoman Empire went to war with Greece. My understanding is, the Greeks were trying to take back territory (on what is now modern day Turkey) that they considered rightfully theirs. If I have my history right, Wilson and the League of Nations (this was just before the start of the UN) stepped in and brokered a deal as the war was ending. Land boundaries were drawn, and the biggest effect of the deal was the exchanging of Greek and Turkish people.

At the time, anyone who lived in Turkey but was a Christian was considered Greek and anyone who lived in Greece but was a Muslim was considered a Turk. The village in the book, based on Kaya, happens to be a small village where there is a large number of Christians. The book paints a picture of two groups of people who, though they live their lives in different ways, live well together and have fused their cultures. They have separate schools and churches, but they all speak Turkish (I think it was basically a dialect of Arabic) but many of those who can write (mostly Christians) write it in Greek letters. The two groups intermarry freely (the wife converts to the other religion).

After the war with Greece, as I said above, all Christians therefore were sent “back” to Greece and all Muslims “back” to Turkey. In Kaya, because there were so many Christians, the town became almost abandoned. The Muslims sent over from Greece were supposed to live in the Christian’s houses, but that didn’t happen. There are conflicting stories, some saying there were not enough Muslims to fill the houses, and others saying the Muslims didn’t want to live there.

Either way, today Kaya is a ghost town. The village is made up of about 200 hours built on the side of a hill but today the entire town is abandoned. It has become a pretty popular tourist attraction, so I imagine the effect of the “abandonedness” is lessened with crowds of tourists wandering around, but we happened to be there in the off season on a horribly rainy day (we even got caught at the top of the hill in a hail storm!) where we didn’t see another soul except down at the bottom of the village where the tourist shops and restaurants are.

It really was a ghost town. It wasn’t broken down enough or commercialized enough to be like old ruins in other parts of Turkey where paths are set and tourists with maps and guidebooks wander around. This was literally just house after house after house with no one around. Like one day everyone just picked up and disappeared, which is pretty much what happened! I think that in combination of the fact that I was reading the book at the time, allowed the visit to have quite an effect on me.

For those not on facebook, here are some of the latest photos I've uploaded:

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Kyiv Part 1

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Kyiv Part 2

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Kyiv Part 3

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Chernihiv Part 1

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Chernihiv Part 2

Amy's Visit to Ukraine: Korop

My Birthday

Sasha's Birthday Part 1

Sasha's Birthday Part 2

Sauna

Christmas and New Years in Korop

November Birthday Extravaganza

My Apartment

Thanksgiving 2008

Visit to Vitya's Grandmothers'

As exciting as it is to see Ukraine on the front page of the New York Times, sadly it's rarely good news. Regardless, this article gives a great outline of the situation in Ukraine as the whole world is being turned upside down with the economic crisis. Sadly, here in Ukraine, it's not just economic. Below I've posted the entire text of the article for those that didn't see it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/europe/02ukraine.html?_r=5

Ukraine Teeters as Citizens Blame Banks and Government

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

Published: March 1, 2009

KIEV, Ukraine — Steel and chemical factories, once the muscle of Ukraine’s economy, are dismissing thousands of workers. Cities have had days without heat or water because they cannot pay their bills, and Kiev’s subway service is being threatened. Lines are sprouting at banks, the currency is wilting and even a government default seems possible.

Ukraine, once considered a worldwide symbol of an emerging, free-market democracy that had cast off authoritarianism, is teetering. And its predicament poses a real threat for other European economies and former Soviet republics.

The sudden, violent protests that have erupted elsewhere in Eastern Europe seem imminent here now, too. Across Kiev last week, people spoke of rising anger about the crisis and resentment toward a government that they said was more preoccupied with squabbling than with rallying the country.

The sign held by Vasily Kirilyuk, an unemployed plumber camped out with other antigovernment demonstrators here in the past week, summed up the pervasive frustration: “Get rid of them all,” it said.

Mr. Kirilyuk did not hesitate to take that further. “There will be a revolt,” he said. “And people will come because they are just fed up.”

Mr. Kirilyuk, 29, was standing in the same central square where throngs in 2004 carried out the Orange Revolution, a seminal event that brought to power a pro-Western government in Ukraine. He said he was a fervent supporter then of the protesters, but now he and a few dozen others who have set up tents here are demanding that the heroes of that revolution step down.

It is not hard to understand why world leaders are increasingly worried about the discontent and the financial crisis in Ukraine, which has 46 million people and a highly strategic location. A small country like Latvia or Iceland is one thing, but a collapse in Ukraine could wreck what little investor confidence is left in Eastern Europe, whose formerly robust economies are being badly strained.

It could also cause neighboring Russia, which has close ethnic and linguistic ties to eastern and southern Ukraine, to try to inject itself into the country’s affairs. What is more, the Kremlin would be able to hold up Ukraine as an example of what happens when former Soviet republics follow a Western model of free-market democracy.

“Ukraine is a linchpin for stability in Europe,” said Olexiy Haran, a professor of comparative politics at Kiev Mohyla University. “It is a key player between the expanding European Union and Russia. To use an alarmist scenario, you could imagine a situation in Ukraine that Russia tried to exploit in order to dominate Ukraine. That would make for a very explosive situation on the border of the European Union.”

That Ukraine can cause problems for Europe was highlighted in January when Ukraine engaged in a dispute with Russia over how much it would pay Russia for natural gas, as well as over gas transport to the rest of Europe. The Kremlin shut off the gas for several days, and some European countries went without heat. The Kremlin also shut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 in a pricing dispute.

While Ukraine’s economy is dependent on exports of steel and chemicals, which have plummeted, the crisis has cut deeply because people are disillusioned with the government.

President Viktor A. Yushchenko, a leader of the Orange Revolution, who garnered attention around the world in 2004 when his face was scarred in a poisoning episode, is so widely scorned that a recent poll found that 57 percent of people wanted him to resign.

His rivals have also lost popularity, as the public has become exasperated by years of political bickering. In February, the International Monetary Fund refused to release the next installment of a $16.4 billion rescue loan to Ukraine because the government would not adhere to an earlier agreement to pare its budget.

Around the same time, Ukraine’s finance minister resigned, saying that the job had been “hostage to politics.”

On Friday, the monetary fund projected that Ukraine’s economy would shrink by 6 percent this year, and said that it was continuing to work with the government to find a way to disburse the rest of the rescue loan.

A presidential election is coming, probably to be held next January, and this prospect is making politicians, especially Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, reluctant to adopt an austerity program that might alienate voters.

Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko were pro-Western allies during the Orange Revolution, but have bitterly feuded since then, and he fired her once. A third rival, Viktor F. Yanukovich, a former prime minister who heads an opposition party that favors closer ties with Russia, also wants to be president.

On Friday, Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko held a public meeting in an effort to demonstrate that they were working together. Mr. Yushchenko said he wanted “to show the readiness of all sides to take political responsibility for decisions which today are not easy.”

Even so, the two did not announce further anticrisis measures.

All over Kiev have been signs that tensions are building.

On the city’s outskirts, more than 200 tractor-trailer rigs were parked Thursday, their drivers

threatening to block roads if the government did not help them with their debts, which they said were caused in part by the drop in the value of Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia.

The truckers dispersed Friday, only after the government said it would try to address their demands, but they said they would be back soon if they were ignored.

“The government is to blame for all this,” said a trucker, Viktor V. Zarichnyuk, 26, who had been at the protest for 12 days. “We want the government and the national bank to agree that the money allocated by the International Monetary Fund, at least part of it, should go to regular people.”

At a branch of the Rodovid Bank across town, a tense crowd gathered Friday morning. The bank, close to failing, was allowing withdrawals of only $35 a day. And so people, some of them pensioners fearful for their life savings, have been trooping each day, ever more aggravated, to try to get what they can.

“Every day we come here — it’s insulting — in the cold and line up,” said Alevtina A. Antonyuk, 58, an engineer. “They are nothing at this bank but a bunch of thieves.”

Who is to blame, she was asked. Before she could answer, Dmitri I. Havrilkiv, 78, a retired crane operator, interrupted.

“The government has to be replaced,” he shouted. “They just can’t handle it!”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 2, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

One of the highlights for many visitors to Turkey is a visit to see the Whirling Dervishes. I write this entry not because our visit was an especially eventful part of our trip, but to educate those of you who don’t know what the Whirling Dervishes are.

I’ll be honest; I had heard of Whirling Dervishes but couldn’t tell you what they were. When I heard the name the first thing that popped into my wind was a bunch Tasmanian Devils spinning around in frantic circles. I couldn’t have been more wrong! The Dervishes are actually members and followers of a particular Sufi religious order and the act of “whirling” they do is a religious ceremony.

While it’s true that they spin around in circles at a fairly quick pace, the act of whirling is far from the frantic gyrations I envisioned. It’s the exact opposite: the repetition of the motion and the minor-tone music that accompanies it evokes a sense of calm in the watcher. Adding to that sense of calm are the long all-white robes the dervishes wear which float and drift as the dervishes spin. Were it not for the hard plastic chairs everyone was sitting in, I could easily picture watchers falling into a kind of trance.

(written 10/2/08)

This weekend I think I had a truly Ukrainian weekend.

It started on Friday night. A while back my neighbor had stopped my in the stairs and introduced herself and (I think) asked me to come over for coffee sometime. I didn’t fully understand though, so I just let it be until I say her again. On Friday I saw her at the store and said hi and she in turn said hi to me. Later, as I was coming home I heard her coming down the stairs. Now, even after living in this apartment for two months, I had not figured out where the trash was supposed to go, so since I heard her coming downstairs and I happened to have the trash bag sitting right there, I figured I would ask her. Well, I got my answer and on top of that got invited that night to her house for coffee. This time I understood. 8pm that night!

So I arrived at her door. Her son was at his fathers for the weekend, but a coworker of hers was there, Victor (Vitya). Coffee, of course, meant a full meal. Ukrainian pizza (which is basically bread with a little cheese, sometimes meat, and veggies, and a lot of mayonnaise!), pickles, tomatoes, fish, champagne, and of course, vodka! I was a little worried when I arrived… yes, my Ukrainian is improving, but it’s still tough to “make small talk.” Well, Alla (the neighbor) and Vitya each speak a little bit of English so with the help of the champagne and vodka, I couldn’t believe when three hours has passed! I finally stumbled home around 11:30pm, very glad I only lived one floor away, and fell into bed.

The next day was yet another canning day. I spent all day making spaghetti sauce and then putting it into cans for latter. Unfortunately, as seems to be my luck with spaghetti sauce, only two of the cans would seal, so I yet again have lots of spaghetti sauce to eat this week!

Sunday I had planned would be another cleaning/around the house day, but I got a call from Vita in the morning asking me to go to the River for the day. We started out with a classic Ukrainian past time: mushroom hunting! Ukrainians love to go into the forest and hunt for mushrooms. It’s amazing, even the kids know which ones are good and which are bad, where to find them, how to cook them, etc. After our hunt for mushrooms, only mildly successful, we piled back into the car and headed to the Desna for a day of drinking and eating, the two most important things in Ukrainian culture. We had the traditional fish soup and shashlik, both cooked right there on the fire. There was also buterbrad, veggies, fish, melon, fruit, and I don’t even remember what else. And lots of beer and vodka! All in all a nice relaxing day and a good escape from my mice (see the next entry). By the end of the weekend I felt like I had had some really classic Ukrainian experiences!

(written 9/26/08)

Some of you, especially those who live in CT, may have seen one or both of the articles I’ve reprinted below. The first article ran in The Hartford Courant, but was a reprint from The LA Times. The second is an op-ed in response to the article, written by a friend of my parents. I found them especially interesting because here in Ukraine we are feeling, first hand, the effects of the Peace Corps budget problems. I’ll let you read the articles and then give my thoughts.

Financially Strained Peace Corps Puts Volunteers On Hold

By CYNTHIA DIZIKES Los Angeles Times

September 15, 2008

WASHINGTON — - The Peace Corps boasts that it's "the toughest job you'll ever love," but this year, just getting hired may be the toughest part.

At a time when both presidential candidates have pledged to promote and expand national service, the popular humanitarian assistance program that sends thousands of Americans abroad annually is now planning to cut 400 volunteer positions in the face of an unexpected multimillion-dollar budget shortfall. With fewer spots, an increasing number of Peace Corps nominees who were expecting to begin service this fall have seen their deployments delayed at least until next year — and in some cases indefinitely.

"There are more people waiting this time than in years past," said Rosie Mauk, the Peace Corps' associate director of volunteer recruitment and selection. "The recruiters don't like to tell people that there isn't a spot for them. To have to tell people that they have gotten to know — and they know are passionate about the Peace Corps — that there is just not room for them now is the most difficult part."

Jen Casto, like many aspiring Peace Corps volunteers, applied to the program during her senior year of college. A double major in English and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia, she volunteered for years as a youth mentor and student tutor and speaks French and Spanish.

Last October the Peace Corps nominated her to a secondary education program in sub-Saharan Africa, with an expected departure this month.

Over the next six months, she visited an array of doctors to complete the famously thorough Peace Corps medical clearance process. Although she passed without much trouble, others have had to have wisdom teeth removed and costly blood work done to gain medical clearance.

But last month, about six weeks before she was expecting to leave for 27 months of service, Casto received an e-mail informing her that her program was full. Along with about 125 others, she was told she would have to wait until another program could be found.

"There is just a sense of frustration," said Casto, who turned down several summer internship offers to prepare for deployment. "I am really committed to this. I have wanted to do this for so long that I am willing to put my life on hold ... but at what point do I just move on?"

The agency, which has a budget of $330.8 million, is preparing for an $18-million shortfall over this fiscal year and next, primarily because of the declining value of the dollar and increased food and fuel costs worldwide. It estimates its foreign-currency losses from 2008 alone to be $9.2 million.

"We are preparing for the $18 million, but that is a worst-case scenario," said communications director Richard Parker.

The budget for fiscal 2009 has not yet been passed. The House Appropriations subcommittee that sets Peace Corps funding has supported the Bush administration's request for $343.5 million, and its Senate counterpart has approved $337 million. But until Congress passes that budget — which could be delayed until after the presidential inauguration in January — the agency must operate at its existing funding levels.

Even though the new budget is likely to mitigate some of next year's shortfall, the current funding problems are real.

About 190,000 volunteers have served in 139 countries since the program began in 1961. Long a symbol of U.S. efforts in person-to-person international relations, the Peace Corps now supports 8,079 volunteers in 74 countries — more than in the past 37 years but well off the 1966 peak of about 15,000.

"Congress loves the Peace Corps ... and in most cases accommodations are made to give it a little bit more," said Maureen Carroll, who went to the Philippines in the first wave of volunteers in 1961 and still helps with training.

"But if they think it is a good thing or a nice thing, it seems they don't think about it enough to double or triple its funding. There are a lot of competing forces."

Fund Peace Corps, Not War

September 20, 2008

The Sept. 15 news article "Financially Strained Peace Corps Puts Volunteers On Hold" tells us that the Peace Corps is short about $18 million in its $330.8 million budget to send talented volunteers throughout the world spreading good works in the name of the United States. Ten months ago, the American Friends Service Committee estimated that the war in Iraq cost $720 million per day in short- and long-term costs — $280 million per day of that from the supplementary bills passed by Congress.

As the mother of one of the accepted Peace Corps volunteers who had planned since last November to leave for Africa this month, I would like to point out the travesty of the Peace Corps situation. It would appear that two days of this war could fund the entire Peace Corps annual budget.

Our daughter's marine biology, fisheries and teaching skills have been snapped up by a Massachusetts organization until the Peace Corps finds a place and the money to send her. But wouldn't it have been better to fund the Peace Corps to use her skills, and those of the hundreds of other dedicated volunteers, to improve our nation's image while teaching in developing nations — rather than fund two days of the excessive waste, defense contractor graft and loss of life the war has brought?

Karen M. Pierson West Hartford

As the articles above show, the amount of money budgeted for the Peace Corps is pennies compared to the budget as a whole and the defense budget. And yet look what Peace Corps is able to do with the little money they have. In one year the Peace Corps uses two days worth of the Iraq war budget to put over 8000 volunteers out in the world. And that money doesn’t pay for just the volunteers and their housing, food, etc. That covers staffing, training, medical care and even a “readjustment allowance” for volunteers when they return to America to help while they get re-acclimated.

It’s staggering what they can do with a small amount of money, but it can only go so far. Peace Corps doesn’t get enough funding to truly live up to its potential as it is, but when Congress can’t get together to pass a new budget and they are stuck with the previous years numbers, it gets even worse. Add to that fact inflation (and keep in mind that, by design, Peace Corps is likely to be in countries with the highest and most unstable inflation rates) and a small shortfall can quickly turn into a problem for the program. The Ukraine Peace Corps program is a perfect example, and we have been noticeably affected by the financial problems at headquarters.

Peace Corps Ukraine is the largest program in the world. It has the most volunteers, and I would therefore assume also the largest staff, highest budget, etc. It is also one of the more expensive Peace Corps countries because it is more westernized and more developed than many others. My understanding is that Peace Corps Ukraine was already having trouble fitting everything into their allotted budget as it was. Since I arrived in country, one staff member has left and they are not refilling her job, and they have cancelled all In-Service Trainings, which were extremely helpful to both volunteers and their Ukrainian counterparts, until further notice.

The cost of living here in Ukraine is also a constant problem. Housing is extremely expensive and so many volunteers cannot find independent housing that falls within the Peace Corps housing allowance. The majority of my group who has had to find housing on their own has had to stay with host families or have been moving month to month while they find a suitable place. (I will insert a caveat here that living with a host family for the full two years is a perfectly acceptable, although sometimes not very appealing, housing option by Peace Corps policy.)

Add to that insane inflation (it been as high as 26% since I arrived and remains in the double digits). So the living allowance they budgeted for and issue out to volunteers a year ago goes 80% as far today… by next year (since we’re likely still going to be working with last years amounts) it will have gone only 60-70% as far (Boyce or Melissa will have to weigh in on the exact math there… that’s where you lose me!). I will admit, I didn’t really watch food prices at home and see how they changed (do you?) so it took me a little while to get into that habit here. Price here can fluctuate greatly with the season, so it’s hard to tell how inflation is affecting many foods, but one thing that (I don’t think) is affected by season is eggs. Since arriving in Korop I can remember buying eggs as cheaply as UAH 5.00 for 10 eggs. Carey remembers seeing them in her town for UAH 4.5 it could have been the same here. Yesterday I spent UAH 6.80 for 10 eggs. I’ve been in Korop all of three months. That’s a 36% price increase (can someone check that math?) in three months. Another very telling example was at a rather expensive café that many of us hung out at in Chernihiv during training. We frequented it for its free wifi and convenience, and I would typically buy the same things… a bottle of water, some tea, a cup of borscht, etc. One day we walked in and every price in the place had been raised UAH 0.50-1.00. For my UAH 2 cup of tea it was a 25% increase. Inflation at work!

So I’m not sure what all these means. Economics and finance were my two weakest subjects, even with my accounting minor, so most of what’s going on in the world right now baffles me, but clearly most Americans have a lot more on their financial minds than the fact that Peace Corps applicants are being deferred the chance to serve and Peace Corps volunteers are at risk of not even being able to live at the same level of those in their community (the PC mandate for living standards). But look back at that comparison of the Peace Corps budget vs. the Iraq War budget. I personally think the Peace Corps is having a more positive (and undoubtedly more far reaching) effect on world opinion of America than the war. It would take .0001% of the supplementary war package to get Peace Corps back to where it needs to be. And hey, maybe make it .001% and put a few more volunteers out in the world doing some good. I doubt anyone would even notice.

(written 9/25/08)

About a month ago I glanced out my kitchen window to see some random cows walking down the road. I moved to my balcony and noticed it was actually quite a large number of cows just walking up the street. What I found interesting was there was not a human being to be seen anywhere. I figured the cows must have gotten loose or something… and they’re headed straight for the center of town!

I called Carey and she proceeded to tell me that this was in fact normal. One person takes all the cows out to pasture each day and then brings them home. The cows know where to go, so they just walk themselves home. I had a hard time believing this. Cows knowing their way home? And I had never seen such an event before.

Well, last week I changed my workout routine. I had been jogging as soon as I got home from work, but I decided to do strength training first (maybe I’ll do another entry about working out without equipment!) and then do my jog/walk. As I returned from the lakes, I saw the cows. There were TONS of them! I caught up to the end of them and started making my way through them back towards my house. Kind of a scary prospect, I must say! At one point I was cross the bridge next to a cow and it turned and I thought it was going to trample me!

But Carey was right. It was kind of an amazing event to watch. The cows would literally disperse off different roads as they forked, and then the cows would walk up to their gate and start mooing for their owner to let them in!

The things I’m learning about village life!

(written 9/15/08)

This past weekend I had my first “real” weekend in Kyiv. It was actually my fifth time visiting Kyiv but the first time I just flew in and we went right to a conference facility and never saw the city, the second time was a day trip with my cluster, and the third and fourth I was at trainings outside the city. So this was my first time where I would actually have some free time to explore the city.

The purpose of my trip was actually a meeting of the Environmental Working Group on Saturday and Sunday. For those less familiar with the inner workings of Peace Corps, most countries have “working groups” covering different topics that PCVs can participate in. The purposes of the groups vary slightly, but usually it’s a chance to bring like-minded people together to work on an issue both within Peace Corps and within the host country.

In order to make the Saturday AM meeting I actually had to leave my site on Friday. As I think I’ve mentioned before, my town has one direct bus to Kyiv, and one that goes via Chernihiv and both leave around 5am in order to arrive in Kyiv around 10am. I was worried about making a 10am meeting on the other side of Kyiv, so I took the bus on Friday. That gave me most of the day Friday to explore the city!

So I boarded my 5am bus on Friday with about 4 other people and we headed out. The bus to Kyiv used to be a little marshrutka but recently it’s been a huge Peter Pan/Greyhound style bus which seriously commands the little back roads around my town. It was still dark and there was pretty much no one around. About 10 minutes into the trip, a car a ways ahead of us on the road stopped and then starting backing up. So the bus driver stopped. I saw a rabbit still moving on the road so I assumed the car had hit it and was backing up to see what it had hit (part of me wonders if they planned on picking it up and cooking it!!). Well, clearly the driver was pretty intent on seeing what it was he had hit and didn’t notice the enormous bus and headlights behind it. It just kept backing up until it backed right into us. Just a little excitement to start off the trip!

Before I jump into the rest of the details of what I did this weekend, here’s my biggest “take away” from the trip. If I ever get homesick for anything American (not family and friends, but food, language, etc.) all I have to do is go to Kyiv and it will probably make me feel better. Unfortunately I’ll be broke at the end of the trip as well. Here’s why:

I arrived in Kyiv and, seeing as how my hotel wad only one metro stop from the bus station, I decided to check in first and drop my bag so I wouldn’t have to lug it across the city. The Peace Corps has an arrangement with the “Hotel Bratislava” where we can get discounted rooms, and seeing as I couldn’t find another place to stay on Friday night, I decided to check it out. As soon as I walked into the hotel, I started to feel more at home. The lobby was quite nice and I could have been anywhere in the world. People sitting at tables, using the wireless internet, checking in, lots of different languages being spoken.

Before I continue on, let me do a little sidebar about prices, because it will become important as you read this entry. When I first arrived here I was always converting things back into dollars to see how expensive they were, but I soon decided that was a bad habit, because I’m not paid in American dollars, so what’s important is how much money I have an how much things cost. So use this guide below to help you figure out prices:

My monthly stipend (this includes money for living, travel, etc.):

Amount I spend on rent: 350 hrv (note, this is not my total rent)

A loaf of bread: 2 hrv

10 eggs: 5 hrv

A bus to Chernihiv: 25 hrv

A marshrutka ride in Chernihiv: 1.5 hrv

A 1 L bottle of beer: 3 hrv

A 1 L bottle of water: 4 hrv (yep, it’s more than beer!)

2 bananas: 1-2 hrv

5 tomatoes: 1-2 hrv

A plate of pelmeni at a café: 8 hrv

A cup of tea at a café: 2 hrv

So hopefully that gives an idea. Keep those numbers in mind.

Okay, back to the hotel. So I arrived in my room and found it looked almost exactly like all the rooms we stayed in at all our conferences. Two little twin beds, an old shower in the bathroom. I don’t know if I’d say it was worth the 153 hrv it cost, especially later when they assigned me a roommate, but at least I had hot water and I could drop my bag!

So I did indeed drop my bag and headed straight to the PC Office because Nastia, the PC staff member in charge of the SPA Committee had asked me to come in a getting a mini-training on it.

Another side bar: what is SPA Committee? SPA is yet another PC acronym that stands for Small Projects Assistance. Basically USAID gives a chunk of money to Peace Corps in every country it works in (every country USAID works in that is) to be granted to Peace Corps volunteers. It is then Peace Corps job to administer the money through a grant program. In PC Ukraine volunteers working on certain types of projects can apply for up to $5000 in grant money. The SPA Committee is who handles the granting process. The SPA Committee is made up entirely of currently serving PCVs and is advised by Nastia. The committee does everything from providing coaching to volunteers as they write their grants (many volunteers have never written a grant before) to reviewing grants and making funding decision. I am a recent addition to the SPA committee along with 4 other volunteers from my group, so I went to get some training on the process.

When I got off the metro at the train station I realized I hadn’t really eaten anything all day and was starving. I was unable to resist the American temptation and so headed straight to McDonalds and had some fries and a МкШаик (literally Mic-Shaek). I dropped over 20 hrvs for the food, but it was worth it. Then I headed to the office to meet up with Nastia.

After my meeting with Nastia I headed up to the volunteer lounge to take advantage of the high-speed internet in the computer lab and check out who was there. There were TONS of people there. Mostly made obvious by the fact that you couldn’t walk around in the lounge because the floor was littered with bags and backpacks. Carey was in the office that day for VAC* and so we said a quick hi and made plans to meet up when her meeting was done.

After that I was free until Carey’s meeting was done so I decided to head into the city. I wanted to get a wedding gift for my friends Laiza and Jason, who are getting married in October and I knew what I wanted, I just hadn’t been able to find it yet. On Carey’s advice I head to the Maidan (the main square in Kyiv) and up to St. Sophia’s Cathedral. From there I found what I was looking for. A long street of little kiosks selling art, local crafts, and souvenirs.

It was quite cold in Kyiv (and allover Ukraine) this past weekend, and so after I got off the metro I decided I could use a hot drink. What I have really been craving is a decaf soy latte from Starbucks (when I finally go home, I’m gonna buy one of those at the airport before I even get my bags!!) but decaf is unheard of here and I wasn’t sure how to say soy. There is a Gloria Jeans Coffee near the Maidan though, so I decided if anywhere might have something I wanted, that would be it. I walked in and the menu was totally in Ukrainian and English, which was nice (and not surprising). I still didn’t see any reference to decaf though, so I decided tea was the way to go. I decided not to be an annoying Anglo-centric tourist and ordered a великий зелений чай (large green tea). Now’s where that price chart above starts to come in handy. How much did I pay for the cup of water with a tea bag stuck in it? 22 hrv.

From there I wandered up and down the street with the kiosks for a while browsing the merchandise and enjoying watching American tourists try to communicate with the sellers. Had we been anywhere else I probably would have intervened but this was tourist-central and the sellers were well-equipped with enough English (and the right vocabulary) to communicate with the tourists. I did ask one couple where they were from (Montana) but didn’t get much more details than that).

Finally I was starting to get cold again so I headed back down to the Maidan in

the hopes of finding a warm place I could be inside (but hopefully not pay 22 hrvs for tea again!). So I decided to hit up the underground mall under the Maidan. I had heard about the mall but never seen it. I walked in and seriously thought I had walked back into America. I walked for a while and marveled at the American or American-style stores and finally made my way down to the food court, complete with McDonalds, Папа Джон піца (literally “papa djon pitsa), and sushi.

I headed back outside and waited for Carey to call so we could decide where we wanted to go for dinner. Even thought neither of us was too excited about spending a lot of money, we decided to splurge and headed to an Indian place not far from the Maidan that is often frequented by PCVs. Neither of us had tried it yet (and I later found out she had never had Indian food!) so even though we knew it would be expensive, we decided to splurge. Yeah, it may not have been expensive on Kyiv terms, but on my term? 25 hrv for a samosa appetizer, 75 hrv for chicken tandori! But it was worth it. When we walked in the restaurant it looked just like every Indian place I’ve been in in America. The host and waitress spoke to us in decent English; the menu was the same and was translated into English. The food was not the best I’ve ever had, but easily rivals most of what I’ve eaten in America. And it was great to just sit with Cary and enjoy the meal.

After parting with about 160 hrvs each for dinner we headed back out onto the street to see the sights and find something sweet to eat. When I had been in the mall earlier I had seen a gelateria and wanted to head there for dessert.

Yet another back-story… The summer after my freshman year in college my friend Brianna and I spent 6 weeks backpacking in Europe. We hit 9 countries in those 6 weeks including Italy. Of course, in Italy we ate gelato every day. While there I discovered a yogurt flavor called “Yogurt” and just fell in love. They also had “Yogurt with berries.” I ate the same flavor the rest of the trip. Since that trip I have been in a constant search for this flavor of gelato, but have never been able to find it. It’s become a habit to look for it whenever I pass a gelatoria. So when I was wandering the mall, of course I checked for it. And there it was! Both “йогурт” and another one which we roughly translated as “yogurt with forest fruits” which basically looked like the yogurt with berries I had loved. I HAD to go back there!

So indeed, I convinced Carey to head to the gelatoria where we each dropped 15 hrvs for the smallest little dishes of ice cream I’ve ever seen. After that we decided our feet and our wallets had had enough and we parted way, she to the hostel she had booked and me to the hotel.

Upon arrival at the hotel I learned that I had a roommate (Bethany, a TEFL from group 33) and as we got acquainted we learned we were both in town for the Environmental Working Group (EWG) meeting the following day. I was wiped from my 5am bus and walking all day so after that I just crashed.

Saturday Bethany and I headed to the office together for the EWG meeting at 10am. The whole day was pretty much taken up by the meeting except for a lunch break where I headed over to nearby Panini chain with a few other 34ers on the EWG. Although the day was long, I enjoyed the meeting and think its going to be a good group to work with. Interestingly I’m the only community development (CD) volunteer in the group and apparently have been for a while (in case you don’t know, the other to programs in Ukraine are Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Youth Development (YD)). It was an interesting seat to be sitting in because a big part of what the EWG does is develop resources, many of which are environmental-based lesson plans and work on their summer camp, Camp IKNOW, neither of which are things that really apply to me. But I really liked the people and am excited to work with them. I also met Josef and Curtis which means I’ve now met all three of the “friends of friends” currently serving in Ukraine.

Let me explain. When I first told people that I was coming to Ukraine my brother said “my friend Josef is a Peace Corps Volunteer there right now.” I though, wow, small world, one of my brother’s friends from college in the same country as me at the same time! Then my friend Danielle said she had a friend Curtis who she studied abroad with who was currently serving in Ukraine. Then it was starting to get weird! Then, to top it off, my Great Aunt and Uncle also have a friend currently serving in Ukraine! 3 people who are all in Ukraine in Peace Corps at the same time as me! I know Ukraine is a big program, but I thought that was a little much! I met my Aunt and Uncle’s friend Colleen during training. She and I had corresponded a lot before I came to Ukraine so it was nice to meet her so quickly. Josef and Curtis, it turns out, both serve on the EWG so I met them both this weekend and I’ll probably get to know both of them pretty well over the next year!

Often for these meetings the members pool their money and get an apartment in the city rather than stay at the hotel and I had gotten in on that so after the meeting I headed to the apartment with Bethany and one of her cluster-mates, Keith. At only 45 hrvs compared to the previous night’s 153 hrv, it was worth the chance that I might have to sleep on the floor. Plus it gave me a chance to hang out and get to know some of the EWG members.

I ended up heading out to dinner with Erica, a fellow 34er and two 33ers, Annie and Jessica. Annie really wanted a hamburger, so we headed to TGI Fridays, another popular place to PCVs to eat while in Kyiv. I have to say, I thought chicken fingers would be the perfect addition to my American weekend. I splurged on a 62 hrv margarita and got my chicken fingers, which were something like 50 hrv. The other girls all got hamburgers. Oh, and there was honey mustard with the chicken fingers. I mention the honey mustard as its own menu item because I ran out and hard to order more. Want to know how much they charged me for tablespoon of honey mustard sauce? 16 hrvs!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe it. And they seriously skimped on the fries.

So after another 150 hrv dinner I decided I had no money left (and the others agreed) and we decided to skip the bar and be true Ukrainians and buy our beer on the street and bring it back to the apartment. We hung out for a while chatting and exchanging movies and music (the single most popular PAC pastime) and then all crashed out slumber-party style on the floor in the living room.

In the am, after a stop at a McDonalds that actually serves breakfast, we headed back to the office to finish our EWG work and hang out until our respective trains of buses. I had another lunch at the Panini place and then headed to the train station to get the metro back out to my bus station. Finally after a rainy but quiet bus ride home (no rabbits or accidents!) I made it home and curled up under my blanket to watch a movie in English before heading back to my all-Ukrainian world on Monday morning!

*VAC is yet another acronym that stands for Volunteer Advisory Council. At Swearing-In each group elects two representatives to serve on the VAC and two to service on TAG (Training Advisory Group) for the duration of their service.

Glossary:

великий (ve-lee-kee) - large

зелений (zeg-len-ee) - green

чай (chai) – tea

йогурт (eeoh-hoort) - yogurt