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.