Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Ukraine: Christmas in Kiev

[Note: As a Christmas gift, this week there will be two postings. So there is this one, talking about Christmas day in Kiev, and then there is the next one, which talks about what happens when you're me and you try mailing a Ukranian Penthouse. Be sure to check it out.]

It was Christmas day, the first I had ever spent without my family. I was determined not to spend it sulking.

I slept through breakfast, hoped a marchrutka to Kiev and had pizza for lunch. Susannah, a petite redhead from Montana (actually, she’s from a different state, but she asked me to protect her identity) and I went down to Kreshatic to watch the “Parade of Santas”. The final election between Yuchenko and Yannokovitch was the next day, so the tent city was still there, determined to be there until Yuchenko won.

It was against this backdrop of orange streamers and smoking wood fires in metal drums that fifty or so “Santas”, really members of a local youth organization wearing Santa robes and hats (and minus the big bellies and beards), were dancing in large circles or conga lines with children around Kreshatic avenue to Christmas music blared from a PA system. I grabbed onto the tail end of a conga line as it came past, just behind a hefty middle-aged Ukrainian woman, Susannah clinging to me. This is how the Ukrainians do Christmas.

A few hours later, we were in Maidan, and it was packed with revelers. Even thought it was 5:00 PM, it was already well into night. Just a week before, the square had been packed with Yuchenko supporters, but they had cleared out, had gone home to vote. The stage that Yuchenko gave his speeches from was still set up, but its video screens were dark, the stage empty.

The attention had been shifted to another stage across from it. This one had kids on it in sprite costumes, dancing around with people in weird animal costumes, at least one of which appeared to be a llama. Beside the stage, some fifteen stories tall, was a huge Christmas tree that, I had been informed, was actually made out of a hundred fir trees.

The sitting president and Yannokovitch-backer, Leonid Kuchma, came out to boos from the Yuchenko-supporting audience. He gave a booming speech about the goodness of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and wished everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, keeping the speech decidedly apolitical. The crowd that had booed him just minutes before applauded him and began chanting: “Molodetz! Molodetz!” something said by our Ukrainian teacher whenever we answered correctly.

They then lit up the tree and ignited the fireworks. Standing packed into a crowd between the tree and the fireworks, I couldn’t see them both things simultaneously, and had to swivel my head between the successive explosions of red and green in the sky and the flashing blue lights that swept in lines across the tree as the huge ornaments on and off. It was exactly what I came to see.

And if you wanted proof that Ukrainians know how to have a celebration, you needed to look no farther than the under-street crossing at Teatralna. On our way back to the Peace Corps office, we walked down the steps into the crossing and ran into an impromptu dance session. The music came from an accordion and two guys beating over-sized tambourines. The dancers were couples in their fifties and sixties that had happened to be crossing under the street and had stopped to dance to the music. Men in suits and ties wearing round brown fur hats and women in dresses, many wearing babushka head scarves, whirled around in a choreographed dance that reminded me of a cross between folk dancing and the ballroom dances last seen in English Cotillions.

They were obviously enjoying themselves and they were so cute to watch. They were good, too. The dance flowed as they moved in circles, the group itself moving in a larger circle, rotating as people went through the steps and twirls. After every song they broke up, walking back into the crowd. Some couples would leave, other couples would come, and then a new song would start and they’d move back into the dance circle. I grabbed Susannah and we did a little dance on the side. An old man pushing seventy came and took her from me, whirling with her on the dance floor. Susannah had no clue what to do, but the old man was sweet about it, slowly showing her the steps while she awkwardly reciprocated, grinning in embarassment

I danced a little jig alone on the edge of the circle. Just then, I felt very. very happy. It wasn't salsa dancing with my family back home, but it was close. And that's Christmas in Kiev.

Ukraine: Mailing Pornography

I was in the Obhiev post office, trying to send home Christmas gifts to my family. For my sister and my soon-to-be-born niece, I was sending matroichka dolls. For my grandmother, it was a shawl handmade by a woman named Tamara. For my mom’s fiancĂ©e, Jerry, I was sending a AK-47 tee-shirt (he had asked me to find him an AK-47 in Ukraine), and a Soviet army belt with the hammer and sickle on the buckle. For my mother, I was sending sent the mug handmade out of Obhiev clay with the town’s name and crest on it, given to me by the mayor of Obhiev when I moved here.

For my grandfather, and here is where the problem started, I it was a Ukrainian Penthouse.

The mail clerk asked to see every item in the package before it could be sent, but she barely even glanced at the Penthouse when I held it up. Admittedly, I purposefully held it up with the back of the magazine to her, so all she saw was a full-sized ad for a watch. I knew it was illegal to mail pornography across Ukraine’s borders, but it’s also illegal to mail food across the borders, and Peace Corps volunteers, including myself, receive food care packages all the time. All packed into the box, the gifts weighed just a hair of the two kilogram limit, and I was asked to remove something. The Penthouse was on top, so I took it out. The package weighed exactly two kilograms.

I paid for an envelope to put the Penthouse into, put it inside and mailed everything.

As I was walking back to my apartment, I had a sudden case of the fear. You see, the Ukrainian postal service likes to open packages. Most of my mail comes to me already opened. A magazine in a box, I felt, could be overlooked. A Ukrainian mailman opening that envelope and a Penthouse sliding out, though…

I figured there could be three possibilities. One would involve him letting it go. Another would involve him taking it home. The third… I didn’t know what the fine was for illegally sending pornography, but I was sure it was something I couldn’t afford. I was also sure that I didn’t want Peace Corps getting involved.

Possibly I was just being paranoid, but I decided to err on the side of caution. I turned around and walked back to the post office. The envelope with the Penthouse was just on the other side of the glass partition between me and the three clerks, all of them women in their forties.

“I need that package back,” I said to them in Ukrainian, pointing.

“We can’t give it back to you,” one said. “Once you send it, it can’t be returned.”

“But it’s right there.”

“Sorry, we can’t.”

“I really need it back.”

That received a raised eyebrow, but one of them picked up the phone and made a call. “A man wants his package back,” the lady said into the phone. There was some more conversation, the end of which was an apparent order to call someone else. She did, but there was no answer.

“Sorry, we can’t give you the package back.”

“There may be something wrong with this package,” I tried to explain.

“Is there something wrong with the address?” one of them asked.

“No, the magazine inside, it may be not good.” (Note that I did not know the words for “law”, “rules”, or “regulations” and instead used “not good.”) “I don’t think I can send this magazine.”

“Why?” one of the clerks asked.

“This magazine, maybe it is not allowed,” I said, once again stringing words together as best I could.

At this point, I had the attention of all three of them, as well as the dozen other patrons in the post office, all watching the American speaking in Ukrainian.

“What is the magazine?” asked a clerk.

I sighed.

“Penthouse,” I said.

I received blank stares. They had never heard of it.

I was marshalling the words in my head, figuring that since I didn’t know “pornography”, the closest I could get to it was “women with no clothes.”

I was just about to say this when one of the clerks offered: “erotika?”

“Tak. Erotika,” I said.

The whole post office burst out laughing.

Not hesitating, one of the clerks grabbed the envelope and handed it to me.

“You will have to pay for the envelope since you wrote on it,” she said, counting back
money to me.

“Yes, of course,” I said, willing to forgo the whole refund just to get out of there.

She counted out the last money of the money to me, barely suppressing a smile.

Head hung low, I left.

Friday, December 17, 2004

Ukraine: Zen and the Art of Handwashing Clothes

I swing the bathtub’s nozzle arm over the blue maw of the wide, shallow bucket, toss in my clothes and turn on the hot water, which comes out tinted yellow. Sometimes we don’t have hot water, but that’s not common. I sprinkle in some detergent and begin to stir the steaming, mellifluous mixture with a hairbrush. It puts me in mind of cooking a sauce, a simmering, multi-colored sauce. Hotoovati goes the constant mental drill in Ukrainian. Hotoovati. To cook. Prati. To wash. Odyah. Clothes. I leave moi odyah to soak. Zaboovati. To leave. Namochuvati. To soak. Ya zabooyoo moi odyah namochuvati.

I return to my laundry ten minutes later and run some cold water into the bucket to lower the temperature below scalding. I put an empty bucket beside the first and sit down beside it in the tub. Then the scrubbing begins: I take each article of clothing in turn and rub the cloth against itself between my two hands, paying particular attention—as shown by my host mother, Anna—to the neck and underarm areas of the shirts. After I scrub an article of clothing, I halfheartedly wring it out and toss it into the empty bucket.

This is actually the relaxing part of my week, washing my clothes on Sundays. It is such an involved yet mindless process that it gives me time to and think and unwind. Besides, it’s my one “deprivation” in the country. There are many real deprivations for me here: unfamiliar food, unfamiliar language, far from home, but these are the deprivations of any traveler. When you sign up for Peace Corps, you expect something harder than that: eating beetles and living in a hut and enduring monsoons and digging your own toilet.

Initially, life in Ukraine doesn’t initially seem very deprived. The marchrutkas run efficiently, the students in the schools are well behaved (mostly), the apartments are comfortable and well furnished. There is usually running water and fairly constant electricity. In short, while there are minor inconveniences, it’s not that hard to live here.

The type of person that joins Peace Corps is the type that relishes in challenge, wants something difficult to brag about, takes a perverse pride in not having all the amenities we take for granted in America. In fact, the average Peace Corps volunteer does not want to see his or her host country turn into America.

I like buying food and clothes at the bazaar. I like having to walk everywhere. I like not having a microwave. So, since life here doesn’t really seem that hard, and Peace Corps is supposed to be hard, hand washing my clothes is really the only thing I can brag about having to do.

But having it hard is not really a reason for joining Peace Corps. In fact, having all that time to think while I scrub and scrub and scrub gives me an opportunity to ponder a question I only half considered before I left the country. A question I didn’t want to bother with answering in the landslide momentum that carried me through grad school, the application process and straight on a plane to Kiev. The question is: Why did I join Peace Corps?

When I first learned of Peace Corps my sophomore year of college, I knew it was a perfect fit: volunteer work, travel, total language and cultural immersion, challenge, prestige, fantastic benefits on return, an extremely efficient organization backing you up. And it was all being paid for by the good, forward-thinking citizens of the United States of America. There is simply no better volunteer program in the world than Peace Corps. Period.

But more than anything, it was a gut feeling. A gut feeling of both elation and fear whenever I thought about it, about the adventure and danger, about completely stepping outside the bounds of everything I knew, for better or for worse. Regardless of what it would cost, I wanted to do it.

I envisioned myself in Africa. Why Africa? Because Africa was romantic: tribal dances, real deprivations, wild animals and sunsets that set the sky ablaze. But then later, I realized I didn’t have the language background for it. The French speakers were being sent to Africa. Spanish speakers were being sent to Latin America and everywhere else. Secretly, I was kind of happy about that, because the more settled down I became, the fewer depravations I was willing to endure.

So then I saw myself in Latin America, living with a mosquito net over my bed, perfecting my Spanish and teaching kids from a chalkboard nailed to a tree. But that was not to be, either. It was offered as a choice, along with Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but although I put it on the top of my list, Peace Corps called a few weeks later and said they really needed teacher trainers in Eastern Europe.

I fought for Latin America, but only half-heartedly. Secretly, I liked the idea of Eastern Europe, the travel options, the comfort of a society that did have indoor plumbing and access to the Internet. And so that’s how I ended up in Ukraine.

I wring the soapy water out of the last article of clothing and toss it into the bucket holding the rest, my rinse bucket. I empty the water from the wash bucket and swing the nozzle to the rinse bucket and turn on the cold water. I swirl the clothes in the water for a few minutes and then repeatedly dunk and wring out each item of clothing before doing a final wring and putting it beside me in the tub. The final wringing requires some effort, veins popping out of my forearms, for not a single bit of water must drip out of the clothes when I hang them up. When I first started doing this, Anna would pull down any dripping clothes and hand them back to me. She can fully wring out a shirt in two seconds with two twists. It takes me ten times that.

I think I came to Peace Corps with a mixture of selfish and altruistic reasons. All of us do, I think. You have to have that mix or else you will never make it through training, let alone two years. Too much of one or the other and you’ll find yourself on a plane back home, realizing either the personal benefits were not worth all the work, or that you could no longer see yourself sacrificing so much for other people.

When I first put my bags down in Anna’s apartment, my altruistic side really wondered what it was going to get out of this. Seeing the apartment, its nice interior in defiance of the building's crumbling fascade, I saw that Ukrainians don’t need “help” the way, say, my kids in Oklahoma City did. The Ukrainian economy is on the upswing, charging along on an amazing 6 percent growth rate. Building in Kiev is non-stop and it’s beginning to spread out from the center. The apartments the Ukrainians live in are nicer than the ones my OKC kids lived in, and the schools aren’t dangerous, soul-damaging places. On the surface--dirty, crumbling and pockmarked as it is--Ukraine seemed no worse than the poorer places in America.

But there is a reason I'm working here, abroad, and not back in the United States. as great as Ukraine is, it's not so great.

With capitalism came problems that were tacked onto the landscape of problems Ukraine already had. Since the state is no longer bothering to keep up the infrastructure and investors have not stepped in to pick up the slack, it is collapsing before everyone’s eyes. The roads all need repair: they are a black swaths of pot holes, broken chunks of concrete and gaping manholes because people stole the covers to sell for scrap metal. The yellow tap-water is undrinkable. Trash floods out of buildings and into the streets where it is burned, filling the air with acrid smoke.

The corruption in the government, fueled recently by the kickbacks it received to license new businesses, has become so obvious that it’s sparked a revolution that caught national attention.

I've helped a drunk woman who was lying intoxicated in the street. I saw a man punch his girlfriend three times in the face in a dance club before his friend pulled him off of her.

And believe it or not, this is all fantastic compared to ten years ago, when hyperinflation wiped out everyone’s bank accounts and the only reason the populace didn’t starve was because of Ukraine’s ability to grow it’s own food. The cities emptied out as the urban population went back to family farms left only a generation or two ago. That was when Peace Corps came.

And now I’m here.

I begin hanging up my clothes on the lines that are strung over the tub. The harder to dry articles, like my jeans, I put on the hot water pipes that heat my room.

I'm focusing on the bad things, and it's not all bad, but I'm listing why I have changed my initial assumption that, with the schools so disciplined and the economy moving ahead, Ukraine didn't need Peace Corps' help.

And even though I know we still have social, corruption and (to a far lesser extent) infrastructure problems in America, they are minimal when held up to the mirror of Ukraine. I'd love to see Ukraine get to the level of "problems" we have. I'd love to see Ukraine have the methods of response we have. Outside of Kiev, there is no Alcoholic Anonymous for that woman I helped out of the street to go to. Outside of Kiev, there is no domestic abuse hotline number to hand that girl who got beat in the club.

So what, really, can I possibly give here?

As a teacher trainer, I will be responsible for giving the seminars that teachers need for rectification. In the next two years, I will train over 1,000 teachers. If I do my job correctly, I can inspire teachers to use inductive, active, communicative methods of teaching that can in turn help their students to become better English speakers. English, as told to me by the Ukranian Minister of Educations, is "the language of democracy," for it is the main language for technology, business and diplomacy.

What am I doing here? I’m not here to “help” impoverished people, because lord knows I could be doing more of that in America. And Peace Corps is nothing like the original idea I had for it. But it is Peace Corps, which is the government supporting me in a diplomatic endeavor to provide aid to any country that requests it. Ukraine has asked for help with their business and educational sectors. Peace Corps has responded.

So I have a job to do here: help, even in a small way, to change the education system of a country that is less than 13 years old, on the cusp of political reform and with the resources to catapult it to first world status. And they could then respond to the social, corruption, and infrastructure problems that are so prevelant.

In fifty years, I may have looked back on a Latin American country and have seen no change whatsoever. In fifty years, I have a feeling that Ukraine will be very, very different, and I can have a role in that, even if it’s a small one.

I don’t think I could have answered the question of “Why Peace Corps?” before I left, because Peace Corps was simply and abstract thing, an ideal. Here, now, I have a very real idea of what I will be doing here, one that is optimistic, but not unrealistic. But if the answer is to make noticeable impact, then there is another question beneath that: “Why bother doing that in another country? Why not work harder on the problems we have in America?”

And that answer I do know, and it may be the seed of something that had me leave America, and it certainly goes to the heart of Peace Corps. That answer is “to bring peace.”

I’m sick of people hating America. I’m sick of people seeing us as this greedy behemoth. I’m sick of people seeing us as warmongering simpletons. And if simply being an American that people know as their neighbor, that people know as their coworker, that people know as their teacher, can help change these views, that much more understanding lead to that much more peace in the world. Peace Corps is, ultimately, a diplomatic endeavor. It says to other countries, “here are our best (only 25% of applicants make it into Peace Corps, and you have to have a college degree to even apply), our brightest, our most hopeful, here to help you.” I’m here to help the cause of Peace. So that’s why I’m in a country with unfamiliar food, an unfamiliar language, far from home, and washing my clothes by hand in a tub. I came into Peace Corps because I’m an idealist and because I’ve been blessed and because I want to make this world a better place in any way I can.

I put away the buckets and dry my hands.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Ukraine: Trying Not To Bribe the Police

It was a late cold December night when I was able to meet two of Ukraine’s finest.

I was walking to a friend’s apartment, hands buried in my jacket and both breath and scarf trailing behind me when I saw the two of them, both wearing the same uniform: fur-collared gray jackets and brown fur Cossack hats with a militsia badge on the brim. They were walking past me when taller of the two came towards me, motioned for me to stop and asked me in Russian for my documents.

This should have been standard, so I reached into my pocket and pulled out my documents with my pink card. Neither officer had ever seen the documents before, and they poured over them with furrowed brows.

They asked me for my passport. I told them it was at home. And then began the litany of questions: where is home, why are you here, where are you from? They seemed surprised that I was from America. In my baggy, fraying jeans, Doc Martin boots and green Miami Dolphins ski cap, I thought it was obvious.

They continued with the questions. Where did I work, what did I do there, how long had I been in Ukraine, how long was I going to be in Ukraine, every question that had been drilled into me since my first language class, save for maybe: what is your hobby?

And thank God and thank my language teacher, Oxana, that I was stopped by the police then and not as much as a month before, before the language finally clicked, when my understanding was on the level of a three year-old. Now it was up to the level of a six-year old, but that seemed to be enough.

It came in handy when they decided to search me. They asked me to empty out my pockets. I did, but I had a lot in my pockets, could only hold so much, and so left a few things in them, including the bottle with the antibiotics that I was taking for a throat infection. I figured a bottle of pills wouldn’t look good.

Looking at the items in my hands, they wanted to know what the yellow throat lozenges in a blister pack were. Sadly, I couldn’t even remember the word for “sick” and managed with “They are for my throat.” They wanted to know what the Chap Stick was, because they had never seen that before, either. I told them it was for my lips and mimicked the motion, simultaneously realizing how effeminate a motion that was.

Finally, the pat down started, and I suddenly “remembered” the antibiotics. That got their attention. I told them what they were and that they were also for my throat. They couldn’t even get the child safety cap off. I finally helped them get the cap off, and they peered into the white-powder filled gelatin capsules.

Kokaine?”

No, it’s not cocaine. “Tse narkotica?” No, I replied, they are not drugs. They are medicine.

The taller one peered at the English label. “Narkotica vid Ameritsee?”

No, they were not drugs from America, although they were liki (medicine) from America. They were legal. They were given to me by Peace Corps. Do you know Peace Corps?
Yes, they knew Peace Corps. Did they want to call Peace Corps with their questions? No, they did not. Did they want to go up to my language teacher’s apartment, which we were standing in front of, and talk to her? No, they did not. Did they want to go back to my apartment and see my passport? No, they did not.

They paused for a moment, expectantly. When I said nothing, they went back to their questions. The shorter of the two kept dropping into Russian, and his counterpart kept hitting him on the shoulder and reminding him to speak Ukrainian to me. Even so, I kept running across Ukrainian words I did not know, and would ask them to explain this word or that word, which only confused the shorter one and caused the taller one to repeatedly cover his face with his hand in frustration.

Every few minutes they tell me my documents were not good and that I had narcotics on me. Then they would pause expectantly. Then I would say nothing, then the questions would start again.

Finally, they suggested going to the police station as if it were a threat.

“Okay,” I said in Ukrainian. “Which way?”

Peace Corps had said that if you have a problem with a police officer, get to a police station. My willingness to go along confused them, but finally they motioned down the street. That was not the way to the police station I knew and so I cautiously followed them, trying to stay close to the street and the passing cars.

A block later, we were in front of the post office, and we stopped there. The post office is also where the public phones are. Do you want to call Peace Corps, I asked them. They can answer all your questions.

No, they didn’t want to call Peace Corps.

The taller one went inside to make a phone call, while the other stayed outside with me. “What is the problem?” I asked him. He waved off the question. We stood in silence for a few minutes.

Finally, the taller one came out.

They both looked at me expectantly. Finally, the shorter one apparently decided to get overt. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for money, motioned at themselves and then waved a hand away. The meaning was obvious: give us some money and you can go.

“Nee,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I had a thought behind it, a thought that maybe it would be easier to just pay them and get it over with. They seemed slightly surprised. After a minute, they nodded towards the street, and I followed them, standing on the sidewalk as cars went by. A few people walked past us on their nightly strolls.

Both took out cigarettes and offered me one, which I politely refused. They both became jovial at that point. They said they wanted to go to America. How could they do that? I told them I didn’t know, but they could call the embassy and ask them. But, I said, I did know that there were large Ukrainian populations in Chicago and New York. I didn’t know what we were waiting on or why we were by the street or who the taller officer had called. They asked me how much policemen made in America. I told them.

Finally, a car pulled up. An unmarked car. They motioned me towards it. I didn’t budge and started shaking my head. There was no way in hell I was getting in that car.

“It’s okay,” one of them said in Ukrainian.

An older, heavyset man in a suit and wearing the same Cossack hat that they had on got out of the car and took a few steps towards us. I took a few hesitant steps towards him and he asked for my documents.

I gave them to him, and he looked at them with the same confusion his juniors had. It became obvious he was their boss, but why had they overtly asked for a bribe after they had called him, I’m still not sure of.

He asked for my passport, and I went through the same litany with him. He thought I didn’t understand him. He kept asking for my passport with a visa in it. I repeatedly told him I didn’t have it with me, that this was all the documentation I needed. He tried different ways: how did I get to Ukraine? Train, car, plane? Plane. Where, Boryspil? Yes, Boryspil. They put a sticker in a passport, where is it? I know what you’re talking about, I said, I just don’t have my passport with me.

Finally, after about five minutes of this, he gave me my documents back and told me to have my passport next time. I look between them.

“I can go?”

Yes. The older man got into his car, the two cops walked off one way, and I walked off another.
I told my language teacher about it the next day. She told me that when Yuchenko is elected, he would stop all that. Also, she told me that it had been great practice for my Language Exam.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Ukraine: Language

English is a language that loves to simplify. We have more words than any other language, and yet an average American doesn’t know more than 3,000 of them and uses less than 1,000 on a daily basis.

The words we do know, we’re forever trying to make shorter. For example, when a person wants to say: “Good day, good sir. What have been the happenings in your esteemed life, for I do hope they have been clement?” he or she may now simply say: “S’up”. I’ve even noticed lately the progression from “S’up” to “S’uh”, dropping out yet another sound.

Ukrainian does not have this tendency towards simplification. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I think that being locked indoors on too many cold, winter nights has caused Ukrainians to inflate their language in an effort take up more time. All the Slavic languages are like this, and are considered so difficult that Ukrainian Peace Corps volunteers are required to live with a host family for six months instead of the usual three.

The Ukrainian word for “hello”, that most basic of words in any language, is ten letters long and begins with three consonants back to back. The Ukrainian word for hello is zdravuistea. When that’s the first thing you’re trying to pronounce, you know it’s uphill from there. “Good-bye”, by the way, is do pobachinea. And, yes, you must separately pronounce the last two vowels. Ukrainians have a lingual dexterity that would shame a fly-eating amphibian.

There very few short words in Ukrainian. The word “use” is vikorictovoovati. I’m not making this up. We groan about the long words to our language teacher a lot, so it was with glee that she taught us the word for “fashion”: modna. “See, it’s a short word,” she said. Then the French speakers in my cluster pointed out where the word originally came from. If there’s a short word in Ukrainian, it’s probably a borrowed word.

But bringing up modna let’s me point out another bit of frustration with the Ukrainian language: words that sound like English words but mean something completely different. Modna means “fashion”, but fason means “model”. Plosha means “square”, but square means “public garden.” Shodenik means “journal”, journal means “magazine” and magazine means “store”.

This confusing echo to the Latin-based languages (to which Ukrainian is distantly related; somewhat like a bastard second cousin) can be seen in its alphabet. The Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet (not to be confused with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet) has 33 letters and is just close enough to the Latin alphabet to drive you nuts. Especially because while some of the some of the Cyrillic letters correspond to our alphabet (“B”, “A”, and “E”, for example), others don’t. “H” is pronounced N, “C” is pronounced S, and “P” is pronounced R. When you see PECTOPAH on a sign, it’s actually read “Restauran”, and you know it’s a place to go eat.

Oh, Cyrillic also has a letter that looks like “b”, and, like a Southern Baptist having sex, it makes no sound at all.

The other left over part of once being related to Latin is verb conjugations. Most Latin languages have two sets of verb conjugations. Ukrainian tries to be big daddy and have four.

Believe it or not, none of this is what really makes Ukrainian so difficult. What makes Ukrainian so difficult is that it is an inflected language. That is, the nouns change depending on how they are used in the sentence.

Meat with cheese. Cheese with meat. In English, the words don’t change. That’s because English is uninflected. Translate them into Ukrainian, though, and you find that Meeyaca z’cirom is different from Cir z’meeyacoyoo.
Old English used to be inflected, as was Old Norse, but both were inflected in different ways. After the Norse conquered England and found that they couldn’t understand the women they were taking as wives (“Husband” is from Old Norse, “Wife” is from Old English), the result was a simplification where the resulting Middle English was uninflected. And this simplification continued right into “’Nuff o’ dis his’tree”.

There are seven ways nouns can change in Ukrainian, and each of these is called a “case”. All nouns change, including names. So my name, at turns, is Daniel (nominative), Daniela (genitive), Danielom (instrumental) and Danieli (locative), depending how it’s used in the sentence. And, once the nouns change, every adjective, pronoun, number or participle used with them must change to agree with their case, gender and number.

Have a headache yet? I get them all the time.

Since six of the cases are common (there are, in fact, seven of the bastards), since there are three genders (including neuter), and there are two ways to number nouns (singular or plural) there are at least 24 variations for any given word. “My” could be miye, moya, moye, moyemoo, or moyeem depending on the number, gender and case of the noun it is possessing. Moyeeh is the form of “my” used when I possess a direct object that is animate and there’s more than one of it.

Advil. I so need Advil.

Ukrainian students learning English can’t get over that most words that don’t change. “What is miye in English?” “My.” “What is moya in English?” “My.” “What is moyeeh in English?” “My.” They think it’s the easiest language in the world.

So now I’m done complaining about how complicated Ukrainian is (did you know there are actually three words for “year” depending on how many years you’re talking about?), and I’ll leave you with one last Ukrainian word:

It is a word that, like some other Ukrainian words, is a concept that takes a sentence to describe. The word is zamourduvaty, and it means “to work someone so hard that they die of exhaustion.”

It’s how I feel at the end of language class.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Ukraine: Revolutsia Boude Pro Televisor

So, after I dragged my butt out of bed this morning after yet another night of staying up way later than I should have, I walked into the kitchen and said good morning to my mother. She said something in Ukranian that I didn't catch because I was still in a stupor, and after I asked "Scho?" (what?) she snapped at me, harshly repeating what she just said, which was to go wash my hands for breakfast.

After a few tense minutes of eating, I slowly started prying into what had gotten her upset, and wondering if I had yet again made some cultural gaffe. After a bit it started coming it: she wasn't mad at me, but three of Ukraine's eastern regions had held a referendum to become autonomous.

And I was reminded yet again that my attention span is way too short. After a few days where nothing but the revolution was the topic of conversation, we had returned to our daily routine: language classes, teaching, nights spent watching movies and playing guitar. After all, we couldn't go to Kiev, and, other than Yuchenko grafitti, orange streamers tied to trees, or the 1:00 AM drunken chanting of: "Nas bahato ee nas ne podolati!" (We are many and we will not be defeated) that is the preminent chant of the Yuchenko supporters (bested only by the 1:00 AM chants of "Yu-Chenk-Ko! Yu-Chenk-Ko!"), we are cut off from the revolution. Oh, by the way, it's not being called a revolution by the Yuchenko camp. It's called "an evolution of democracy."

The evolution of democracy is being televised 24 hours a day here (the title of this post, by the way, is the closest the Ukranian language can get to "The revolution will be televised"), but as I still can't keep up with the breakneck Ukranian spoken on it, I get my news updates from the same place much of America does: Yahoo News.

Still, I do get a side that can't be gotten in America: the reactions of the Ukranians. My host mother is at turns glowing with pride and worried to tears about her country. Losha, who returns from Kiev each day beaming, red-faced from the cold and sporting yellow and orange streamers. The host grandmother of one of my link mates, who tied an orange shawl around her head, declared "I am not afraid" and stomped off in her boots to a marchrutka bound for Kiev. Oxana, my Ukranian teacher, who watches the television and points out that people are smiling, her psyche looking for any bit of evidence that this will turn out alright. Helen, my technical trainer, returned from Kiev yesterday, where she had spent the day amongst the tent city that has sprung up along Krechatic avenue. "Everyone is trying to be kinder than everyone else," she told us, giving us stories of the free food being passed out, apples being forced into people's hands, the free toilets that that have been set up, the free ride she recieved back from Kiev when her marchutka driver declared that he would accept no payments from anyone for the ride.

The demonstration in Kiev, rather than being an impromptu gathering, is obviously is what it is: the successful result of massive organization. A never-ending series of concerts with all of Ukraine's top artists entertains the crowds from the main stage and on plasma screens. Someone brought in those portable toilets. Someone handed out the hundreds of orange tents. Someone is funding the field kitchens feeding hundreds of thousands of people. That someone, of course, is Yuchenko's party. I don't know if it's insidious or not, but the simple fact is that this was prepared for. I had heard the rumors before the first election: that if Yannokovich won, there would be a revolution. So it wasn't unexpected when they descended on Kiev. What's surprising is that it's lasted a week in sub-zero weather and heavy snow. Frankly I'm impressed, but let no one think that this wasn't forseen, that this revolution (or whatever it's called) wasn't orchestrated.

And we will see what the future will bring. After a few days, after no violence, I think we all relaxed, the Americans at least. Police were joining Yuchenko's crowd in droves. Kuchma and Yannokovich went to the negotiating table with key EU people mediating. We thought it was but a few days to a transfer of power or a new election.

But now what becomes apparent is what is not being carried in most Western news media: that Yannokovich has more than just thugs and mafia supporting him. That a huge percentage of the east did support him in an election that, even without fraud, was very close. And now that Eastern section, completely shut out by the media and dubbed as lackeys of a corrupt government, is threatening to break away.

And one would say good riddance, save for one thing: it's the industrial center. Currently, Ukaine cannot economically survive without it. If it breaks off and becomes independent or allies with Russia...well, I can't predict, but the results would be dire. And that's the balance of power: a West that refuses to be led by Yanakovich and an East that refuses to be led by Yuchenko. The West is the intellectual center, but the East is the industrial, and they need each other. Revolutions are grand things, amazing things, especially when so many people pack themselves into one place to together shout down corruption, but things do balance on the edge of the knife, and that's why my host mother was snapping at me this morning...

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Ukraine: The Coup Continues

Here, in Obhiev, the snow continues to fall, and the city is blanketed, purified in white. Children outside of School #3 throw soccer-ball sized snowballs at one another, and, save for a few people with yellow flags sticking out of their pockets, the cause behind the rallies that have stopped Ukraine and gained the world's attention seems not to exist.

My host-mother returned from Kiev last night. She was one of the quarter-million that supported Yuchenko taking his symbolic oath of office, watching on a huge videoscreen as he read the words with his hand on a 300 year-old bible. It was with her this morning that I watched on television as a deputy from Zhytomyr told the gathered crowds that Yuchenko was the president of their oblast, and Lviv and Ivano-Fansisco have declared the same.

My host brother, Losha, and his friends are on a marchrutka as I type this, on their way to Kiev to lend their support. What could I tell him but "operechno", be careful?

Kuchma, the current president of Ukraine staunch supporter of Yanokovich, finally came out of hiding and announced that the government was willing to negotiate. Yuchenko has agreed to negotiations, his supporters now being ringed with militia. All is still peaceful, but Yanokovich suppoters in the capital are growing in number, covered in blue the way Yuchenko supporters are covered in orange. The television still hounds down any threats from the east, trailing miners from Donetsk who say they are going to Kiev "for a football game", and who may well try to stir up violence. The government has promised not to be the first to start the violence, but an outbreak of fighting would be the perfect excuse for an intervention...

Despite the illegal grab for power, Yuchenko still has legal routes to take. The parliment could declare no-confidence in the election and the supreme court could null the votes in some of the disputed regions (all of which are Yanokovich supporting) thus giving the election to Yuchenko.

The problem at this point is that no matter what is said at the negotiating tables, there is no way the Western oblasts will accept anyone other than Yuchenko as president. And with Western governments completely in his court, Yanokovich and Kuchma are backed into a wall. Even Putin in Russia is backing off his earlier support for the Yanokovich win. Still, the last thing Russia wants is the EU and NATO spreading right to its doorstep.

The White House has said it was "deeply disturbed by extensive and credible indications of fraud committed in the Ukrainian presidential election," according to spokeswoman Claire Buchan and reported by the AP.

Putin has branded the West's criticism of the elections as "inadmissible". Ukraine "doesn't need to be lectured."

I'm still twiddling my thumbs in Obhiev. Everyone in America wants me to stay out of trouble, which is endearing, but my romantic side wants to be in Kiev. I know that this is real life, real danger, but that is why I want to go. I want to go because this is real life, history in the making. If this goes off like the Rose Revolution in Georgia not even a year ago, this will be one of the seminal turning points in Ukrainian history, something noted in Eastern European textbooks for centuries to come. If Ukraine finally takes its place in the EU, which I hope to see it do in the next decade, this will be the moment that helped that to happen. But being in Peace Corps is more important to me than being at a rally, and so I stay.

At least my mom will be happy about that...

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Ukraine: So You Want A Revolution?

I don't know what's making the news in America, but it's a bit of a madhouse in Ukraine right now.

First off, let me say that I am safe, I feel safe, and I don't think anything's going to happen to me.

That said, Ukraine is having a revolution. In its most important election since independence, Ukraine was split down the middle in support for Viktor Yuchenko, who wants to ally Ukraine with the West, and Viktor Yanocovich, a friend of Putin who wants to tie Ukraine closer to Russia.

In elections condemned by the EU and the United States as "flawed" (the United States has threatened sanctions), Yanocovich was declared the winner. That was two days ago. Since then, millions of Yuchenko supporters (Yuchenko is the liberal one and the one I'm rooting for)have flooded the streets. The western half of the country, including Kiev, has refused to acknowledge Yanocovich as the winner. Strikes have ensued all over the country and they refuse to stop until recounts are had or Yuchenko takes office.

In my little city, 45 minutes from Kiev, the streets haven't been flooded, but there is a trickle. Told to stay away from demonstrations by Peace Corps, I've instead watched as couple hundred people, decked out in Yuchenko's colors of orange and yellow, march up and down the main street.

As a bit of a back story, Yanocovich is both a convicted felon and supported by the Ukranian mafia. There was an assasination attempt on Yuchenko last month, apparently by Yanocovich supporters, during which he was poisoned with Ricin and, as a result, the left half of his face no longer works.

A few hours ago, Yuchenko (the loser, according to the elections) walked into parliment and,
backed by a quarter of a million supporters outside, declared himself president. He then took the oath of office on the bible used for such purposes.

During his speech to his supporters, he said this, as quoted by the AP:

"Ukraine is on the threshold of a civil conflict," the Western-leaning Yushchenko earlier told lawmakers in the chamber before his oath. "We have two choices: Either the answer will be given by the parliament, or the streets will give an answer."

Of course, violence is a concern, but thus far everything has remained peaceful. The embassy has released a warning to U.S. Citizens to avoid the rallys, and that's as far as it's gone.

There are rumors that Russian milita are moving into the area to settle the protests in favor of Yanocovich, and the Ukranian news is currently full of shaky camera shots of buses and trucks moving into Kiev that may or may not contain troops.

As far as the Peace Corps is concerned, there will be no evacuation as of yet, and the following was sent to all of us:

***1) The public demonstration in Kyiv has at least doubled in size, and itappears demonstrations in Kyiv will continue for some time with resultantdisruptions in transport, business activity, and freedom of movement in the city.
2) We have received reports that demonstrations in support of Yushchenko arealso underway in the following Ukrainian towns: Zaporizha, Kirovograd,Odessa, Kharkiv, Lutsk, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Chernigiv, Rivne, Dnipropetrovsk,Chernivtsi, Cherkassy, L'viv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Vinnytsya,Khmelnytsky, and Sumy. A pro Yanukovych demonstration is reportedly underwayin Sevastopol.
3) The opposition has called for strikes of workers in public services including the railways and bus services. Volunteers should avoid intercitytrain and bus travel or expect altered timetables and cancellations.
4) Thus far the demonstrations have been peaceful, and the demonstrationorganizers are on record as urging all demonstrators to avoid any use ofviolence.5) There are continuing reports that a large number thugs have been broughtinto Kyiv by Yanukovych supporters to cause trouble at the demonstrations.
6) Also there are new reports that common criminals, including juveniledelinquents, have been released from jails and encouraged by the authoritiesto disrupt the demonstrations. At the same time, the incidence of streetcrime in Kyiv including muggings, robberies, and random physical attacks isreported to have increased.

7) Kyiv Volunteers are strongly advised to stay indoors at night and to bevery careful when moving around the city in the daytime.

8) Nothing, repeat nothing, that has happened thus far is of a sufficientlyserious nature to cause PC to consider evacuation. Rumors that an evacuationis about to begin are entirely untrue.***

So that's what's going on in my world. Frankly, I find it rather exciting. I wish the Democrats had risen up this strongly during the 2000 elections. Our elections then were obviously flawed, but after a few inefectual rallies, opposition died away. Yuchenko supporters have shut the country down and refuse to let it back up until there is a full and fair recount in the disputed regions.

I wish I was out there now, taking photographs and interviewing people in broken Ukranian, but Peace Corps effectively has all the trainees in lockdown.

More information can be had by doing a search for "Ukraine" under Yahoo News or wherever it is you get your information. Also, if anyone has seen anything about this in the states, let me know. There is a dispute in my cluster as to whether the U.S. media has bothered to carry the story at all.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Ukraine: Ukrainian Peculiarities

Ukrainian peculiarities

What’s different about Ukraine? The little things.

Guards at the grocery store. A grocery store is a radically new concept in Ukraine. Most people are used to haggling at the bazaar for their food. The grocery store in Obuhiv is where you go if you want Western products like Pringles or Gillette razors. Because these things are so high priced and rare, there is a security guard every two aisles that watches you like a hawk.

Holodetz and salo. Holodetz is volunteer kryptonite. Think Jell-O. Now think Jell-O made out of meat. A square of translucent gelatinous stuff on your plate that is, in fact, meat. This is holodetz. Salo. Salo is simply pig fat. A slab of it. You eat it with black bread, butter and garlic. Sometimes, they dip it in chocolate and you eat that.

Refusing something three times. Customarily, you are supposed to refuse something the first time. If you don’t actually want it, you have to refuse its offer three times. Why would you refuse it? I don’t know, maybe because it’s an offer of more holodetz or salo.

A refusal to hand you change. In the Cossack era, a person had to refuse a position of leadership three times before he was worthy to accept it. You’re also supposed to refuse money three times before you can accept it. Because of this, a cashier will never hand you change at a store, instead putting it in a little dish for you to take, thus subverting the three-refusals rule and speeding things up.

Bread. Bread is a nationally worshiped food. The Ukrainian flag is blue on the top to represent the sky, yellow on the bottom to represent grain. The name of the city where I will live and work for two years, Zhytomyr, is made up of the words “Bread” and “Peace”. Bread is served at every single meal (and you eat it plain) and you never, ever throw away uneaten bread. Even if you’ve munched on your bread until it’s an inch-wide wafer and you can’t stand another bite, that bit goes in the breadbasket for the next meal.

Giving an odd number of flowers. An even number of flowers is given at funerals to the grieved. On any other occasion, it is bad luck. One of my clustermates, Liz, once gave her host mom three flowers, and the head of one fell off. The host mom freaked out and quickly put the two remaining flowers in separate jars to make them two gifts of one, thus keeping the flowers at an odd number.

Whistling indoors. Don’t do it. Ever. It’s bad luck.

Opening windows on public transportation. It doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the summer, your shirt is transparent from sweat, your hair is plastered to your forehead and you are beginning to merge with your seat, you must not open windows on public transportation. There is a long-standing belief that the draft will make babies and old people sick and possibly kill them. Our cluster mentor, Nick, related a story during which he had opened a marchrutka window in the middle of summer. The entire marchrutka went into an uproar and, after he got it closed, an old man came up, grabbed Nick by the shirt, waved a fist at him and said in Ukrainian: “if you do that again, I will punch you in the face.” For the rest of the two-hour ride, all the occupants of the marchrutka glared at him.

Toilets and bathrooms are separate concepts. Toilets get one room, the bathtub and sink get another. This is probably because it’s customary to do laundry in the bathroom and who wants to be constantly interrupted by the biological needs of others? They are such separate concepts that one host family I know of built a brand new bathroom (finally bringing indoor plumbing into their home) but didn’t bother to build an indoor toilet, continuing instead to use their outhouse.

Oh, public toilets don't have toilet paper, so you have to always carry some in your pocket.

Light switches. All the light switches are outside of the room that they are for. This leads to two problems: one, if you wake up in the middle of the night and want to turn on the lights, you have to stumble outside your bedroom door and blindly search in the hall for your switch. Two, central rooms that lead into several rooms (as in the case of the one that leads to the bathroom, the toilet, the kitchen, Losha’s room and the hall) will have all the switches for each room. Next to one another. So if you’re trying to use the restroom in the middle of the night, you find yourself staring at them, trying to figure out which one will turn on the light for the toilet instead of the light in Losha’s room, thus waking him up at two in the morning.

No shower curtains. There simply are none. Liz swears she found a room with one at Prolisok, but no one believes her.

Interesting health prohibitions. Ukraine is a cold country. Ukraine is a country with very little access to medical care. Therefore, there are many prohibitions that, if you violate them, will cause your host mother to throw a conniption fit. Drinking cold liquids is one. All liquids, from tea to milk to juice to soda, are served either hot or at room temperature (yes, Liz was once served heated Diet Coke when she was sick). Ukrainians don’t believe in ice. When I go to the McDonalds in Kiev, I can be found swirling my drink around just to hear the ice rattle on the sides. Another prohibition is walking out the door with wet hair. A third is walking around the apartment barefoot. You’re supposed to wear slippers, but my host mom will settle for socks.
Apparently, all this will keep you from getting pneumonia.

No locks on the interior doors. At all. Even your bedroom.

Milk in bags. This one makes absolutely no sense to me. Milk is sold in plastic bags. Not cardboard boxes or plastic jugs, but in bags. When you pick one up, it’s this amorphous blob in your hand as the liquid swishes around. You cut a corner off to get to the milk, but if you don’t use it all there’s no convenient way to store it other than putting a clothes pin on the end and hoping it doesn’t leak in the fridge. Yogurt is sold the same way, and I’ve seen more than one American just upending the corner of the yogurt bag over their mouths and squeezing.

Black pointy shoes and black leather jackets. Everyone wears them

Carbonated water. If you buy bottled water, you’d better specify ne hazodna because Ukrainians, like Europeans, love carbonated water. Frankly, I can’t stand the stuff and before I learned how to read Cyrillic, I bought several bottles of water that later just got tossed.

Patronymics. This is a Slavic thing, but I find it interesting. You don’t use the term Mister or Missus to denote respect in Ukraine. Rather, the formal way to acknowledge someone in Ukraine is through their patronymic. This is their first name followed by the first name of their father with –illa­ tacked on the end for women and –ovich for men. There are other ways to form the patronymic, but I stick with that. In Ukraine, I am formally Daniel Fosterovich. And an American named after his father could very well be Bob Bobovich.

Babies. I think the long winters, cultural traditions, and small apartments lead to one thing: an outdoor baby density of two to every square foot. You cannot take a ten minute walk (and I am in the habit of taking longer ones when the weather isn’t deathly freezing) without seeing dozens and dozens of little babies, bundled to twice their size, all in cute colorful little winter caps with two ore three little points on the top, being carried or pushed in strollers. Mothers sit on faded blue and yellow benches, talking to one another while they absentmindedly push their strollers back and forth with one hand, rocking their children. Babucias coo from beneath head shawls at their grandchildren in parks covered in yellow leaves. Even older brothers and sisters push the little babies around, giving them fresh air, getting them out of the apartments. It’s one of the nicer things about Ukraine.

And lastly there are babushka bags. No one uses backpacks or sling bags or even big purses to carry things. They use plastic department store bags colloquially called babushka bags. You know when you buy clothes from Sears or the Gap or Structure and the salesperson puts them in a plastic bag with the store’s name emblazoned on the side? Those are the bags I’m talking about. Every person you see on the street will have one swinging at their side. Stalls at the bazaars sell fifty different kinds for three hrivna each. Women color coordinate these plastic bags with their outfits. The esteem of the bag coordinates with the brand on the side. BMW plastic bags, for instance, are in high demand. Mine is a Hugo Boss bag, black, that I use to carry my books to class.

The first day I, in my leather jacket and walking through a crowd of babies, went to buy a bag of milk with my babuska bag swinging at my side, I felt very, very Ukrainian.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Ukraine: In the Eye of the Marchrutka

I’m performing marchrutka-cises (my word, mind you), the daily calisthenics required to ride in a people-packed minivan driven by a man five minutes out of his hug-himself white jacket. Currently, I’m squatting (very good for conditioning calves and thighs). Other days, I’m standing hunched over, clinging to an overhead strap (very good for the upper body).

Marchrutkas are capitalism’s answer to a communist failure. The old Soviet accordion-style busses could barely be kept running after the collapse of the USSR, the state unable to provide for them as they are barely able to provide for street repair, building refurbishment or garbage collection (have I mentioned yet the smell of the half-dozen or so trash fires burning continually throughout the city?). Into this transportation void stepped a few forward-thinking city employees that eased tax laws, sold the machines to themselves and started the franchise-without-a-franchise concept of marchrutkas. Now, hundreds of these privately-owned little minivans, packed to bursting, dart about the major cities and actually provide faster and cheaper (the capitalist mantra) transportation than the few remaining busses.

I do not apply the adjective “safe” to these little speed demons (also, when I say “speed”, I am not referring to the quality of going fast, but rather the hysterics-inducing amphetamine). I feel the safety factor of taking a marchrutka was best put forth by the U.S. Embassy head of security, who addressed the Peace Corps volunteers the very day we stepped off the plane. His speech was long, convoluted, and full of politically correct phrasings, but one of his points amounted to this: “if you ride on a marchrutka, you will die.”

This sentiment was later rebutted following by our Ukrainian coordinators: “that man has a private car and a chauffer.” In other words, if you want to get anywhere in Ukraine, get on the damn marchrutka.

The sight of a marchrutka, despite the Mercedes symbol on the front grill, does not inspire confidence. All have dents and dings (some have fully-imploded panels), and all but one I have ridden on required help from the 3M company to keep going. I don’t know how the Soviet Union existed before the incorporation of that company known for Post-It notes, but I feel it would still be around today had it discovered earlier the now omnipresent products of masking, cellophane, and duct tape.

Take the marchrutka I’m riding on now. The spider-web cracks that spread the length of the windshield are being held firm through cellophane tape, and it is through that tape that I see Đ° hapless car being bared down upon before the marchrutka dives into oncoming traffic and then back into the proper lane, leaving the car to suck down dust. Marchrutka drivers, despite taking off with the side door still open, making change for the fares en route and never letting the gas pedal off the floor, always drive as if they’re running late. Late for getting an iced-down heart to a transplant patient, that kind of late.

This type of driving isn’t limited to marchrutkas, mind you. Every driver in Ukraine drives this way, weaving in and out of traffic, barreling straight at pedestrians (who most certainly do not have the right of way), and driving on the sidewalk. Although I have not heard it uttered aloud, there must be a Ukrainian proverb that goes: “If God did not want me driving on the sidewalk, he would not have paved it.” My host father in Zhytomyr admonished me for putting on my seatbelt, saying I did not need it in Ukraine. I put it on anyway, telling him it was habit. I think the reason seatbelts are not required is that no one would survive a Ukrainian car wreck, so why bother wrinkling your suit? After pulling a very illegal U-turn in the middle of the street and barely making it out of the way of oncoming traffic, my host father told me not to worry. “Ya droog miliziom,” he said by way of explanation. I am a friend of the police. Which is almost a superfluous thing to be in this case, because in a month and a half of traveling between cities on marchrutkas, I have never, ever seen someone pulled over on the side of the road. I have seen babucias selling onions, horse-drawn carts and an SUV on fire on the sides of Ukrainian roads, but never the police.

So really it’s no surprise when my marchrutka nearly hits a grandmother walking on the edge of the road , literally nearly hits this woman as it's trying to dodge around a too-slow car, and this babucia doesn’t even bother to have an expression of fear or disgust on her face, doesn’t even bother to shout an obscenity (not that it could be heard over the Ukrainian reggae music blaring from the driver’s radio) and instead stolidly kept walking as if her life had not been put on the line by a man driving with one wrist on the steering wheel as he tries to make change for the twenty sardine-impersonators in his minivan.

So it is in this way, as it is twice a week, that I partake of my morning workout session en route to the city of Ukrainka, having no doubt that I will arrive on time (provided I survive) for my technical session on how to stay safe in Ukraine, riding the whole way in the eye of the marshrutka.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Ukraine: Meeting Cujo

Once again, I have discovered that a first aid kit is a talisman against wounding and should be carried at all times, if only so it is never used.

Evidence: this summer I climbed the highest mountain in the continental United States without a scratch, first aid kit weighing heavy in my bag. The summer before, I had forgotten to bring a first aid kit to Europe, and managed to both gash open my hand in Amsterdam (righting an overturned boat) and break a toe in Switzerland (getting out of bed; sad but true).

Now, here in Ukraine, I managed to get gastrointeritis before we were distributed our medical kits, and after, well, we'll get to that in a second. First let me talk for a second about the medical kits, each the size of a small suitcase, that each volunteer recieves. I could perform an apendectomy with this kit, which comes complete with several million bandages, several thousands of kinds of over the counter drugs, three kinds of antibiotics: amoxocillin, cipro and bacatrine, sunscreen, chapstick and exactly four condoms. I did not bring this kit on my short trip to Zhytomyr, though, and that was my first mistake.

The dog seemed friendly, the big St. Bernard that belonged to my new host family in Zhyotomyr. Coming home the first night, it ran away from me. The second night, it ran towards me to see who I was, and then went back to its dog house. The third night, it repeated this, and I felt that I should befriend this dog. I started with the motion you're taught as a child: extend your hand palm forward, below the level of the dog's head. This allows the dog to get your scent. If it appears friendly, you can then slowly raise your hand to pet it. As I was extending my hand, though, I had this exact thought: "it already knows what I smell like." So, as the dog was coming forward, I raised my hand to pet it.

Sensing a threat, the dog's inner Cujo came out. It opened its jaws and clamped them down upon my hand. Luckily, I jerked my hand back at the first growl and its teeth only caught the side of my hand, leaving some small, tooth-shaped gashes. It was because this wound was, as I was later told, a "crush wound", that it immedietly swelled, looking as if my hand had gout, and sent searing signals of pain up to my brain.

My first thought was: does this dog have rabies? I figured no, because it was the family dog, not a stray. My second thought was: goddamn my hand hurts. I have a pretty high threshold, so I was in stunned disbelief that these little wounds on the side of my hand could hurt so badly.

The dog had since put itself between me and the door of the house, doing its job of protecting the family. Cradling my hand, I walked up the steps to the door, the dog growling and barking loudly, and I stopped about four feet from it, watching it out of the corner of my eye, trying to seem unthreatening, debating my options.

I was on the outskirts of Zhyotymr, Ukraine. The temperature was below freezing. My host family was inside and asleep. Possibly, they would come see what the dog was barking about, possibly not. My brain had an internal arguement then. The pain bit wanted something done about the pain bit as soon as possible. The fight or flight bit let every other bit know that the adrenaline had been opened full blast and wondered why we were neither fighting nor flighting. The anger bit was waving its hands about and demanding that this dog be kicked in the face, but the rational bit was trying to tell it that it wasn't the dog's fault and that the situation needed to be resolved in a, well, rational manner. The libido bit wanted to know when I was going to be laid. This is an emergency, the other bits said, go away. Perhaps I can use my powers of seduction on the dog, suggested the libido bit. Shut up, replied the rest.

And it was in this manner that I stood for at least five minutes while this dog barked its lungs out at me and neither of us budged an inch. This thought occured: "I can't believe that dog bit me." This thought occured: "am I really going to have to bum rush this dog to get into the house?" This thought occured: "will someone come out and see what this goddamn dog is barking at?" And, to show my screwed up sense of priorities, this thought occured: "If I try to get to the door, and it attacks, I really hope it doesn't damage my jacket." The jacket, it should be noted, was a birthday/Christmas gift from my mother, and I already felt bad enough about loosing the gloves she also bought me on a marchrutka coming back from Kiev.

I had just made up my mind to slowly inch my way to door (and possibly begin kick at the dog should it try to attack) when the interior lights came on and my host mother opened the door. She was surprised to see me standing there and motioned for me to come in. I had taken exactly one step towards her when the dog lunged.

Seeing the dog in motion, this fifty year-old woman said one harsh word in Russian, and the dog simply stopped in mid-attack, dropped to the ground and began whimpering.

I quickly walked past the dog and into the house, and it was then that my host mother noticed me cradling my bleeding hand. She flipped out. She began yelling in a fast, high-pitched Russian, beeseeching God, apologizing to me and cursing the dog all at the same time.

She had me wash the cuts off in the bathtub and then brought me into the kitchen. After she sat me down, she scooped some strange black stuff with the texture of grease out of a mason jar and began smearing it onto the cuts. Then, she slit open a bell pepper, scrapped out the seeds, put the skin of the bell pepper over the cuts and secured it to my hand in linen gauze.

My heart was pounding throughout all this, my whole body amped to do something: flee, pummel this dog, cry war cries, something, anything, but I was simply sitting on this stool in a kitchen having a woman put vegtables on my swollen, bleeding hand.

I told her in Ukrainian that I needed to call Peace Corps, and she didn't want me to. I think she was afraid that they'd take me away because the dog had attacked me. She kept telling me that this was the first time this had ever happened and apologizing over and over. I insited that I wasn't going anywhere, but I had to tell Peace Corps. Finally she relented and gave me the phone.

I called Peace Corps, slightly embarassed that this was my third medical call in my first month and a half of service (the first for gastrointeritis, the second for a throat infection). The nurse listened to everything that happened and then told me to get all that crap off my hand, wash it vigourously with soap and water, put antibiotic ointment on it and wrap it in gauze.

I went to do so and gave the phone to my host mother so they could explain to her in Russian all that needed to be done. I also told them to make sure she understood that I wasn't angry at her, and that I wasn't going leaving them.

I didn't have my antibiotic ointment or gauze, they were both safe in my medical kit in Obhiev. After I washed my hand, my host mother pulled out several tubes of stuff, none of which had intelligible words to me, and she began smearing everything on the wound in thick globs. I don't know what was in those tubes, but I'm pretty sure one was aloe vera. I kept tellng her I needed antibiotic ointment. She told me I needed all of this. Finally, slightly frustrated, I took the one tube that she told me was antibiotic cream, went to the bathroom, washed all that stuff off, put on the cream and wrapped it up.

It's a lot better today, not as swollen, and scabbed over. So, emergency averted. I went down with my host cousin to feed the dog the day after. The dog barked up a storm, but greedily wolfed down the food I tossed to her. So, hopefully the dog and I will get to be friends.

The dog's name, by the way, is Katrina.

I know one thing, though, I'm never going anywhere without a first aid kit.

Ukraine: An Update from Zhyotomyr

Well, my little weblog is vastly behind real life at the moment, considering the latest is from day three in Ukraine and I’m at a month and a half and going strong. So, an update: I am currently in Zhotomyr, a city of about 300,000 that also happens to be over a thousand years old. It’s a two hours bus ride west of Kiev, and will be my new home for two years starting in January.I’m currently visiting the city for a week, getting to know my new host family, teaching classes at the teacher training institute where I will be working for two years, and generally seeing if there’s any problems that Peace Corps needs to address before I permanently move here in a month and a half.

Life in Obhiev, where I currently live, is going really well. Language training is coming along very rapidly. This is what happens when you have six hours of language class a day and live with people who don’t speak English. My new host family (and perhaps they were being nice) thought I’d been studying it for several years. That’s probably not far off, considering that in two semesters of college you would only receive, what, 72 hours of language instruction and I’ve already received somewhere around 90 hours worth? In any case, I’m at about an intermediate-low level (to use the official ranking system) able to use public transportation, haggle at the bazaar, describe myself, and carry on shallow conversations Intense has always been the word to describe Peace Corps training, and that’s fairly true. Your entire day is packed up with technical sessions, language sessions, teaching classes and moving between cities to get all these done. And, theoretically, you should be sleeping at night but you actually spend most of your evening hanging or partying with fellow Peace Corps people. All the Volunteers that I’ve met that have been in country for over a year say that training was the worst part of Peace Corps, and if that’s true, I have nothing but good times to look forward. I’m loving this. It’s like college and a summer camp rolled into one, with the added bonus of getting paid every two weeks.

Training is officially half over, and the time came to see our future sites. My division of about 50 Peace Corps Trainees met back up in Prolisok where, after listening to the election results come in via BBC radio, there was much partying late into the night to take the edge off the knowledge that we’d have to endure four more years of Shrub (this was lubricated by 12 point Ukrainian beer). Following three successive nights of this were three successive days of bleary-eyed tech sessions focusing on both teaching techniques and safety issues, a boring experience since A) all the teaching training is a rehash for me (out of 109 trainees, only eleven of us have prior teaching experience) and B) they’ve been giving us the same security information over and over since we got off the plane in September. But they did give us our diplomatic papers, which was cool. Since Peace Corps is technically a diplomatic organization (albeit an apolitical one), we are accorded the status of diplomatic administrative staff. This does not mean I get diplomatic immunity (sadness) but I am free to move about the country without any restrictions and am legally allowed to say I am a diplomat with the U.S. Embassy.

We all departed Prolisok yesterday, some with 17-hour train trips ahead of them, and, after eating McDonalds, I got on a bus to Zhotomyr. Oh, let me digress on the McDonalds. It’s sad, but I craved it. This country does not have the sheer variety of food that we have in the States, and after a month of bortch and varenike and galupste and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, the fatty, salty goodness of McDonalds was a beautiful thing. I ate a whole double cheeseburger meal (and the drink had ice in it!) and then bought another double cheeseburger meal and ate it, too. It’s sad, but an American diet is one that trains your body to feel leaden after a meal, and to associate that feeling with being full. Consequently, I haven’t felt full since I’ve gotten here. I’ve stopped eating because my stomach could contain no more food, but I haven’t felt full. I now know why dieters fall off the wagon so much when they switch to healthier food; it’s because they still feel empty. Actually, I’m in much better shape here, more energetic, eating more, exercising more (mostly in the form of walking everywhere), but my body does miss that feeling of being filled to the gills with grease. Sad, but true. So, yes, McDonalds was a sating experience.

Zhotomyr is very old, and I imagine it will be very pretty in the summer. The architecture is more of the soviet block style buildings, but there are many of the onion-domed Orthodox churches here, in beautiful blues and yellows that contrast with the gray skies and bare, brown trees. My new host family lives in a three-story house by a river on the outskirts of town. Once again, I seem to luck out while everyone else gets little mud and brick houses in tiny villages or cramped apartment buildings in packed cities like Liviv or Odessa. The father was in the Soviet military, but has been decorated by both the UN and the United States (for peacekeeping work by the former, and for helping to clear a minefield by the latter). The mother is the most, um, motherly person I’ve ever met, showering constant attention onto her two teenage sons, smoothing their clothes and kissing them over and over, embarrassed looks on their faces. She has already declared me her third son, and I fear the day that this attention will swing to me. Both sons do a lot of boxing (my room is covered in Mike Tyson posters) and they have told me they will teach me this gentlemanly sport of how to get the crap beaten out of me while wearing padded red gloves. Should be interesting. You have to cross the river to get into town by walking across a bridge. The bridge looks not so much made as evolved, a metal and rotting-wood contraption that has the added benefit of being fifteen feet above the icy water. Running from the bulls was less scary than crossing that thing.

I discovered that I will not be speaking Ukrainian when I move here. Zhotomyr is a Sergic city, which means they speak both languages. Well, theoretically. In actuality, everyone at my workplace and everyone in my new host family speaks Russian. They can understand Ukrainian, but since they’re not used to it they have to concentrate and are much happier when I drop into what little Russian I know. Ukrainian and Russian are as close as Spanish and Portuguese. Which is, to say, kind of. If you’re a native speaker of one, you can kind of understand the other, but guess what? I’m not a native speaker. The grammar is the same, about 30 percent of the vocabulary is the same, and that’s it. On an interesting note, after a long introductory conversation that included a mishmash of Russian and Ukrainian with my host mother and English with one of my host brothers, my host father pulled a letter from Argentina where he has business contacts. It was in Spanish and he doesn’t speak Spanish, so could I translate it for him? Surprisingly, I was able to, but I don’t know how the Dutch manage to effortlessly switch between four languages because it gives me a splitting headache (on the other hand, though, I like bragging about it). It would make sense for me to switch to Russian training, but I will also be going to a lot of schools in the countryside as part of my job, where they don’t speak a lick of Russian. Peace Corps’ current plan is to have me finish out Ukrainian training and then switch to Russian at site in January and work with a Russian tutor until I have a decent grasp of it.

I like having to learn both languages for one very good reason: travel. Now that everyone has their sites, I have discovered that, much like how it was in America, I am central to a whole lot of friends living on the outskirts of the country. My cluster mates, whom I’ve grown very close to, are now on the borders of Poland, Romania, Moldova, Russia and Turkey. We already have massive travel plans this summer to meet up and cross those borders. Since Polish is very close Ukrainian, it’s best to speak that language. And Russia, well, they don’t speak anything but Russian. Romanian is actually a romance language, somewhat close to Spanish. And Moldova and Turkey? I might have to resort to (gasp!) English.So, much to look forward to, much to look forward to, especially since Krakow, Bucharest, Budapest, Moscow, and Istanbul are all within a day’s train ride (well, you have to take a ferry to Istanbul), and then, of course, there are Ukrainian’s golden jewels of Kiev, Odessa, Yalta and Liviv…

In any case, I’ll stop here. Currently, my only complaints are the cold (and winter has not yet begun), the fact that it is pitch-black dark by 5:00 PM, and the excessive amounts of cabbage I have to eat (a fellow PCT received Cheese-its in the mail and shared them. I was brought to an near-delirious ecstatic state by their cheesy goodness). More later, but I wanted everyone to know that I’m safe, having fun, and getting to know this country that, while bleak and coming out from under the dual yoke of poverty and a Soviet legacy, is a really amazing place, with really amazing people that experience the world on an emotional level that Americans don’t get to without a lot of time and trust. I’ve learned a lot, have a lot to learn, and am really enjoying what I’m doing.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Ukraine: Training

This is Peace Corps Ukraine training:

Four hours of language class a day, usually in the afternoon. Teaching twice a week, 10th and 11th graders at a local school. They're pretty cool. As a teacher trainer, I observe my clustermates as they teach (and they teach four times a week) and give them feedback. Saturdays, we have ungodly long technical sessions that last all day where they teach teaching skills. As I did this for both my bachelors and my masters, I am bored. Nights: hanging out with clustermates, talking or watching episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on Seth's computer. Weekends: Extremely hard partying with the link, which usually involves drinking at Rastafaris and dancing at Indigos.

All in all, a lot of fun, I'm kept very busy and I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Ukraine: Down with the Sickness

Well, every traveler tends to have a bowel story, and now I have mine. It came on suddenly just after dinner and lasted for 12 hours as my body violently tried to get rid of every bit of food inside through every available orifice.
All night I alternately puked, pissed and spewed diarrhea. I called the Peace Corps medical office, my bottle of Amoxocillin clutched in my hand and ready to take some as soon as I got approval. They told me that I was among several volunteers getting hit with gastroenteritis, and the most I could do is curl into a ball and wait it out.
There was no curling into a ball, at least not for long. After everything in my stomach had been emptied, my stomach started filling with gas. So mostly I sat up in my bed, half-awake, back against the wall or footboard, rocking to burp out some of the gas that was distending my stomach.
Not that I stayed in bed for any real length of time. About every ten minutes I’d get up and go to the bathroom and spew or shit out food I didn’t even realize was in me. In a devil’s game, there were a number of times that I sat by the toilet, felt a bit better, and as soon as I got up to walk back to bed, had to run back to the bathroom.
Would my host mother, Anna, not have started freaking out, I would have just dragged my blankets by the bathroom door so that I wouldn’t have to keep crossing the house whenever I felt another bout come on.
And boy did I feel sorry for Anna. After about four trips to the bathroom (mind you, it’s now about two in the morning), I was determined to call Peace Corps Medical the very next time I had to get up. That time was only a few minutes later, but I couldn’t get the phone to dial Kiev. Unsure if long distance was on their phone, I woke Anna up to get her to dial the number, assuming that she’d use her son’s cell phone. Actually, she was able to dial it from the house phone and paced while I listened to the on duty nurse tell me that there was nothing to do but wait it out. The puking would stop eventually, she said, with only a few more days of diarrhea. If I was still feeling bad in the morning they’d put me on Cipro and send a car for me to take me to Kiev. I didn’t tell her that the chance of me getting in a car for a forty minutes trip, one during which I’d have to exit the car every fifteen minutes to empty yet more of myself was nonexistent.
The nurse recommended bouillon, juice and water, and to sip on all three in an effort to keep some nutrients in me. I relayed this to Anna, asking her if she had juice (cik) or water (voda). She had neither and grabbed her purse to go get some. As I was not going to let her go out at two in the morning in the freezing cold, I told her not to go. "Nee cik," I said. "You sleep," I said, pointing at her and mimicking putting both hands on one side of my cheek. Of course, she wasn’t about to.
I began to feel worse about her than I did about myself. She had to listen to me puke and run to the bathroom all night, unable to do anything about it. She kept grabbing the dictionary to look up a word. "Sweat" she pointed out. No, I wasn’t sweating. "Medicine." Nee, nee medicine. She kept looking up juice. Did I want orange juice? "Nee, nee cik. I sleep," I said, pointing at myself and mimicking sleep.
Actually, what I wanted most of all was water. I had forgotten that it’s possible to shit water, but I was reminded that I could as I did it again and again and again. I felt myself becoming progressively more dehydrated, that tightening of the skin, the itch at the back of the throat. But I only had one bottle and every time I drank some I would puke it back up. Ukrainian water is unsafe to drink, and most families don’t keep around bottled water, preferring to boil what comes out of the tap in order to make tea. Anna kept trying to give me tea, which I felt was the last thing I could possibly drink.
I finally realized some of the limitations and problems of being in Ukraine. It seemed so close to America, but it was not. I had to ration this one bottle of water and I couldn’t communicate what was wrong to my host mother, and I couldn’t even pick up the phone and call my own mother. More than anything, I just wanted a comfortable bed.
But then I realized how lucky I was to be stationed in Ukraine, to have a bout in a house with a flushing toilet. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I had to repeatedly run out to an outhouse buzzing with flies and mosquitoes.
Finally, about five in the morning, my stomach had stopped churning and inflating long enough for me to drift off into a couple hours of sleep. And when I awoke, like the nurse predicted, I was feeling better. Peace Corps Medical called to check on me and the nurse gave me a run down for the day: sleep, juice, bouillon, bananas, water, nothing else.
I had the nurse call my Language and Cultural Facilitator, Oxana, who spoke both languages and have her call Anna to tell her what I needed, since going back and forth with the dictionary wasn’t working, especially with how exhausted I was.
The LCF called a few minutes later, and Anna began ranting in high pitched Ukrainian, working herself in a tizzy over my state. She was obviously very worried, and I was really touched. Finally she calmed down to listen to Oxana.
After she got off the phone, Anna made me some tea. At that point I was getting frustrated. I did not want tea. It was too hot, and I couldn’t keep it down. I wanted water, lots and lots of water. I must have lost literally gallons of water during the night, and I felt parched. I gave Anna 20 hrivna and tried to convey that I needed juice, bananas and water. Water, please, water. Anna pushed the money back at me and said that she knew I needed it, but she wanted me to drink tea. As I started sipping it, she left to get the groceries, and I realized that once again even a tiny cross-cultural thing like bottled water was working against me.
Anna came back with the juice and bananas, but no water. I was ready to throw in the towel, resolving to go out and get water myself as soon as I felt a bit better. After eating a banana and sipping some juice I went back to my bedroom. And there, on the bedside table, and newly bought by Anna, were two bottles of water.

Friday, October 08, 2004

Ukraine: Initial Impressions

I am sitting in an apartment in Ukraine, watching a bootleg copy of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Since it’s dubbed with Russian voices and uses a Russian soundtrack, though, it might be better if the two protagonists are referred to by their names in the movie: “Jay ee Smolke Bohb”. I must say, there is nothing quite as amusing as seeing a deep Russian voice come out of Jay’s mouth and say “Snoogins.” Except for hearing that voice say “Ya pushinke clitka. Ya clitka commander” (I am the master of the clit. I am the clit commander).
That the apartment I’m in has a brand-new computer to play the movie came as a surprise. In fact, almost everything about the apartment came as a surprise. I had assumed the worst about the apartment I would spend the three months living in during Peace Corps training: some tiny, freezing apartment with the plaster falling off the walls, the power dimming every ten minutes (if there was power at all), and nothing more than a dirty mattress for a bed.
But the my apartment is very nice, far nicer than a lot of places I’ve seen in Miami. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the outside, though. From the outside, Ubuhiv (the city I’m staying in, 40 minutes south of Kiev) looks exactly like you would expect an Eastern European city to: tall, boxy communist apartment buildings with crumbling and faded facades, small shops with bars on their windows strung along tiny streets with broken asphalt. It also appears that Ubuhiv has cornered the market on stray dogs. Garbage spills out from garbage chutes beside the door you use to get inside the apartment building, which makes the interior halls rank. But at the end of a dimly lit (in my case) or dark (in the case of some other Peace Corps Trainees) hallway is a door that, once opened, leads to a spacious four bedroom apartment with new wall paper, clean, bright carpets, constant power and a bathroom with hot water (mostly, it’s broken at the moment). Like I said, it’s a lot better than I’ve seen in Miami, and the kitchen appliances are newer than the ones I had in Oklahoma City.
I’m not sure why there is such a huge discrepancy between the exteriors and the interiors. Perhaps under the communist regime the state took care of the exteriors and the family the interiors, and the state is no longer up to it. Perhaps, due to the obscenely high 6 percent economic growth rate, the new income has poured into the homes and has not yet reached the exteriors. Or perhaps Ukraine wants to keep its cities ugly so that Russia doesn’t come knocking once more.
My host family is great, too. My host mother is Anna, and her son and daughter are Alex and Valentina. Oddly, both Loosha and Vanna (their diminutive names) seem to both have a lazy eye and a blind eye. Alex’s lazy eye appears to be his good eye, so he’s always tilting his head to look at you.
Alex speaks a little English, Anna and Valentina speak none. Dinners consist of passing the Ukrainian/English dictionary around so that we can communicate. If this doesn’t speed up my Ukrainian acquisition, I don’t know what will. I may learn some Russian to boot, as Alex, Valentina and their friends all talk to each other in Russian.
I’m feeling a million times better about being here than when I arrived. I was so badly jet-lagged when we arrived in Kiev that I could barely stay awake during the barrage of health and security lectures we received (although I was awake for the warning about the SUB, formerly known as the KGB. Basically, they may think we’re spying for the U.S. government, and so may go through our things while we’re at work, and may listening devices in our rooms. Try not to worry about it, we were told. The SUB may also try to recruit as spies. Do not except this offer, we were told). Those who know me well know that there is an inverse relationship between my level of sleep and my level of moodiness. Plus, with the exhaustion came a cold that I’m still fighting and it was all added to by gastrointestinal distressed brought on by food that, while excellent, my digestive system was figuring out how to deal with. On top of this was the news that I would be learning Ukrainian and not Russian (while the western half speaks Ukrainian, the eastern half is solidly Russian speaking), despite my initial requests to the contrary.
The resulting mood of this equation ended up with sitting on my bed one night, still in Kiev, wondering why I was going to put so much effort into a language that would probably be useless after Peace Corps, typing on my computer: what the hell am I doing here?
I left the room to talk with the director yet again about switching to a Russian language group and was once again firmly shot down. Walking back to my room, I received an answer to my earlier typed question.
My Kiev roommate, Seth , was in the room playing guitar with my roommate from staging in Washington DC, Mike. Another girl, whose name I can’t remember, had brought her guitar as well.
Yet another thing I had been upset about was the fact that I had broken my guitar in transit to DC. I think the head had been weakened when I shipped it from OKC to Orlando without loosening the strings—a bad idea in an unpressurised airplane compartment—and it took its final blow trying to get through a revolving door in DC while an Arabic cabby screamed curses at my back because I would not pay him the $14 he requested when the meter only said $11.15 (“Rush hour charge” he had told me, after I had just spent ten bored minutes reading the sticker on the inside of my window that listed all possible charges, along with the number to call if the cabby asked for anything other than the fare on the meter). The result was that the next morning, I found that the head had snapped forward: repairable, but not anytime soon.
I was not without a guitar during the impromptu jam session in my room, though. The girl, while a great singer, was only a beginning guitarist and couldn’t keep up with Mike and Seth, both highly skilled. I’m not fantastic, but when she loaned me her guitar, I was able to follow chord changes as they yelled them out and solo when they called out song keys.
The jam session lasted more than two hours and brought nearly the entire floor over to listen, as well as the one above it. We moved out to the common area of the hotel floor to accommodate all the people, and the musical group was added to by Gino, another fantastic guitar player and singer. The girl sang and rhythmically beat her chair, Mike handed off his guitar to Gino and played harmonica, and the crowd of Peace Corps trainees surrounded us and sang along. By the time it was done, I felt absolutely fantastic and wondered why I had been so upset before.
I realized that this was probably a microcosm of my entire Peace Corps experience: drastic highs and lows, probably higher and lower than this, both offsetting one another. In any case, I certainly no longer despaired. Learning Ukrainian would no doubt have its benefits, I told myself, and those would probably become clear in time.
The next day, we all said goodbye to one another and Seth, myself and three girls—Liz, Jerry and Jessica—got on a bus to go to Ubuhiv, the sky gray and the crisp air promising freezing temperatures by the end of the week.
The five of us are a cluster, the only Americans in a city of 33,000, and our “link” is another cluster in a town called Ukrinka, five more peace corps trainees being trained in Russian that we are to meet with every Saturday and exchange our experiences and have technical training with.
I was met at the bus stop by Alex, who had come along with his friend, Alex. Later, I met another friend of Alex, also called Alex. All three Alexes are seventeen and the two that I’m not living with work in Kiev, while my host-brother Alex is still in school. The three Alexes spoke little English, but were excited about seeing my photographs from home. They particularly like the photographs of Leslie and Shauna, pronouncing each in turn to be a “bootiful ghurl”.
And yes, what they say about Eastern Europeans is true: 70 percent of them, guys and girls alike, would have little trouble getting work as a runway model. Um, provided they don’t smile, that is. Cosmetic dental care and orthodontics have not exactly booming business here.
I was repeatedly told by friends before coming that I would end up getting a Ukrainian wife. There is actually a booming business in helping foreigners to meet Ukrainian wives. Our technical trainer, Helen, actually worked for several months with a company that matched up Australian men with Ukrainian women, and on the back of the Ukrainian customs form is as an advertisement for a law firm that implores: “don’t let your little lady get stuck here,” before explaining its services to help Ukrainian women with visa problems. And then, as the final coup de grace, I met Steve, a Peace Corps Volunteer working in Ubuhiv (I guess that makes six Americans in town). He’s been in country for a year, and after meeting him, we met his wife. His Ukrainian wife. That he met in training nine months ago and married shortly thereafter.
Back at my new home, Alex showed me his guitar, which mostly sits and gathers dust. He said I could use it until mine is repaired. The three boys asked me to play something, so I started playing the intro to “Nothing Else Matters” before I was interupted by Alex yelling “Metalika!” and springing to the computer, pulling up the MP3 of the song I was just playing. The three then showed me the stacks of bootleg games and videos, as well as the gigs and gigs of MP3s they own. They have no internet in the house, so all of these come through disk swapping and burning.
Oddly, Alex and his friends were the only ones that seemed excited about my being there. Valentina barely acknowledged me when she later arrived, and Anna had only enough time on her way to a teacher celebration (she teaches Russian literature at a local school) to say hello and put food in front of me before she left again. I had been warned about being overwhelmed from the attention, so I was distinctly underwhelmed by my uninterested reception. I would later learn that I’m the fourth volunteer to stay with the family, so I’m not exactly a novelty.
Anna did surprise me that night, though, by coming into my room at four in the morning and tossing another blanket on me (there is no heat in the house and, even though the air is below freezing, the city won’t turn it on for another couple of weeks). She also mothers the hell out of me by telling me to put on socks when I walk around barefoot, forcing lots of food into me, and telling me to wash my hands before dinner.
It’s sad to say, but I kind of like the gender roles that became apparent the first night at dinner with Alex, Valentina and her friend, Luda. Valentina and Luda absentmindedly poured tea for Alex and I, took our dishes when we were done and washed them, all while keeping up a steady conversation. Alex never moved a muscle to help and I (as per Peace Corps instructions) took my cues from him. Apparently my gender role is to open doors and carry heavy packages. No women’s work for me! Although I do have to do my own laundry. In the tub. By hand.
It takes forever.
Also, no one pulled out vodka at dinner. The father, I learned from Anna, now has another family. With no older male pulling out the vodka and Alex making no attempt to, I can safely assume that drinking alcohol is not a nightly tradition. In fact, I’ve only seen alcohol at the table once, on Vanna’s birthday, and it was only a shot of wine a piece (replenished after every toast). So while I may have to evaluate how I will or will not drink in other social situations, at least I’m not constantly having to make decisions about whether to drink alcohol every night.
So all in all, I like it here. Admittedly, this is only the first week, but it’s all much better than I expected. My only complaint is my bed, which, instead of a mattress, has three wire-rimmed cushions with a sheet over them. The wires love to cut into my ribs and thighs while I sleep. I’ve taken to using my comforters as padding and just sleeping in my sleeping bag on top, which is warmer anyway. Currently the only frustration (and one that will remain so for a long time) is my lack of language ability. With 6 hours of language classes a day, though, that should change soon.
In fact, each night as I eat dinner while constantly flipping through the dictionary for words, I find myself getting better. I strung my first sentences together last night, telling Anna that I was going to another Peace Corp Trainee’s apartment, and that I would be back at midnight. My hope right now is that, in a few months, I’ll be able to sit at that same table, able to exchange news and tell stories with my host family in their native tongue.