Got another one of those: "gee, you seem to be spending your Peace Corps service at Ukranian bars" emails. It was actually a supportive email other than that, but I would like to make a correction: I actually don't spend spend a lot of my Peace Corps service at Ukranian bars. I spend it at Ukranian discos, and my time there is important for language acquisition, cultural integration, and oggling beautiful women. Most of these are in the Peace Corps Handbook as being essential to success at site, but I leave it up to you to figure out which ones.
It came right before an intended blog on work anyway, which I swear I try to keep balanced with "Daniel having fun" and "Ukranian Culture" blogs.
Anyway, the lead off in the work news is that we just had our last training at the wall. We went out with a bang: 16 participants were trained! It concluded eight weeks of me promoting the wall during the week (every week I visited an average of six classes at local schools and distributed about 100 flyers) and eight Saturday trainings. Final numbers: 82 people trained in eight weeks, 61 of whom were under 18. That's in addition to the 93 trained since the wall's opening in November (during which it wasn't promoted; we were waiting for warmer weather). Each of the 82 people trained in the past eight weeks also recieved a one-hour course in HIV/AIDS prevention.
The HIV/AIDS courses, I feel, are what really mark the success of the wall. Initially it was to provide a recreational option in a city where there are few save playing soccer on dirt fields. But because Polissya has been having problems (some motivational, some staffing) with keeping the wall open regular hours and because HIV/AIDS awareness is so low in Ukraine (a recent poll showed that only 14% of 16-25 year-olds could correctly name the ways HIV is transmitted) that pairing the draw of the wall with an HIV/AIDS awareness class really make the money invested (AKA your tax dollars) worth it.
Of course, I thought that would be our last training for a bit, but I got a call last night to go visit the village of Ivanivka this morning to do a presentation. Irina, one of my trainers is from there, and she wanted to bring students from her old school to the wall(I told my trainers that they could start promoting the wall and I would open it for any training they wanted to do). So I got up early and caught a marshrutka out there and we'll be having training this weekend. This is added two at least two planned by volunteers: Jon is bringing a group from the Rivniska oblast and another volunteer is bringing a group from the Kyivska oblast. Thinking we should expand that, I put out an all-call on the volunteer bulletin that we would schedule trainings for any volunteer bringing a group of students in over the summer, so maybe even more Ukranians will get to experience climbing and become more informed about HIV/AIDS!
On a side note, after today's trip I am starting to realize that Ivanivka might merit a documentary of sorts. I've mentioned Ivanivka before: it's the town with the mass graves from the Holocaust. But, as I learned today (as it was behind the school I gave the presentation at), it has an old collective farm from the Soviet era. It was creepy: high concrete walls, a guard tower and a sliding metal gate normally reserved for military bases surrounded the farm. The gate was ajar and inside were a dozen buildings: the remains of a huge concrete barn, paddocks where milking cows were kept, the collapsed wooden coops where chickens were kept. It wasn't so much as a farm (although fields still used by the village sat just behind the walls) as a food factory. I hadn't brought my camera with me (always a mistake in Ukraine), but Irina told me her father used to be a bookkeeper at the collective, so maybe I can have him come out with me and have him point things out on camera, describe a bit of what life was like there. Along with the graves, footage of village life (this is where people hand-plant and hoe produce and then bring it to market by horse-drawn cart) and interviews with village residents about life now (one house had a satelite dish attached to the roof), it might make for an interesting encapsulation of Ukranian life, then and now. Or maybe it'll get buried under every other idea that I have...
*Just got the money in my bank account for the bike project. I'll be giving it to Polissya tomorrow and we will get that project rolling (pun intended). The first tours should start in July.
*The Across Ukraine Run is now getting moved to September, for a variety of reasons, the most major of which is that we should be getting a grant to cover most of the costs, but won't get the money until August. Other than that, a lot is finally starting to coalece. More and more people keep coming on board and taking up the slack in different areas, so I finally feel like we're almost to the apex and soon it will have enough momentum to succeed no matter what! And believe it or not, despite how big it's getting, I might have problems taking the 18 days needed to manage the trip as official leave. It was a bit of hoop-jumping to get four days approved to go teach for American Councils in July, because Peace Corps Ukraine is changing its policy that any work not directly related to your site does not count as official travel. Run Across Ukraine is not directly related to my site, but my manager understands that we'd been working on it for months prior to the travel-policy change. The problem is that he's about to be out of the country for a month. We had a phone conversation about the best time to submit the request (i.e., after he gets back, but before the new Country Director is installed) to get it approved. The interim director also strongly supports the project, so hopefully this won't be an obstacle, but it is entirely possible that they'll say I can't take official travel to do it, and I'm almost out of vacation days.
*My climbing camp is giving me fits. Finding dates that work for everyone is problematic. My Healthy Lifestyles teachers can't do it in the first half of July and my climbing instructors can't do the last half. I think I'll have to just set them and those that can't do it can't do it and we'll find replacements as needed.
We're also running into a funding snag. Polissya should be donating most of the equipment for climbing and camping, and American Councils should be donating use of teaching materials, so we're going to be able to fund it dirt cheap (I don't want to run my camp on grants, as that cuts back on sustainability), but I wanted to raise some extra funds via a car wash to buy the kids tee-shirts, etc. This is the answer Irina got back from the City Council: "Minors are not allowed to work, the government is in a mess right now (the elected mayor had her election overturned by the court due to falsification and there will be a re-election in July), and no one does car washes in Ukraine. Forget about it." Bear in mind all we need from them is PERMISSION to have the car wash, not any kind of support. And the excuse that minors can't WASH A CAR TO RAISE MONEY is ridiculous. I told Irina to get me a meeting with the head of youth services on the council next week, so hopefully we'll get it sorted out. That's the fourth Ukranian to say that "no one does car washes in Ukraine" as if that's a reason not to TRY to do something. Ultimately, I'm not that worried about funds: with the in-kind contributions, the camp is designed to run as cheaply as possible (it will run 9 AM to 3 PM specifically so that we don't have to feed them) and I'm willing to fund the rest out-of-pocket, but I'd like to set it up so that it can continue itself without me. I'm already hopefull of that: Marina, Irina and Tanya are taking on a lot of management responsibilities of the camp, and I hope to leave it to them after I'm gone. They're making me really proud, actually!
*Just finished another cycle of courses at the insitute. I LOVE my job there (which is good, because it's my main job). I teach the same set of classes to a different group of teachers every month, which means that my lesson plans just keep getting refined instead of the stress of making new ones for every single class. Also, since the cycle only lasts a month, at the end of every month my teachers give me candy or (if I have a good rapport with the group, like this last one) little gifts. If I'm lucky, I get both, and yesterday I was lucky. Yesterday I got my candy and my gift (a little figurine of a cossack and his wife) and said good-bye to another great group of teachers. I estimate that 1/10 of the English-teaching teachers in the oblast have been my students, something proved when I travelled around the oblast doing observations this month: at every single school I visited, even including the school I saw today in Ivanivka, at least one of the teachers knew me. The new volunteers will begin to introduce me to one of the teachers they work with and either I or the teacher will stop them because we already know each other. "How?" the new volunteer will ask. "She used to be my student," I will say. It's fun.
But enough about work. I finished another 5.11a on top-rope on Sunday and I want to make an attempt on lead today. I'm meeting Marina in an hour to attack it. It's time to go climbing.