Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Peace Corps Service Completed

Wow.

Like everything in my life, it was at the last second: a series of events meant I got to Kyiv with only 90 minutes before the Peace Corps office closed, and I needed to get a medical checkout, close my grant (which normally takes a couple hours) and get a half a dozen signatures from people who turned out not to be in their offices.

With quite a bit of help and goodwill, at very annoyed financial manager, and a new record for running up and down flights of stairs, it's done.  I'm done.

I am no longer a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I thought it would be more sad, but the elation of getting the paperwork in under the buzzer put me on an adrenaline high.

Wow.

Done.  After everything.

I fly home in five days.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Why I Almost Quit Peace Corps

Yep.  I almost quit Peace Corps 12 days before finishing it:

My day started off well enough, with me taking my language proficiency test and getting a score of "Advanced-Mid".  The language exam is one of many tests, exams, surveys and interviews that comprise the two page checklist that must be completed before a volunteer can close his or her service.

 It’s as hard to get out of Peace Corps as into it.

Although "Advanced-Mid" is only one below the best rating you can get of "Advanced-High" (provided you don't count the "Native Speaker" rating), I don't feel I deserved it.  You see, the exam is really just a conversation with the examiner, during which they suss out how good our skills are.  The thing is, we stuck mostly to talking about my projects in Peace Corps, which are topics I've had to discuss hundreds of times in the course of making them happen.  I've got canned responses and the grammar nailed down for those, so I came off sounding much more proficient then I actually am.  Still, considering I didn't speak Russian at all 18 months ago and received an "Intermediate-Mid" rating on my test 11 months ago, I was pretty damn proud.

My day took a turn for the worse in the afternoon.  The Ukrainian administrator handling my file was confused: why was I telling her that my flight was on December 4th when my records showed that my Close of Service date was December 14th?


Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Ukraine: Description of Service

Had my last day of teaching today. Felt good, actually. Also went and bought my first suit 'cause I know I need one and it's cheaper here. Everything's like that now: finishing this, getting that, all preparing to leave. And that includes writing my Description of Service.

What is it? It's the official record of everything we've done. Like a few other volunteers in my group, I've decided to post mine online. Why? To brag of course!

It's just the way such things are. A lot of it is boiler plate: they gave us the exact wording on most of the beginning and end and gave us examples of how the middle should go. Workin' for the government and all.

Thought I'd share.

***


Description of Peace Corps Volunteer Service
Name: Daniel Reynolds
Country of Service: Ukraine
Dates of Service: (December 2004 – December 2006)

Monday, November 13, 2006

Ukraine: Extreme Marathon 2006 (Pics)

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Waiting for the race to start.
A guy rode past me on his bike, popped up his front wheel while peddling, hit the brakes and then stopped like that, perfectly balanced on his back tire. Then he started jumping up and down, using his bike like a pogo stick, the back tire thumping as it repeatedly hit the ground.

Okay.  Mission Accomplished.  I am impressed.

It was 9:00 AM, and I was waiting, along with 19 other people, to compete in Zhytomyr’s Extreme Marathon, a multi-sport adventure race. This was actually only a mini-Extreme Marathon. The real one, in which I had competed the year before, was a 24 hour endurance race of running, swimming, climbing, ropes course challenges, orienteering, biking and rafting. Another volunteer named Carrie had been my partner, and we had lasted about 12 hours before Carrie's hurt knee caused us to drop out.  Still, of the 32 teams from 6 countries in the race, four others dropped out before us, which meant we weren’t complete losers.


Friday, November 10, 2006

Ukraine: Uman (Pics)

"Do you think black cats know they cause bad luck?" asked Diana as we sat down on the bus to Uman. Apparently a black cat had looked at her on the way to the bus station and, just as she neared it, purposely walked across her path.

The bus left at 7:00 AM. Diana said it would take three and a half hours to get to Uman. This is what they had told her when she bought our tickets. They had lied.

"Nature takes her clothes off with dignity," said Diana several hours later, apparently in a poetic mood as she looked out the window. The bus was rocking down a road paved through the middle of a forest. On either side, trees blazed red and orange and yellow. Soon those leaves would fall and leave nature naked, but before then she'd have one last burst of glory.

At 11:00 AM, when we should already have been in Uman, Diana asked the driver if we'd soon be there and laughed at her. The bus kept on its slow way, stopping, it seemed, every fifteen seconds to pick someone up or drop them off on the side of the road. Diana and I were going to Uman on a whim. Uman is famous in Ukraine for it's park, reputed to be the Versailles of Ukraine (which, admittedly, doesn't say a lot). Neither Diana nor I had been there, but we thought it would be great with the fall foiliage. We were discussing this on Friday. Not having a lot of time, we decided to do it as a day trip on Sunday.

Finally the bus pulled in, six hours after we left Zhytomyr. It being near winter, it was already starting to get dark. It was raining. In the bus station we found there were no more buses headed back to Zhytomyr that day. Still, we knew we could still get back to Kyiv that night (all roads lead to Kyiv) and if we could get to Kyiv, we could get to Zhytomyr. We headed over to the park, which was in walking distance of the bus station and, when we got to the entrance, Diana found that she had lost her wallet, either on the bus or in the bus station. We went back to the station, but it was not to be found. I was going to find that black cat and kill it. Deciding to make the best of it, we headed back to the park.

The park was built in honor of a woman named Sophia. A little over a century ago, a nobel had fallen in love with a Polish concubine and built the park over several years as a gift to her. As with everything in Ukraine, much of the park was destroyed during World War II, but it was famous enough to have been rebuilt under the Soviet Union. And guess what? Even with the overcast skies and dim light, it was still beautiful.

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A map of the park

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The following photos show nature in her dignity (and show Diana and I being not quite as dignified)

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This was kind of cool: there's a long tunnel that goes under the park. For 2 UAH you get in a boat and a guy pushes the boat along the tunnel using a stick. For most of it there's absolutely no light (except from idiots who can't turn off their mobiles and people like me who insist on taking pictures)

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The trip back was shorter than the trip there: a marshrutka to Kyiv and then a marshrutka to Zhytomyr. Unlike buses, marshrutkas haul ass. Of course, the bus station and the train station in Kyiv (which is where one marshrutka arrived and the other left from) are on opposite sides of the city. Also, for all their really efficient Soviet planning, the bus station is inexplicably far away from any metro stops. Which, with it raining again and raining hard, meant we got pretty wet. I blame the cat.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Ukraine: Orphans in Costumes (Pics)

So, on Halloween I was at the orphanage's costume party (but sans costume myself) and had a lot of fun. Here's the pics:

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Tanya and I talking to the orphans about the history of Halloween and how it's celebrated in America. We were kind of put on the spot about this and I found myself lacking a lot of the necessary vocabulary

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Playing limbo

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I think she's supposed to be a cat

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Tanya getting mobbed

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Monsters everywhere!

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Break dancing

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A traditional Ukrainian game of passing a handkerchief in a circle

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The break dancing boys. They asked me to show them some of my moves

So, yeah, fun all around.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Ukraine: What's Been Going On (Pics)

Happy Halloween! I’m not celebrating it in any real sense, but I have been invited to the orphanage tonight to see their “Scariest Costume” contest. Should be fun.

Yesterday was the first snow in Zhytomyr. This might be more welcome if we had heat in my apartment building. Some parts of Zhytomyr have heat, some don’t and no one seems to know when the rest of the city will get theirs (this is the favorite topic of conversation at the institute, though). I have a space heater that keeps my bedroom warm and otherwise I just stay in my three layers of clothes. Yesterday I even managed my first multi-layer quick change. Since I had pulled off my “casual” layers (long-sleeve shirt, fleece, Harley-Davidson hoodie) all at once, they were still intact on the chair when I stripped off my “nice” layers (long sleeve shirt, dress shirt and tie, nice sweater) all at once and pulled on my casual layers as if it were one item of clothing.

***

Sarah left just ahead of the real cold, and now she’s back in the states. Soon she’ll be going to India where she has a seasonal job as a kitchen manager at a yoga retreat. In India, I don’t think they have a word for cold.

Since I was teaching we really couldn’t leave Zhytomyr, but here’s some of what we did:

Sarah was missing yoga while she was here, so we went with my friend Tatyana to her yoga class one evening. The instructor had not shown up (for the second class in a row) and an 18 year-old girl who said she knew a lot of yoga volunteered to teach it. What she was showing us was more of a warm-up for a dance class, though, including kicks. We’d be in a dance stretch and someone would ask what the pose was called and she say “I don’t really know, but it’s good for your legs.” The most yoga it got was mid-way through when she asked us to sit in a lotus position and chant “Om”. The problem was that one of the older guys in the class (who was one of several that spent the entire class telling her that she was doing this or that wrong) was trying to convince her that she was doing her “Om”s too quickly. Of course we’re following her, but then while we’re all going “Oooom” he’s doing “Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom”. He was literally trying to out om her. Finally the class broke down entirely due to their tug of war and Tatyana suggested that Sarah show us some things since she was very into yoga and had been doing it for a while. This is how Sarah, who speaks only English, ended up teaching a half-hour yoga class to Ukrainians…and doing a good job, too.

***

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All the decked-out Ukrainian women convinced Sarah to attempt to beautify. Since they're so cheap, she got a facial, a pedicure and a manicure while here. My friend Irina took her to all these things and then taught her about the joys of make-up.

***

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On my one day off we took a day-trip to Kyiv to see the Percheska Lavra (Caves Monastary)

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I took both Sarah and Amy to visit both an old USSR collective farm and to the mass graves from the Holocaust. Above and the next three below are the remains of the farm, where villagers still graze their horses. During Soviet times, farmers were required to keep all their livestock and mill all their grain here. It was unproductive, but let the Soviets be able to take their cut.

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Above and below are pictures of the mass graves

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***

I got interviewed on television. The local news station had a camera set up by a statue of Sergei Korolov that’s near my apartment. Korolov, if you’ve never heard of him, designed Mir, the first manmade object in space, and also designed the ship that let Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space (yes, we did loose that part of the space race). Having been raised in Zhytomyr, Korolov is my city’s favorite son. They stopped Sarah and I as we walked past and asked me if I knew who the statue was of. It was Korolov’s birthday, and they were doing a piece on him, seeing what Zhytomyr residents did and did not know about him. I said I did and said who he was and they could tell from my accent that I wasn’t Ukrainian. They asked where I was from and I told them and they seemed excited to interview an American. They then asked if I knew why Korolov was famous. Here, my Russian ran into trouble. I didn’t know the word for “design” or “spaceship”, so what the citizens of Zhytomyr heard last night was an American telling them that their local hero had “prepared the first car to go into space.”

***

Sarah and I took two of the bikes we got with the grant and did a circuit across the condemned bridge, down to a path by the river, along the river to the man-made waterfall/dam (where sewage is also dumped) and then we carried the bikes across the river to ride up to the WWII momument (with the eternal flame that wasn't burning) and then back to my apartment. Done at sunset, the whole route was gorgeous.

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Here you can see the WWII memorial in the distance as we bike along the Teatriv River

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Me, carrying my bike in front of the waterfall

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***

Sarah was kind enough to talk to a English-education group at the local library. She brought photos and told them about her work as a wilderness ranger in Alaska

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***

This is what I have been doing since Sarah left:
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It is the entire British Councils Recertification Curriculum (what we teach at the Institute), re-written. Since almost every teacher attending courses at the institute has already done the curriculm (they have to get recertified every five years), we needed a new one, which is essentially the results of me developing my lesson plans over the past two years. It took a week to get everything typed up and organized, but there you go: one copy for me, one for Peace Corps, one for the institute and three for the new Teacher Trainers that just arrived in Ukraine last month (and whom I worked with and gave feedback to when they came to give practice lessons at the institute two days ago)

Here's some pics from my lastest group of teachers:

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Doing a reading/creative thinking exercise

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Rewriting a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

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Working with flashcards

***
And that's about it! I'll leave with one final photo:

My friend Amy wanted to visit Zhytomyr to hang out and climb and asked to bring a friend. "Is she cute?" I asked, jokingly. Turned out she was. She was a New Zealander (Kiwi) named Livvy who was living in Prague and met Amy, who lives in Ukraine, when Amy was in New Zealand. Confused yet? Anyway, it turns out she actually was cute and I got to make out with my first Kiwi. Between her and "Lord of The Rings", I'd really like to visit New Zealand now.

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Me, Livvy and Amy before going to a club

Monday, October 23, 2006

Ukraine: Letter From the Director

I feel horrible at the moment. For reasons I'm not even sure of, I got another bout of gastroentiritis and was up all night while my body tried to get rid of every last bit of fluid inside me. Not fun, but as this is my fourth in two years, they get a little easier to deal with each time.

I've had a crazy couple weeks with Sarah (who left Saturday morning) and when I wasn't working, she and I were tearing up Zhytomyr. Haven't gotten any of that up on the blog, though, 'cause I've been a bit busy. I only have three weeks of work left. It's odd. I realize I need to start packing up and stuff, but I haven't even begun thinking about it. Mostly I'm trying to get this last cycle of teaching done and get my lesson plans in order to turn over to the next batch of teacher trainers.

Anyway, one cool thing that has gone on is that the Deputy Director of Peace Corps (as in, the whole world-wide program) was visiting Ukraine and came to see the wall. I was told I should have a training session going at 3:00 PM on a Thursday. This is the time when everyone is at work or at school and it's a little hard to get a group of kids there. Panicked is not the right word, but stressed is.

Luckily, one of the teachers I have trained agreed to bring her class. I called in a few favors to Polissya, ACET and my climbing friends and everyone was good enough to take the afternoon off from work or skip their university classes and the whole thing went off without a hitch. The Director of Peace Corps Ukraine was with her, along with two guys from the Peace Corps communication department who were taking photos, one of which also took a stab at climbing the wall.

Here's the email I just recieved from the Deputy Director:

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Dear Daniel,

Thank you for welcoming me and my staff to the Zhytomar Climbing Wall. I was so impressed to see how you managed to combine elements of fun with HIV/AIDS education. It was very clear that under your guidance, kids who visited the wall received important life lessons, as well as a boost in self confidence (this became abundantly clear when our own Chris Harnisch made it to the top of the wall and was smiling for the rest of the day!). I applaud you for your can-do attitude and the determination that you have instilled in much of the youth of Zhytomyr. You represent the highest ideals of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I wish you the best of luck for your final month in Ukraine.

Sincerely,

Jody Olsen
Deputy Director of the Peace Corps

***

Kinda cool, huh?