Schedules in Ukraine are something like a chimera. This past week I’ve been working on my leadership training project at school, which deals with teaching my students to be peer trainers. So all week my 10th form students have been preparing and giving lessons on HIV/AIDS and leadership to the 5th to 8th formers. And all along, you can find me scrambling around, escalating up and down flights of stairs, hunting down teachers and keys, relaying messages, etc. I’m not that disorganized, honest. It is simply that this is how things are done in Ukraine. Schedule changes and sudden cancellations are almost a guarantee. Curveballs fly at you from all angles and you just learn to live with it. I’m almost afraid that one of the reverse culture shocks that I’ll face when I return home is that I won’t know how to manage my time like an American anymore. The teachers always assure me, “этокакмыживём” (this is how we live). Take a look for yourself:
a snippet of my planner
note the many changes in the schedule that takes place over a single day
The past month or so can aptly be characterized by laziness and procrastination. I find it harder and harder to wake up in the mornings despite the weather being nicer. Motivation evades my grasp as I sometimes lay in my couch bed wondering why my back feels like it's twice my age. There have been days when I felt accomplished because I finally got around to doing that load of laundry or the pile of dishes. Maybe the culture shock they warned us about is finally catching up to me. I never really had that low point up until now aside from the slight seasonal affective disorder (SAD) that afflicts anybody that has to undergo a Ukrainian winter. Or maybe I'm just feeling the withdrawal effects from being in Prague.
Prague
Earlier this month, I was in Prague for the Prague International Marathon with three other PCVs to run the marathon relay. We spent 4 days there. In a word, the city is beautiful. If there is any city I'd like to get lost in, it is Prague. And I did just that. On one of the days, I went to exchange some currency and meanwhile, the group that I was with decided to step into an adjacent store. Upon walking out and noticing that they were out of sight, I walked uphill to catch up. The street was flooded with tourists and after walking back and forth a few times, I decided to spend the day getting lost by myself. The streets of Prague are like a labyrinth. They are not gridded like most modern cities. I wonder if there is a negative correlation between a city's navigability and its beauty. It certainly adds character to the place. Everything there is rife with beauty. The architecture is stunningly gorgeous and the streets are of cobblestone. Nearly every building boasts beautifully carved statues and every turn leads to a charming little side street. Despite the packs of tourists, the city is a marvel. And what city that exudes so much beauty should not garner so much attention? It is rightly so, even though every person there is thinking, “how much more charming would this place be without the masses?”
it's like a fairy tale
old town square
view of (i think) the castle from a bridge
the relay team: Cassie, Emily, Kim, and I
Prague has some of the most interesting doors
Charles bridge
face of St. Vitus cathedral
inside St. Vitus cathedral
church where I saw a live performance of Mozart's Requiem
Race day was very exciting. It was amazing to see the amount of work put into organizing such an event. And being an international race, we witnessed some of the world’s best marathon runners in competition. I can proudly claim to have run in the same race as them. As I was the last leg of our team and each runner runs approximately an hour, I had to wait 3 hours from the start of the race until I was to run. As I was running, I was ecstatic to find that my pace was faster than almost everyone around me. I must’ve passed a hundred people throughout the duration of my run save a handful. Then I realized that these were full marathon runners and I was running on fresh legs and only running 12 kilometers. But it still served as a point of motivation to run by people. I ended up running my 12 kilometer leg in 1:05:22 and our team time was 4 hours and 9 minutes.
Beregovo
Just the week before, I ran in a 10 kilometer race at a wine country run in the western part of Ukraine in a town called Beregovo. The town is located just 6km from Hungary and the influence of the culture was very evident. I felt as if I was not in Ukraine. The people there spoke Hungarian and were very nice. It felt happier there and the people smiled and laughed in the streets. The wine there was also really good. There are many good things about Ukraine. Wine is not one of them. With that said, I was thoroughly enjoying the good, locally produced wine of Beregovo.
engaging in conversation with the locals
a charming cobblestoned street in Beregovo
I think it's abandoned, but I love this house
Work
As for work, my schedule is nonexistent. That’s not to say that I haven’t been working, just not consistently. My “schedule” is different month to month, week to week, and even day to day. My work, I’ve found, is much like a big juggling act. When you drop a ball, you pick up another one and keep juggling. Sometimes you have 10 balls, at other times you may be awkwardly juggling 1. Such is life here. Anyway, of late, I’ve been working on a Small Project Assistance (SPA) grant for a project at my school. It consists of a leadership training through HIV/AIDS education. I’ve trained my 10th form students to be peer educators and they will train their peers on HIV/AIDS and how it relates to leadership. Then as a final project, the students will disseminate information to the masses via flash mob.
at work: Natalia Nikolaevna - English teacher and my Russian tutor (left), Olena Viktorivna - my counterpart (right)
my 10th form students
Another project that I recently completed was a Living Library. What is a Living Library, you ask? Simply, it is an event in which students “read” “books”, or people of different backgrounds in a friendly environment. In short, it is culture sharing and it works a bit like speed dating. Every few minutes the books rotate to a new group of about 5-10 students and for their allotted time, they asked questions and basically have a conversation. I held one such event at my school and another at my site-mate’s school. All in all, I’d say it was a success. We’ll be holding several more of those in the future in mine and other PCV’s sites.
adorable 4th formers
meeting the books
Alison sharing photos
Tiago captures the attention of the students and translators
Students and teachers carefully listen to what Rich has to say
Chris pointing to Portland on the map
Kyle draws a crowd
The books: Top (left to right) - Olena (my counterpart), me, Kyle, Jing, Alison, Tiago; Bottom - Chris, Rich, Sasha
This summer, I will be working at ABCamp, one of the premier camps in Ukraine. Camps are all the rage in Peace Corps Ukraine. When summer rolls around, PCVs flock to whatever camp they can be a part of. I was lucky to be accepted into ABCamp, as it had a large pool of applicants. We’ll be teaching the kids about leadership, doing activities, playing games, and coming up with creative ways to have fun. You can find out more about it here.
Books
I’ve been reading a lot of Dostoevsky since I’ve been here. I’m in the middle of reading Crime and Punishment and I just finished Notes From the Underground not long ago. They are all heavy readings and not the lightest of subjects. I tend to absorb books into my life. By that I mean: I start to think a bit like the characters; internalize the themes and motifs; but mostly, I absorb the author’s writing style. I see it in my journals. Whatever book I happen to be reading at the time is reflected in my sentence structure, my prose, and even the mood. Maybe this is a contributor to my downbeat mood of late.
Anyway, I recently picked up a piece of journalism done by John Steinbeck called A Russian Journal. It was done in collaboration with photographer Robert Capa. I’m still in the middle of the book but I’ve read the part of the book where the duo travels to Ukraine, which is what concerns me here. I’d like to expound a bit on that:
A Russian Journal is a journalistic piece about the Russian people barring politics and editorials. It attempts to capture a portrait of the people on the other side of the iron curtain and Steinbeck does a good job of it. He leaves out commentary and prejudice. Where he does give his impressions, he leaves them open-ended for the reader to make one’s own opinion. This is particularly important because the trip to Russia was right after the Cold War had begun. Throughout the journey, Steinbeck engages in conversations about American perception of Russia particularly through the lens of journalism.
I greatly admire his keen sensibility in recording his experiences. He laces it with his dry humor and one gets a sense of the camaraderie that he and Capa develop over their journey in the way that he takes friendly shots at him.
Like the advent of my reading of Brothers Karamazov and all others of Dostoevsky’s writings, I particularly enjoy reading this while I am here in Ukraine. As I’ve mentioned, the duo spends a few days in Ukraine and may possibly have been to the town I currently reside in (they went to a couple towns called Shevchenko and humorously number them: Shevchenko I, Shevchenko II).
Many of the things he mentions, we Ukraine PCVs have experienced first-hand. I found myself laughing out loud while reading some of the observations he made of Russian/Ukrainian culture and even the exchanges they have with the locals. I see that some of the impressions that Americans have of Ukrainians comes from Steinbeck. That Ukrainian women are among the most beautiful is one example. But more interestingly, a lot of the things he writes about Ukrainians are still true to this day. They will go out of their way to over-feed you. Ukrainians still have a fear of drafts and night air. This is to the point of discomfort in marshrutkas. Ukrainians still overdress for any excuse they can find to do so. Interestingly, he notes that Ukrainians laugh and smile, whereas in Moscow people don’t. I thought that Ukrainians don’t smile. Maybe Moscow is an even more drab place than Ukraine is. Certainly, people in the US are much more jovial in public than here in the former Soviet Union.
I am a deep admirer of Steinbeck at this point. I’d forgotten that my favorite book of required readings in school was Of Mice and Men until I’d read The Count of Monte Cristo. And now I may have to get back into Steinbeck’s works. I may come back to this one again and again. This may be particularly true when I am back in the states and am feeling nostalgic over Ukraine.
As I've said, I tend to absorb what I read and having read a bit of Steinbeck, I felt roused out of my laziness and inspired to write again. You can thank Steinbeck for this blog entry.
I’m walking home from school on a glacier that is my route home. I look to the side of the road and see what looks like a fault. Running through it is a stream of water that serves as a natural drainage system and I wonder how the water hasn’t frozen. I see patches of blacktop covered in black ice and I realize that I haven’t set foot on solid ground in my town in months because the sheet of ice is still inches thick. On such terrain I go.
It is -14 degrees Celcius. In the distance I see trees stirring in the howling wind and I anticipate the wall of wind that approaches. In such cold your nose hairs freeze instantly and when you breathe you can feel them prodding the inside of your nostrils. The inevitable drip of snot starts to flow but your face is too numb to notice until you get inside. A sniffle will only remind you that your face is frozen and it feels like dough as it slowly returns to its normal position. Have you ever felt so cold that you thought you were going to puke? I can say that I have. I didn’t know if it was the Indian food I had that morning or the tight thermal underwear that was applying pressure to my gut or the most likely suspect: the extreme, biting cold. It was probably a combination of all three. Nonetheless I can say with complete confidence that I’ve never been in such cold weather before. It is weather like this that makes one want only to run home and bundle up in blankets with a pot of mulled wine. Twice I’ve resorted to such devices.
And amidst the cold and the long dark and the hostile canine neighbors that make it extra hard to find the resolve to step out of my apartment, I have to remind myself that service is hard. It is indeed a sacrifice. If it were comfort that I was looking for, I would not stay here. But it is in times like these that I remember the issue that is at the heart of service, of altruism. It is in times like these that I have to remember that to “love one another” (John 13:34-35) is indeed a choice. And the perfect example comes from the one who said it. In the very same chapter of John, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet several verses before he utters those words that are so simple, yet so hard to put into practice.
Many of us volunteers came expecting something. Many of us came to run away from something/s (as some of us discovered). We have to ask ourselves this one question: “if I were not able to see the fruits of my labor or receive some sort of personal satisfaction from service, would I still have gone through with it?” (This gets to the heart of the paradox of altruism). In other words, is there such a thing as a truly selfless act?
It’s been a long time since my last update and a lot has happened since then. But still sometimes I doubt my utility here and wonder if I’m sitting around too much. It’s certainly true because I have spent whole days doing nothing but sitting around and watching Batman: The Animated Series on my laptop. But then again, sometimes there isn’t much to do in the midst of a Ukrainian winter where it’s already dark by 3:30 PM and a good portion of the town population decides to take a “sick” vacation for weeks at a time.
And when the sun sets, things get crazy. I’m speaking particularly about the stray dogs. There is one that lives right outside of my building and I pass by it everyday to work and sometimes it even saunters over to me, beckoning to be petted. But once the sun sets, the animals here can’t be trusted. The same dog will bark at me menacingly. Dog bites are a pretty common occurrence and not too long ago I was attacked by a little one. I kept walking and went passed its territory, or so I thought. It then ran up and bit me. Luckily, it only caught my jeans and didn’t touch me. Though I don’t like to think it, I know it’s left a small scar on my psyche and whenever I have a dilemma about stepping out to get groceries or to buy a train ticket when the sun has already set, I tend towards agoraphobia.
Vacation
Of course my visit home was a great time. All the weight I lost in Ukraine, I gained back during my two week visit, and then some. It was a bit hectic trying to squeeze in everyone I wanted to see into my schedule but it was worth it and I had a blessed time. But by the end of the two weeks, I was ready to come back.
On my flight over I had a 20 hour layover in London and I spent the night out on the town to make the most of it. I didn’t sleep that night. I saw Big Ben, Parliament, The London Eye, stopped by Ye Old Cheshire Cheese (one of the many claimants to being the oldest pub in London), had some fish and chips, a whole bunch of good ales and lagers (I’m in love with Samuel Smith’s Brewery), walked around an outdoor bazaar-like thing, went to Convent Garden and saw a street performer, went to Soho, saw a live jazz performance, met some Polish girls and befriended them, went to a coffee shop and got hit on by a gay guy, got steak and eggs for breakfast while it was still dark, wandered around Picadilly Circus until the Tube opened and finally headed back to Heathrow to nap until my 11AM flight: the best layover of my life.
Holidays
New Years and Christmas were both great times, though I spent both holidays in Ukraine. Christmas was in Kotovsk in Odessa oblast with my cluster mates. We cooked, ate, drank, conversed, played cards, and watched movies together. New Years was in Lugansk with some of the older volunteers. We did the usual cooking, eating, drinking, etc. And the food was amazing. I can say without any reservation that that was the best meal I’ve had thus far in Ukraine.
Work
As for work, everything has been dwindling but I’m learning that my work here as a youth development volunteer consists of finding more balls to juggle to replace the ones I drop. My 8th and 9th form English club has dwindled to 2, but they consistently show up. They asked me to teach them American history so I am now an American history teacher. I brush up on my history every week and prepare power point presentations to show on my laptop. They love it. My older students’ English club is extinct but to replace that, I have my 4th form students, who love attending. I’m still trucking along with my Russian tutoring and that’s probably the one thing that is consistent in my schedule. I haven’t taught a healthy lifestyles lesson (or other YD related topic) in months, but I did pick up a student for tutoring in English. I received my 20 lbs of books from Darien Bookaid, which my students and I are very excited about. And I finally took the first steps in doing a community project. I’ll update more on that later.
Making the News
In other news, I made the local newspaper. Although I think what prompted it was my town getting another volunteer. Oh yes, I have a sitemate, by the way. Coincidentally, or intentionally, she is Asian. Anyway, this is now the fourth time I’ve made local news in Ukraine. The other three times were during training.
This is Jing, my new site mate.
This is me with a couple students from the school. This was totally staged and awkward.
This is me with my school director.
Here are the videos from training and swearing-in:
Rap
One of my students is into rapping. He calls himself DFM. I find it interesting how hip hop has spread across the globe and how it is perceived by people. Of course because mainstream rap has a certain image, people associate it with what hip hop is. Unfortunately, a lot of people become acquainted only with a façade that is the result of commercialism. This is true even in America. I’ve taken it upon myself to educate people about hip hop and what it actually is. I’ve had many heated conversations about this back in the states with close friends and though I don’t know everything about hip hop, I think I know a lot more than the average person about it. And as a representative of my country, from where hip hop was born, I count it my duty to defend her image from people who wouldn’t know any better.
The rappers here, from what I gather, tend to go for the gritty, hardcore sound. When they do it, it sounds good. But get into a regular conversation with them and you’ll find that their rapping voice is fabricated. It’s all entertainment, right? Maybe, but I like to think of hip hop as real expression. Not a paradigm to be followed or attained.
So anyway, to the point. My rapping student, Nikita, asked me to record a rap with him. I obliged him and we went to Kharkiv to record. His soundman was very good and knew what he was doing technically. The equipment was decent and actually I can’t say much more than that because I’ve never been in a studio. But I wasn’t feeling their vibe because they were going for the gangster rap style and his soundman was too overbearing during the process. It’s not like he’s a producer. He’s just the soundman. But he kept correcting our work and my student puts up with it. It is probably because this is the Soviet mentality. Hip hop, in my opinion, is about taking what you’ve got and making something of it, not aiming for a particular pattern or mold. This is the epitome of black music: improvisation. Anyway, they had me record these “backs”, or echoes, to emphasize the rhymes and give it that hard gangster sound. They would say, “90% of rappers use backs, even in America”. Not true. Maybe if you’re Dr. Dre. But he’s only one producer. Anyway, I went with what they wanted, because it was their track. I’m just the guest rapper. At this point I would have posted the track here for you to listen to but Blogger doesn't have this feature. If you want to hear it, ask me and I'll send it to you or something.
The studio
My student, Nikita and the soundman.
I'm already working on a second track. I haven't thought of a rap name. Any suggestions?
Miscellaneous Updates
Apparently, I have hypertension (high blood pressure). So for the past month I’ve been monitoring my blood pressure daily and recording it. My doctor says I need to come in and get this looked at. Hopefully it’s nothing. Personally, I don’t trust this BP monitor.
Speaking of health, I signed up for the Prague Marathon this coming May. I’ll be spending 5 days in Prague with a group of other PCVs running the marathon relay. Yea, there’s no way I’ll run a full marathon without serious training. I’ll save that for another day.
I got stopped by the cops yet again. That is now 6 times in 8 months.
