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.