Borderland Edition

A Day in the Life

We’ve been in PST for about a month and are in the full swing of training now. I have my little routine down for the most part, with the occasional chaotic ‘what the hell is going on?’ moment or two. My Russian language skills seem to be improving, but just as soon as I get a little cocky I am reminded that I only understand a small part of the language. Oh, and Ukraine is often said to be a tri-lingual country: Russian, Ukrainian, and Surjek. What? You’ve never heard of Surjek? Well, never did I until I arrived in Ukraine. I’m pretty sure Surjek is a cruelly designed scheme to keep foreigners who speak either Ukrainian or Russia always in the dark. Surjek happens to be a language of mixed Russian and Ukrainian. But not mixed in a consistent and discernible way. I’ve been told that the mixture of Russian-Ukrainian can come at the sentence level or even the word level (i.e. Ukrainian words with Russian endings). Which makes for a good old time.

But I digress. Back to a day in the life of your favorite Peace Corps hero:

After waking up with the roosters at about 6:30 (ish), I get up, take a shower, have breakfast which sometimes consists of leftovers from the previous night’s meal, and then head off to class. I never am allowed to forget the morning tea of course. Oh yea, the roosters still crow early in the morning even in the big city of 300,000. I walk to the bus stop, avoiding the stray dogs savaging for the morning breakfast, and wait for bus number 21. I sometimes wait longer for a bus that is not already crammed full of morning commuters and am late to class which means I get the hard chair instead one of the two comfy armchairs. When I’m lucky I get on an empty bus and take a seat next to the window. Usually in two more stops the bus is crammed packed with people. And there really is no such thing as a bus that is ‘too full’ to take a few more passengers. I have to admit that I’m often selfish and don’t give up my seat to the old lady carrying bags of potatoes because I hate being smashed between people shoving to get on/off the bus. So I just pretend not to notice her (In my defense, there really would be no way for me to switch places with her anyways without crawling over people).

It’s a short 30 minute bus ride to the outskirts of town where my LCF (language-cultural facilitator) lives and where I have language class with two other guys. We had a fourth member but he quit after a week to go and work for the Obama campaign or something like that. Language class usually lasts until about noon and then we eat lunch consisting of either pelmeni (chicken-filled dumping things) or bread, cheese, and sausage. I hear that the language groups with girls eat much better than we do, but such is the bachelor life in Ukraine.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have additional classes at school number one, located in the city center. These classes are the so-called Technical Component where we have done one of two things so far. 1. Have sessions on useful stuff such as grant writing and fundraising for community projects, or 2. Argue pointlessly about how not everyone in the room is or is not the ‘typical American’. If the session consists of the former I listen attentively and take notes, if it’s the latter I usually space off and start lusting after Qdoba. Oh yes, food lust is my new way of passing time. I imagine myself walking into Qdoba and ordering a burrito with hot sauce and extra chicken… ah… you never know what you have until it’s gone.

After technical sessions we usually go to one of the many cafes or open air tents that are popping up as spring arrives for our weekly ’support group’. Support group consists of sharing the funny events and frustrations of the week over a beer or two… or three. Then I cram on the afternoon bus home for dinner with my awesome host family. In the evening I usually study or watch episodes of ‘The Office’ on my computer.

On the afternoons that we don’t have technical sessions we sometimes have meetings with various community organizations or schools that we are working with for our community projects. The community projects are a requirement of training and we are learning a lot about what it’s like to work within the Ukrainian context. I’m working on a project where we are attempting to setup a sister school relationship between one of the schools here and one in America. It’s going… well, interestingly. We don’t have a school in America yet, but I did promise a certificate to the principal here and she is pretty stoked about that. I might have a reason to bust out Microsoft Publisher after all…

Yesterday the couple that I live with, Igor and Olya, decided that we should have a picnic dinner. So we packed up some sausages and bread and headed off into the nearby park. We collected firewood from nearby dead trees and started up a fire. It was great. As we feasted on sausages and bread, they taught me camping vocabulary: fire, wood, roasting sticks, marshmallows - you know, survival language. =) It was actually much more fun that sitting at home studying verbs of motion, which includes different verbs for going one direction by foot, going one direction and coming back by foot, going one direction by vehicle, going roundtrip by vehicle, and a bunch more based on if you are just stopping by or staying… etc.

So, that’s a day in my current life. Tomorrow (I’m writing this from home today) we are going to Kiev (Kyiv) for the first time. We’ll do some of the sightseeing stuff and get an introduction to the city and the Peace Corps office (where I hope to post some pictures on flickr). I hear that there is a TGIFridays in Kiev, so I’m planning a return visit there soon (it’s only about 1.5 hour mini-bus ride away from our training location). Again, food lust. The food here isn’t bad, at all. My host family keeps me well nourished and fed plenty. There is just nothing that can top a good ol’ burger and fries…

And that, my friends, is this week’s scoop. So, go out, enjoy Colorado (or wherever you are) and when you eat at Qdoba, think of me fondly.