[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.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
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 fiancée, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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