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.
Monday, October 25, 2004
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.
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.
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