Welcome
Saturday, March 24th, 2007Welcome to the rebuilt edition of the Borderland Edition. In August 2007 my hosting company disappeared and took all of my data with them. Being the dummy that I am, I didn’t have a backup copy of all of the entries I had previously posted. But luckily I had made copies of some of the better ones, so I’m reposting them with the original date written as the post timestamp.
In brief:
On March 24th I said goodbye to my friends and made the drive from snowy Breckenridge, Colorado to my parents house. Then a few hours later they drove me to the airport where I boarded a plane to Philadelphia for a three day staging/orientation event.
On March 27th all 73 of us hopped on a plane at JFK International Airport and flew across the pond to Kiev. Upon arriving in Kiev about half of us was informed that the airline hadn’t been able to put all of our luggage on the plane with us. So, after sitting in customs for about three hours, we left the airline with some of our luggage and were taken to an old Soviet sanatorium named Prolisok (”snowflake” in Russian).
A couple days after arriving in country, we left Prolisok for the town of Chernigov, located about 2 hours north of Kiev. We would spend the first three months of our Peace Corps experience in Chernigov as part of Pre-Service Training (PST). During PST we had daily language classes (Russian or Ukrainian) and technical training to prepare us for life as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV).
And that’s the brief.