A Random Assortment!

Hello!

I know, I am awful at keeping my blog updated! So, I have uploaded some pictures from the last two or three weeks with some captions!

I spent a Sunday on the beach with some friends, the lady in the back left is Natasha, an English teacher who is currently on maternity leave (maternity leave in Ukraine is 3 years!).  She has become a good friend and is also my Russian tutor. Her husband is to her left and the rest of the group are their neighbors.

Last night Natasha and I made tacos with some seasoning that my Mom and Grandma sent in a box.  It was the first Mexican food that they have ever tasted- they loved it!  We also made homemade tortillas which were delicious! (pictures to come :))

One Sunday afternoon I went with some friends to watch our local soccer team play another village's team.   

 A trip to see the Settlement's fire department and fire truck!

I had an amazing day when I went to the Post Office and found out that I had received TWO care packages on the same day! Check out this loot!  Little bits and treats from home are amazing and really can transform a lousy day (the librarians also really enjoy trying American candy)! Thank you to Drew and Mom and Dad! 

 Thursday's are the big bazar days when people selling clothes and household goods come in.  Here is a snapshot from last Thursday! 

I helped Tonya and her mom prepare for some canning.  To me it seems like Ukrainian's can tomatoes every day!  This particular day Tonya was canning tomatoes and peppers.  In the winter, fresh produce is very expensive in Ukraine, so people rely on the food that they grow in their gardens and can in the spring and summer for the rest of the year.  Pickled tomatoes are the most common variety of canned vegetables (yes, I know that a tomato is a fruit).

August 24th marks Ukrainian Independence Day.  The town celebrated with a performance in the center by the Lenin statue which is in front of the Rayon (district) administration building.  There was singing, dancing and speeches to celebrate and commemorate Ukraine's 20 years of independence. Go Ukraine! 

Friday is always a good day!

I just bought my first chicken.  This morning it was enjoying its free-range village life and now, at 10am, it is waiting in the refrigerator for me to cook it into soup.  I am not sure how I feel about that short process I just know that I am very relieved that the feathers and head did not come with it.  

Yesterday I bought three kilos (6.6lbs) of tomatoes from the bazar (for a 1USD).  This weekend I am planning to make tomato soup for some ladies who will be coming over to my apartment on Monday- the first dinner get-together at my apartment! With the left over tomatoes and other vegetables that I have purchased I am going to make vegetable stock (also needed for the tomato soup).  

Later this weekend I will post the results of my cooking endeavors with some pictures of of the food and possibly the bazar and different areas around town! For now, I will post a picture of my new washing machine! I love it and it has made my life so much easier and comfortable here in Ukraine.  Unfortunately the only place where it could work is about a foot in front of my kitchen sink. Yes, I can still wash dishes, its just a tight squeeze!  The gray tube in the sink is the drainage tube and I am sad to admit that one time I forgot to put the tube into the sink so the floor got an unexpected cleaning! 

Happy Friday morning to those of you who are in America! I hope you have a fun and nice weekend! 

Entertaining walk-

I've already posted about my workday today, I but really enjoyed my evening walk and thought it was also worth sharing....

After work, I set out on a walk - not a run, because I do not have water today, so showering is out of the question this evening!

1.  And on this walk, I was stopped by a mother goose leading her 4 cute goslings across the road.
2.  Then, I was stopped by a herd of cattle passing on the road.
3.  The cattle were followed a few minutes later by a herd of sheep.
4.  The next animal I encountered was a huge all-white turkey with a floppy waddle and bright blue beak.
5. The last bit of evening entertainment was coming across a cat vs. snake fight.  It looked vicious, and I did not stay to see who the victor was!
6. My walk was made complete when I got an all thumbs up from the babushka bench.

Simple Pleasures!

Today has been a great day; it has reinforced just how happy I am right now living in Ukraine.

I live on the second floor, and this is the entrance door to my apartment.

A cat and a birthday.

Today has been a busy and entertaining day.

At 7:55 this morning (along with several other librarians) I was waiting for somebody to arrive with the key to open the library. As we were talking about the hot weather, we heard a meowing noise from above.  Looking overhead we spied a cat stuck up the tree. Everyone started calling to the cat trying to tell it how to get back to the tree trunk from where they thought it could climb safely down. It didn’t work.  After much effort from all of the Ukrainians, my American thought-process started to sneak in with “well... we could just call the fire department!” I quickly realized that this is not a possible solution in Ukraine.  After several minutes where everyone was calling to the cat, the grounds keeper said that he would go find a long stick and poke at it until it came down. I didn’t like this idea, so to the dismay of many librarians, I decided that I would climb the tree and rescue the cat!  Apparently girls do not climb trees in Ukraine! Will some help, the cat made it back to safety, and a librarian who was looking for a cat decided to take it home as a new pet!  We had a very good ending to an eventful thirty minutes.

After opening the library and a half hour of work from 8:30-9, it was time for the birthday celebration of one of the librarians. Everyone had a shot of wine and some chocolates and candy. Her birthday was yesterday, but there seems to be an unwritten rule that you don’t work on your birthday.  After another brief half hour of work, I was invited into a second birthday celebration held during the usual 10 o’clock hour-long tea time. This time there were 2 liter bottles of beer, raw fish, carrot and potato salad, tomatoes, sausage and bread. I had to leave the celebration early to go and run my first English Club of the day. When I got back everyone was washing dishes from the party because it was time to go home for the lunch hour.

In the afternoon, I went and purchased a bus ticket to Seavestopal because I will be visiting some Peace Corps friends this weekend. Seavestopal is a resort town right on the Black Sea! I kept thinking about the upcoming weekend adventure, and I finished the day with lots of laughs at the last English Club of the day. All in all, it was a GREAT day! I am excited to see a new city and some familiar faces this weekend! We are going to hang out on the beach, watch a local team in a soccer match, and of course speak lots of English....

I am also getting excited and planning MY birthday party at the library in a few months. It is customary for the birthday person to bring the food and candy. I have decided that I am going to go all-American for my birthday. My boyfriend Drew is coming to visit for my birthday, and I have persuaded him to haul a jar of peanut butter across the Atlantic for me. PB&J and other all-American food will be served at this PCV's birthday party!

I hope everyone back in America has a great Friday and a warm and Sunny weekend!

From last Friday-

I have been having some blog problems and this is an entry that I wrote last Friday (July 22, 2011) and am just able to post today!

Happy Friday!! I have now been living at my site for 5 weeks, and I have been happily surprised with how quickly time has been moving! I still spend Monday-Friday from 8-5 at the library where most of my time is spent talking with people as they drink tea, holding English Clubs, or doing other odd activities around the library. When my brain gets tired trying to listen and understand Russian, I fall back to reading books. With my down-time in the library and free time in the evenings, I have been able to finish a few books a week. Now I am running into the problem that the library has a limited number of English books!

Everyone at the library is great, and every day something new is happening. Today the local second hand store got in a new shipment of clothes. Somehow all of the clothes found their way over to the library. Our office was turned into a changing room for the afternoon!

Next week on the 26th and 27th, the Crimea Director of Libraries and staff will be coming to review the Pervomais’ke Rayon Library (my work site) and all of the other libraries in our Rayon. Everyone has been working very hard to prepare for the inspection. Yesterday the library even got new curtains for some of the windows and some non-working light bulbs were replaced with new ones!

A while ago I was interviewed by the Rayon newspaper, and an article was written about the Peace Corps and what I am doing in Ukraine. The author of the article brought by tomorrow's (Saturdays) newspaper today (Friday) so I could look at the article. It's funny how tomorrow's news has already been printed!

On the 28th of next week, our town's gas will be turned off for maintenance. The maintenance may take as little as 3 days or as long as a month. It may not sound like a big deal, but I honestly do not know how some Ukrainians will function with out borsh at every meal! Everyone has a gas stove, and the vast majority of ovens are also gas - so, cooking is out of the question for residents. I am excited to have an excuse to buy cereal (which is much more expensive than kasha or oatmeal), and eat sandwiches and salads.

Cold food sounds great right now as the weather has gotten fairly hot in the last two weeks. We have been having weather in the mid-to-upper 90’s, and yesterday it was 104. The library stays pretty cool, but my apartment is another story! We have two more months of hot weather, and I am already ready for fall temperatures. I miss working out everyday, but it is hard to find the energy when everyday seems hotter than the last.

Thats all for this update. I think next I will take pictures of my apartment and maybe around town to post. Hope everyone who is reading this is doing well and staying out of the heat wave!!

Internet at last!

Hello all!

I have now been at my site for a little over three weeks, and I am loving it! The community is great. It's a fairly small community, but since it is the Rayon (district) Center, there are always people walking around.  I have my own apartment which has two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.  My landlords are wonderful and have even taken me to the Black Sea on multiple occasions!  

The library where I spend my days was recently redone - and is quite nice.  There are sixteen women that work at the library, and they all take good care of me. They make sure that I have everything that I need, and that I am buying all the right products from the right people.  The librarians are equally interested in what I do with my free time, what I eat at every meal of the day, how I've been sleeping -  and of course, my views on all things Ukraine.  It is great having so many people at work, because there is alway someone to practice my Russian with! 

For the first two weeks I didn’t have much to do at "the office."  They said that they were happy I had finally arrived, but they didn’t know what to do with me.  So, I sat through multiple coffee and tea breaks everyday just trying to get to know people and establish relationships.  The library has held two seminars in the last three weeks, and I have been able to attend.  

Library Seminars

This is the room my English Clubs will be held in.

This past week has been much busier.  I have been preparing for my three English Clubs that will begin next week.  I have two groups (kids 9-13 and 13-16) meeting once a week on Tuesday or Thursday, and then I have a group (students 17-20) who are home from University for the summer.  The older group will meet twice each week.  So, I plan, prep and lead four different club sessions each week.  I also received some documents to translate from English into Russian from the city government.  In addition, I will be helping in a two-day regional festival that will be happening in late August.  It will involve my town and many other villages close by.

Friday was my busiest day yet - in the morning I had an interview with the Rayon TV station about Peace Corps and myself.  I did have a translator with me, but I was able to speak in Russian for a while!  After the interview, they asked if I would help create a TV program to help young children learn English.  They can then submit the program and possibly win a grant for new cameras and equipment!  After the interview, the town's Russian Orthodox priest and his wife came over to my apartment  with an invitation to dinner and a refrigerator!  It had been a long three weeks with out a way to keep food cool and fresh, and I am so happy that I now don’t have to go to the store everyday!  I also was able to buy a internet modem (similar to the verizon thumb drives in the States) and so I now have internet!  There are a lot of things to catch up on when you don’t have internet for over a month!  The connection is pretty slow, but I have been able to ichat/skype with people, so if you ever want to chat just shoot me an email!   

Swearing in Conference

On Monday June 13th said our goodbyes to host families and loaded the bus heading to Kiev to begin the swearing-in conference.  The four day conference was held at a university in Kiev.  All of the soon-to-be-volunteers stayed in dorm rooms at the university.  The check-in process was a long and hot line, as 103 people were anxious for the happenings taking place that afternoon.  The first exciting piece of news that I received was our language exam results.  Every day for the last three months, we were immersed in the Russian language - from language class, to marshutka (bus) rides, to talking with our host families.  Our three month goal was to achieve the “intermediate-mid” level.  We were given white envelopes with our test results when standing in-line, and I was ecstatic and relieved when I read I had achieved the intermediate-mid level! After getting checked in, we headed to the cafeteria for lunch.  Everyone was talking about language results as well as the site announcements which were happening next.  We all gathered in the large conference room for site announcements.  Peace Corps had created a large map that they projected onto a screen.  The map broke the country into regions.  Each Regional Director announced the region and then named all of the people going to that region.  The second region was Crimea (крым).  It is a region that many volunteers hope for because it is in the south of Ukraine, has great summers, the Black Sea, the sea of Azov and mild winters (from a Ukrainian view).  When the Crimea region went on the screen, I thought to myself “I shouldn’t even pay attention right now; there is no chance I’m going to get Crimea...” BUT.... I did!!!  

Crimea Region Announced!

The map of Ukraine with all of PC Ukraine group 41 locations

After all of the other regions were announced, we meet with our regional managers, and we found out what town and organization we will be working with for the next two years!  I am going to Pearvomis’ke (первомайское) and working with the Rayon (раон), or district library. The Peace Corps' agreement with a volunteer's hosting organization is that as little as 40% of the PCV's time is spent with that organization if they are working with secondary organizations.  So, I will be talking with many people in the community my first few months on-site to try and get a good feel for what my community needs and wants. My town is located on the northern part of the Crimean peninsula, and it has about 10,000 people.  I am about 30 minutes away from the Black Sea, 2 hours from Simforopol (the capital), 3 hours away from Yalta, and 4 hours from Seavestopal.  Yalta and Seavestopal are coastal resort towns. The estimated travel times are about how long it takes to get there by a public bus - PCV's don't drive.  After the great test results and site placement, I didn’t think that the day could get any better, but walking home from dinner I saw a game of pickup being played - so I and other volunteers got to play for the first time in three months!  

My counterpart, Valia and I at the swearing in Ceremony 

Tuesday morning our counterparts (employees at the organization where we will be working) arrived in Kiev, and we were finally able to met. My counterpart is Valia, a very nice and funny woman who has two boys: Max is 21 and Andre is 18. We had a little time to introduce ourselves.  The rest of the conference was full of meetings focused on topics ranging from grants to Peace Corps Policy and an entire day was dedicated to awareness of HIV and AIDS in Ukraine.  

On Thursday, after the conference we all headed to the busy Kiev metro and headed down to the “Teachers' House” where the first Ukrainian Parliament was held.  This was the setting for our swearing-in conference.  It was a formal ceremony, and it was attended by the US ambassador and other Ukrainian figure heads.  After the ceremony my counterpart and I headed to the train station to catch our 15 hour overnight train ride to Crimea.  It was crazy saying goodbye to the people that I had spent everyday with for the last 3 months! I think that everyone was ready and anxious to get to site and to settle into their new environment and routines.  At this point there are still so many unknowns!