Well guys, I've managed to get to a (relatively) reliable computer for a moment so I'm going to do a quick first blog from Ukraine to get things started. I've got about 20 mintures until I've got to go and meet up with my group, so I'm going to dive right into it...
After arriving in Ukraine on the 26th of September my group, known as Group 40, had two days for what they call an arrival retreat in a town a bit to the northeast of Kyiv. It was a whole lot of informational meetings, paperwork and general administrative stuff to get the ball rolling. It was also nice to have two days to compose a bit and get our bearings. The group that I arrived with had ~55 people with another 40ish comming a few days later (they had visa issues a got delayed...). At the end of that arrival retreat we were broken up into our 'clusters' which is usually a group of 4-8 people that live in the same village/town during the three months of Pre Service Training (PST). These are the folks that you take language classes with, get teacher training, and do your PST community/school projects with. I've been luckey enough to end up with a cluster of very good people, four of us total, which has made PST thus far interesting and doable (though extremely busy, stressful, and chaotic!!)
For our three months of PST my cluster is living in the village of Kevshovata, a community of about 3000 people (counting all the out-skirts...) with one school, one post office, 3 stores that carry identical products, and lots of lovely rural views. I'm living with a host family which consists of my host mother Aholla, her husband Petro (who lives in his own house on the other side of the driveway, he's 72 and has some issues with his legs) and their grandson Maxeem, who just had his 13th birthday which we celebrated with a cake and champagne. Like I said, it's definately a rural community... we have about 20 chickens (the number depends on what's for dinner) and 4 or 5 roosters who are my alarm clock in the mornings.
Ukrainian culture and life revolves around food, and your are always having more and more pushed on you as a gesture of hospitality... I never leave the breakfast or dinner table feeling hungery, or capable of walking for that matter. I've been eating lots of borshch and other soups, little meat patties, lots of potatoes and beets, and drinking tea like it's my job... it kind of is.
Every weekday we have 4 (!) hours of Ukrainian language class, which is so damn complex I'll dedicate a whole blog entirely to it, but just a taste: all nouns are conjugated with different ending for gender, different endings if there is one of them or 2-5 of them, or 5+, numbers are conjugated based on gender too, nouns are also conjugated with different endings (based on gender) depending on how they are used in the sentence (direct object vs. indirect object) etc. I'll vent on all of that in a different blog :-)
I've also started teaching. I had my first 7th Grade English class in the local school last week, and I'll have two more this comming week. We receive 'technical training' on teaching techniques and lesson planning tutoring. We are also getting started on a community project, which is as yet undefined, but should prove to be very rewarding and very time consuming :-)
Aside from all of that there is always stuff to do around the house, helping out in the kitchen, work around the yard, etc. All in all there is a lot to do and not enogh time to do it in. I don't sleep to much but when I do it's deep... until I hear those damn roosters :-)
Ok, I've run out of time! Sorry for any typos, no time to proof read. I'll post some more later this week.
Love you all!
Evan
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
And here we go...
Hey everybody!
Welcome to my new blog for the next 27 months as I embark on this new adventure with the Peace Corps in Ukraine. After saying goodbye to my life and all my great friends in Bozeman, I spent last month in upstate New York splitting time between my folks place in Rexford and our place up on Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. I gave myself all that time to get my ducks in a row before I hit the road, but in typical form I procrastinated like a professional and left the majority of the work to shut down my life to my last week in town. So, I've spent the past five days running around in circles trying to get everything in order. I was successful for the most part, though it did cost me a fair bit of anxiety and sleep. As if packing up for a 27 month journey into the unknown of Ukraine was not enough to keep me on my toes, my parents are also moving. They're heading to Shanghai in the beginning of November and most likely selling their place in Rexford. That means that I ended up packing two times over in the past week, because everything not coming with me will be heading into the chaos of a storage facility.
Anyway, everything came down to the wire last night as I found myself bleary eyed at 3:30am packing and repacking my two bags to check until each was under the allotted 50lb. limit. When I finally got it sorted out my head hit the pillow at 3:45am and I got a fleeting nights sleep until my alarm went off at 4:15am. That whole sleep thing is overrated anyway, especially in high stress situations... My 6am flight to DC was uneventful until we were coming in for a landing at sunrise, cruising past the Washington Monument with the monument and a fiery red sky shimmering up from the reflecting pool in the mall. Beautiful way to start the day to say the least, or rather, to continue the previous day.
There are 56 people in my group heading for Ukraine, all English teachers to-be, and right off the bat in the airport shuttle the introductions and good ol' get to know you stuff was in full force. This two days here in DC is what they call Stateside Orientation (or Pre-Pre-Service Training, PPST :-) and is a general introduction to the Peace Corps and how they operate. General health issues, safety issues, overview of what these first few months will look like, etc. Kind of felt like college orientation, and in fact most of the volunteers were relatively recent college grads. The average Peace Corps age is 28, but at 27 I think I'm the oldest volunteer in the group. And for tomorrow, we head out to the airport in the afternoon for an overnight to Frankfurt and then on to Kiev by mid-day Sunday. The 56 of up are split into 6 groups and I was nominated to be a group leader for the trip. Day One, Task One and it's responsibility time already, so here we go.
We'll have 3 days near Kiev, during which time we'll get country specific orientation info from the Ukraine Country Office. In that time I'll learn if I'll be learning Ukrainian or Russian as my main language and I'll also learn who is in my learning cluster (6-10 folks I think) and those will be the people in my village, sharing language classes and English Teaching classes. And after that it's off to my Pre-Service Training (PST) with my cluster for three months, living with a family and getting down to business. I'm not sure where it will all lead for me, but what I do know is that I'm still running on the 30 minutes sleep from last night and it's time for me to collapse into a pillow before another long day manana.
I won't have any internet access for at least a week, possibly longer, but when I do I'll be posting some more of what's happening, which will be a whole lot at that point....
Much love
Evan
Welcome to my new blog for the next 27 months as I embark on this new adventure with the Peace Corps in Ukraine. After saying goodbye to my life and all my great friends in Bozeman, I spent last month in upstate New York splitting time between my folks place in Rexford and our place up on Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. I gave myself all that time to get my ducks in a row before I hit the road, but in typical form I procrastinated like a professional and left the majority of the work to shut down my life to my last week in town. So, I've spent the past five days running around in circles trying to get everything in order. I was successful for the most part, though it did cost me a fair bit of anxiety and sleep. As if packing up for a 27 month journey into the unknown of Ukraine was not enough to keep me on my toes, my parents are also moving. They're heading to Shanghai in the beginning of November and most likely selling their place in Rexford. That means that I ended up packing two times over in the past week, because everything not coming with me will be heading into the chaos of a storage facility.
Anyway, everything came down to the wire last night as I found myself bleary eyed at 3:30am packing and repacking my two bags to check until each was under the allotted 50lb. limit. When I finally got it sorted out my head hit the pillow at 3:45am and I got a fleeting nights sleep until my alarm went off at 4:15am. That whole sleep thing is overrated anyway, especially in high stress situations... My 6am flight to DC was uneventful until we were coming in for a landing at sunrise, cruising past the Washington Monument with the monument and a fiery red sky shimmering up from the reflecting pool in the mall. Beautiful way to start the day to say the least, or rather, to continue the previous day.
There are 56 people in my group heading for Ukraine, all English teachers to-be, and right off the bat in the airport shuttle the introductions and good ol' get to know you stuff was in full force. This two days here in DC is what they call Stateside Orientation (or Pre-Pre-Service Training, PPST :-) and is a general introduction to the Peace Corps and how they operate. General health issues, safety issues, overview of what these first few months will look like, etc. Kind of felt like college orientation, and in fact most of the volunteers were relatively recent college grads. The average Peace Corps age is 28, but at 27 I think I'm the oldest volunteer in the group. And for tomorrow, we head out to the airport in the afternoon for an overnight to Frankfurt and then on to Kiev by mid-day Sunday. The 56 of up are split into 6 groups and I was nominated to be a group leader for the trip. Day One, Task One and it's responsibility time already, so here we go.
We'll have 3 days near Kiev, during which time we'll get country specific orientation info from the Ukraine Country Office. In that time I'll learn if I'll be learning Ukrainian or Russian as my main language and I'll also learn who is in my learning cluster (6-10 folks I think) and those will be the people in my village, sharing language classes and English Teaching classes. And after that it's off to my Pre-Service Training (PST) with my cluster for three months, living with a family and getting down to business. I'm not sure where it will all lead for me, but what I do know is that I'm still running on the 30 minutes sleep from last night and it's time for me to collapse into a pillow before another long day manana.
I won't have any internet access for at least a week, possibly longer, but when I do I'll be posting some more of what's happening, which will be a whole lot at that point....
Much love
Evan
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