Now, and Then

I live in a large village near Pavlograd in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. It's southeast-central-ish. Basically, I'm not really far south and I'm not really far east.

Most people speak Surjek, which is a mix of Russian and Ukrainian. I spent my first three months learning Ukrainian, so communicating with people is interesting. I try to tell people I speak a little clean Ukrainian, which makes them laugh, and they try to stick to pure Ukrainian but it's difficult for them to distinguish between the two or remember the Ukrainian word. Pavlograd, which is the closest large city and my regional center, is Russian speaking.

When I first arrived at my site, it was the last week of the school semester. All the teachers were doing control work, so I hung around for a couple hours and a few students were given the task of showing me around the village. They showed me where the shops, hospital, pharmacy, post office, museum, monuments, cultural building, orphanage, and kindergarten are located.

The two weeks after that were winter break. I mostly hung out in my house, trying to make it feel more like home and unpacking my things. I also watched a ridiculous amount of tv on my computer, mostly because I didn't have anything else to do, and I went for a long walk everyday to be seen and to learn my way around.

The first week of this semester I observed my counterpart's lessons. My school has two English teachers, and my counterpart is one of them who is supposed to help me establish a schedule, observe my lessons, and give me feedback. This past week I actually started teaching, and taught 12 classes. I teach the 5th, 7a, 7b, and 10th forms, and I think eventually I'll have to add a class or two for a total of 16-18 hours every week. If I don't end up teaching that many hours at my school, there's an orphanage close by that I can offer to teach at (to be honest, I'm hoping to work there).

During training, I lived in a small village about 60 km outside of Kyiv. It was very cute, and I lived with a wonderful babushka (grandmother) who was always worried about my health and safety. Most days, I would wake up early, go to language class for two hours, have a 30 minute tea break, have another two hours of language, go to the shop next door, buy and prepare lunch as a group, have a hour or hour and a half session about something teaching/education related, take a walk around the village (weather permitting), do my language homework and study Ukrainian until my brain started to melt. There were also miscellaneous tasks thrown in, like health and safety visits from the PC office, site placement interviews, and after the first couple weeks we started teaching at the local school. We usually put in about 8 or 9 hours of work everyday, Monday through Friday. Saturdays we would hop on the local train and travel to our link city, and have cultural sessions and go to larger stores to buy things our village didn't have, and we also started English language puppet shows. Sundays were our "relaxation" days, but we usually spent them studying, spending time with our host families, doing laundry, more studying, catching up on reading, or working on our community project.