The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Sometimes It's Difficult to Write These Posts

Mostly because I've got 107 things I'd like to write about but I can never organize my brain enough to sit down and write about them all.

But today I am forcing myself to do it. So here goes:

1) My landlord has baby chicks! They were adorable for about three days, and then they started to get big, get real feathers, and peck at each other. Also, they smell and they are living in the spare room in my house in a crib. There are more eggs incubating so I guess there will be another batch of babies soon.


2) Earth Day was this past Friday! I decided to do lessons about the environment and ways to save water and prevent pollution. My first three lessons with the 10th, 6th, and 7b students were fairly successful. There were only six students in my 7a class so I decided to take them down to the sporting competition and watch that instead. Unfortunately, my last class of the day, and my favorite, the 5th form, was canceled so kids could go home early for the holiday weekend. I really wanted to get a picture with them and their Earth Day artwork so I had something to show for it.

Here's a picture of a trash pocket in my village. Lovely, eh?

3) Students in Ukrainian schools are given designated territories to keep clean and beautify. Because Easter was approaching, students spent most of last week outside raking leaves, planting flowers and cleaning. After all the cleaning is done, it's custom in Ukraine - at schools and at homes - to paint the bottom halves of tree trunks, curbs, and edgings of walkways white. I will post a picture of this as soon as I remember to take one.

4) I spent Easter with my landlord's family. I think traditionally there's 4am mass, followed by a blessing of food by a priest but the church in my village is very far away and I don't think many people often go to it. My landlord's family just visited for the weekend and had a barbecue Sunday night. My landlord's granddaughters and their friends gave me some Easter eggs and traditional Ukrainian Easter bread, called paska. I also went for a walk Sunday evening and the physics teacher at my school saw me, and gave me more painted eggs and bread. I also talked with her, her son who is in my 7b class, and her daughter for about an hour. This is a good example of Ukrainian hospitality.


5) I met a 23 year old! This probably seems like a weird statement, but most volunteers have trouble finding friends our own age. The problem is, once students finish secondary school, most either move to large cities to find a job or go to university, or they get married and start having kids. There's only one other young woman I've met in my village, and she's 22, married and has a four year old. The young woman I met goes to university and lives in Dnipropetrovsk but comes back to visit her family in Mezhyrich sometimes. Hopefully, we will be friends.

6) My schedule is starting to be a little more full, which is nice. It took three months, but I finally started to get really bored with nothing to do in my village. I could go to the discotech, in theory, but it probably wouldn't be very fun to go by myself and then I would have to deal with all the rumors that I was drunk at the discotech (this would happen most likely whether or not I was actually drunk, or even had a drink).

7) A fun fact about the Ukrainian education system: You can't fail. Literally. You can not fail, even if you rarely show up and don't really do any work. Also, when you miss a class, you don't have to make up the work. Provides a lot of incentive to show up and learn, right? I have kids in my classes who I'm supposed to see three times a week, every week but who have actually shown up a handful of times since January. Also, the grading scale is from 1 to 12 but there's really no objective way to grade. I have to ballpark what I think a student’s level of participation and quality of work is worth. Next year, I hope to enforce a more objective rubric so students know what they have to do to get a good grade.

The Kind of Anniversary You Don't Want

"There is no such thing as someone else's sorrow."
- Ukrainian proverb

I forgot that today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. My school did some kind of short memorial during one of the 20 minute breaks between classes, and I think an art competition was held so the winners were announced.

Here are two really good New York Times articles about the anniversary, and if you haven't looked at the photos Gerd Ludwig took, you should.

Ghost Town Bears Witness to Lasting Nuclear Scourge

A Visit to Chernobyl


Saturday, April 23, 2011

Sound Bite

"I know, it's hard to accept that mostly we just blatantly fail." - a PCV friend.

This made me laugh, simply because it's exactly how I've been feeling the past two weeks.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

On My Way Home From School

I already thought my five minute walk to school was a pretty awesome commute, but this view makes it even better.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Highlights Reel

It's been awhile, I know. Here are some highlights from the past few weeks.

I had spring break a couple weeks ago. I traveled to Lviv to visit my friend John, who lives in a town north of the city, and my other two former cluster mates also traveled there. We hung out in John's apartment, watched tv, cooked, went to the bazaar, and went for walks. Basically, we relaxed. We also traveled into Lviv one day to see the city, which is definitely different from most other parts of Ukraine. People actually spoke Ukrainian! It was wonderful. We ended the weekend by going to the Carpathian Mountains with a bunch of other PCVs and Ukrainians to climb Mt. Hoverla, the tallest mountain in Ukraine. It was a lot colder and a tougher hike than all of us were expecting, but I'm happy we went.

I signed up to run a 10k in Berehove/Beregszasz (Ukrainian name/Hungarian name), which is by the border of Hungary. The description says the race takes place in the foothills of the Carpathians, in wine country. After I run, I get a cup to participate in a wine tasting! This is a large part of the reason I signed up. I also conned one of my former cluster mates into volunteering at the event so I have someone to go with. I'm looking forward to the weekend, but not the 20+ hours of train travel it will take to get there.

Which leads me to: I've started running again. The weather is nicer, though still chilly some days, but I'd like to not die during the 10k. Unfortunately, running in my village means avoiding or dealing with the dirt roads that have become muddy and full of puddles, getting barked at, snarled at, and almost bitten by small dogs, lots of people blatantly staring at me, and trying to avoid the smoke from people burning their trash. It's an adventure. Today, for example, I had a german shepherd put his mouth around my arm. In his defense, he didn't actually bite down and I think he just wanted to play. In my defense, I was paying more attention to the two older men with a gun (I think it was a bee-bee gun?) staring at me in the driveway. They called the dog away and laughed. Gotta love Ukrainian men.

Now that it's spring, it's planting season. It's still too cold for a lot of crops but I've noticed more sections of green magically appearing in the fields behind people's houses. I'm excited to learn more about Ukrainian agriculture, it's one of the reasons I wanted to be placed in a village. My landlord is mostly still just planting in a small greenhouse in her yard, and she has flat boxes with sprouting seedlings sitting near the heaters in her kitchen and in the spare room in my house. I told her I'd like to help, and she said when it's time to plant potatoes, everyone works together and I can help then. 

I've realized how much Russian my landlord speaks, and that sometimes she doesn't understand the Ukrainian words I use. I asked her if a certain plant was a strawberry plant using the Ukrainian word, and she said no, it was something else. I asked one of the students at school the next day what that word meant, and he told me it was the Russian word for strawberry. I also used the Ukrainian "Lviv" when I told her I would be traveling, and she looked confused. When I returned, I decided to try the Russian "Lvov" and she understood. I'm trying to learn a few more Russian words, partly to communicate better with my landlord, and because when I travel beyond my village, all the cities are Russian speaking and it's currently making my life difficult. The benefits of a bilingual country? But in truth, Ukraine is more than bilingual. My friend that lives near Lviv hears Ukrainian and Polish, and other areas speak mixtures of Hungarian/Ukrainian and Moldovan/Ukrainian/Russian. I'm sure there are others, too.

I participated in Суботнік [Saturday cleaning] last weekend. People from the community get together in the morning and clean certain "territories". It's like community service but it's just expected that everyone will participate. Teachers and students from my school went to a section of the highway and raked up leaves, grass, branches, and trash. Once everything is raked into piles, it's set on fire. Unfortunately, this is the way most unwanted yard waste and trash is handled and it makes the tree hugger in me sad. There are plenty of things I've gotten used to in Ukraine, but seeing fires burning in yards or field, particularly at night, still always surprises me.