As the Weeks Go By

Hello everyone,

Sorry I did not post last week.  I don't really have an excuse other than I just didn't get around to it.  After getting back to my site from the Halloween party, I was feeling a bit drained.   Anywho, since my last post, I have finalized the grant for my project.  It is now official – we have won the grant and will receive funding to start a volunteer center in my city.  Very cool.  Now I just have to find a way to motivate my coworkers to work on the lesson plans.  This is another time where I have to work really hard on not letting the American in me get out.  I want to have a solid plan and prepare the PowerPoint presentations for our trainings ASAP but my Ukrainian colleagues don't seem to think it is necessary and will probably wait tell the last minute.  Breath deep Conor – it will work out Conor.  I have also been working with 2 Russian tutors.  It is a lot of work and my Russian is at the point where it is hard to determine if it is getting better or not because I am now concentrating on learning words that you might only hear once a month or so.  I feel I know most of the extremely popular words but as soon as the conversation goes into more detail, it can be tough to understand.  For example, if I talk about Universities in general – I am fine but once we start talking about specific subjects – it is difficult.  Because of this, the learning curve is damn near flat at this point and without hearing my new words regularly, they are easy to forget.  Oh well.  Nobody said this would be easy. 

I have also been busy working with a few of the English teachers in the community.  I am not a teacher and I have little teaching experience so developing lesson plans can be difficult but I am already much better at it than I was a few months ago.  Ideally, the Ukrainian English teacher will develop the lesson plan and then I will execute it.  I had a class at the local museum that was very fun, everyone was participating in the activities, and I met some good people.  One of the students invited me to go see a soccer game in Donetsk.  Donetsk just built a new soccer stadium for the Euro 2012 games and has a very good team called Shakhtar.  This stadium is huge and will host some of the World Cup games.  Should be a crazy time.  There is also a Foreign languages organization that I have been visiting from time to time and speaking to the students.  It is kinda funny to get praise for simply speaking your native language.  lol  It is fun and it is a great way to meet people.  I even have a class for little kids ages 4-7.  The little kid class took some getting used to but it is also a good time.  I have been working on some fun games for them to play and I bribe them with candy to keep them focused.  My lesson plans have gotten better and I am happy to say that my last class was very well done.  Everyone leaned a few things, the students were involved and asking questions, and we are all getting to know each other. 

This last weekend was the collaborative meeting for all the volunteers in the Donetsk region.  I made my way to the main Donetsk Library and met up with 7 other volunteers that live within a few hours of Donetsk.  We talked about everyone's sites, what projects people are working on, and discussed a variety of issues and best practices.  It was a lot of fun and I met some awesome PCVs.  After the meeting we all went out for dinner at a Turkish restaurant.  It is always interesting to hear about how other volunteers are doing because we all have such different experiences.  No 2 peace corps experiences are the same.  After dinner we went to a bar that was off the beaten track and listened to some live music.  One of the volunteers that I met will be COSing (Close of Service – going home) in a month – it was interesting to hear what he has done over the last 2 years and his impressions of Ukraine.  The organization he worked with was a English Languages school so he was surrounded by people that speak a good amount of English and  because of that, after 2 years, he still does not know Russian.  At times it would be nice to have an English speaker in my community but overall, I am happy that I do not have English speakers in my community because I really want to be fluent in Russian by the time I leave Ukraine.  After the live music, we went to a bowling ally / night club / karaoke bar.  Lets just say, PCVs know how to have a good time.  We bowled, sang a few songs, and danced the night away. 

My cluster has now fully paid and reserved our trip to Egypt for X-Mas.  I can't wait.  Egypt is going to be EPIC!  Our hotel is right next to the beach.  We are going to see the pyramids, celebrate Xmas together, and relax on the beach.  It is very common for Ukrainians to go to Egypt for vacation because there are my cheap travel packages.  We will be there 8 days / 7 nights and I might stay a bit longer by myself depending on the flight arrangements.  I figure that I don't know when I will be in Egypt again so I might as well stay a bit longer and take it all in.  After my cluster flies back to Ukraine, I plan on traveling to a small village/town that is off the beaten path to try and get a feel for the culture.  You really need to stay in a foreign country for a number of months to experience the culture but that is out of the question.   We shall see.  The plane tickets might be expensive so I might decide to come back with my cluster. 

Next week I will be traveling to Kiev for warden training (I will be the security warden in my area).  So I leave for Kiev Monday night and will stay there for a night or two then I will be heading to Konotop in the Sumi Oblast to visit my cluster mate for a day or two then it is off to Lugansk for Thanksgiving.  I am excited.  I love traveling and overnight trains make it so easy because you just go to sleep and wake up in a new city with a new adventure waiting for you.  Awesome.  When I first arrived in Ukraine I thought it was a bit silly to have to travel overnight when you are only going 200 miles or so but now I enjoy it.  It is pretty cheap as well.  It is only $15 to travel to Kiev from Donetsk (300 miles or so). 

Overall, life in general is going pretty good.  I keep busy with my projects, Russian studies, English clubs, traveling, and all the random events that seem to come out of nowhere.  It is hard to keep a routine because everything is always subject to change though I enjoy the variety of the things I do.  When I reflect to my time working as a broker at Fidelity Investment, it makes me realize how lucky I am to be here.  I enjoyed my time at Fidelity but I was at a desk all day every day and every min of every day was planned.  Now I never know what the day has in store for me, I am constantly traveling to new cities, meeting new people, experiencing new things, helping people, and doing things I never thought I would be able to do.  The downside is that I miss my family & friends, I miss everything familiar, and  I don't get paid - in fact I spend some of my own money every month but that is a small price to pay for the experiences I am having.  The culture is just so different here. 

Conor's Noteworthy Noteables:

1.  Meeting up with the volunteers in my region for an unforgettable night.  Awesome

2.  Hand washing more clothing.  God,  I miss a washing machine.  I find myself pushing my clothing to the limit.  It is amazing how many times you ware the same clothing if you know you have to hand wash everything.  Not to mention that I only have running water for a few hours a day. 

3.  Traveling to Egypt, Konotop, Kiev, Lugansk, etc..   Keeps thing exciting

4.  Skyping with my peeps from the states. 

5.  I have a Kindle on the way.  Awesome -  now I will have an endless supply of English books to read.

6.  Meeting people and learning more about the former USSR.  Very interesting. 

7.  Getting pretty creative with my meals here.  Oh Costco.  Where are you?

8.  Trying Holodets.  Animal fat that was liquefied then put in the refrigerator to solidify then eaten.  I don't know if I will ever get used to that particular dish though I have started to enjoy Salo. 

The following photos are from a hike I went on last Sunday around my city. 

I will post photos in a few hours. 

Halloween!

Hello everyone,


I write this from Balaklea (Amy’s town). We just got back from Kharkiv (the region center and former capital of Ukraine). It was awesome. Let me start from the beginning. I took a taxi late Friday night to a neighboring town (Markeevka) and boarded an overnight train to Balaklea. Arrived at 3 in the AM and waited at the train station for 45 min because Amy was arriving from Kiev on a different train. We then made our way to Kharkiv where we checked in at the hotel all the PCVs will be staying at. Let’s just say customer service is still a foreign concept here. When I was talking to a group of PCVs, I jokingly referred to the lady at the front desk as “a big bucket of sunshine” and everyone knew who I was talking about. This constant lack of customer service can probably be attributed to the old days of the USSR when everyone was assigned work, everyone knew their place/role, and there was little opportunity for change – if someone did not like the service they were receiving, there was little to be done. Everything was government owned so there is only one option and if you didn’t like that option - tough. Nowadays, though things have gotten better, private property rights and free enterprise are not fully developed or understood. It is interesting to me to see this transition first hand. It is apparent that those that understand the concepts of Supply and Demand have a huge opportunity here in Ukraine though they first have to get around an extremely difficult legal system before they can start any viable businesses. Not to mention the business mentality that exists. It is difficult to explain and I am by no means an expert on the subject but I think a good example is the old films from the USSR. When I was hanging out with some of my Ukrainian friends in my community, we watched a couple old films from the USSR. In one of these films, a man brought cases of oranges from Moscow to the Crimean Peninsula to sell them for a profit (USSR controlled the supply of everything). It was interesting because he was the bad guy in the movie. Why? It is because he is taking initiative and trying to buy and sell things for personal gain. It is a common mindset that everyone should get an equal share, the government knows what’s best, and it is bad to question authority or to take any initiative. Anywho, the slow transition to a free market system is very interesting to me and the businessmen in Ukraine that have identified inefficiencies in the market have huge opportunities though the rules and regulations (or lack thereof) that govern markets and businesses is a huge obstacle to overcome for any businessman or entrepreneur.



Sorry, kinda went off on a tangent. Back to Kharkiv – After checking in at the hotel Amy and I took the metro to the city center and walked around for a while. Kharkiv has lots of history – we walked around the “red square”, saw the sites, and ate at McDonalds. The day was nice however the Halloween party that evening was Legendary! Since Halloween is not celebrated here, costumes are difficult to come by. Lucky for me, Amy let me use her “dead-face gorilla mask”, and we found some black wings so I was a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz. It was awesome. We had over 100 PCVs - young men women from 100 different communities all over Ukraine that have been deprived of all things American, that have not seen there fellow Peace Corps friends for long periods of time, and that have not been able use/speak English for long periods of time. It was a recipe for an unforgettable night. We had a nightclub rented out only for PCVs that was right next door from the hotel. It was so nice to see everyone again, to hear about everyone’s crazy experiences, and to simply relax with people that speak your language and know your culture. Well, I need to get going. I am helping Amy with her English club before heading back to my site later today via overnight train.



Conor’s Noteworthy Noteables:

1. Best Halloween party ever! PCVs are the most friendly, carefree, open minded people I have ever met. Makes for awesome times.

2. Exploring Kharkiv. Good times – I will have to go back.

3. Seeing my fellow volunteers and cluster mates that I have not seen for a long time.

4. 7 months in Ukraine.

5. We booked our trips to Egypt. My cluster and I will be going to Egypt for 8 days over Christmas! Whoohoo! It is very cheap to travel to Egypt from Ukraine and all meals, hotels, and drinks are included.

6. Got a nice letter from my sister with some great photos. Thanks Erin-o!
7. Submitted my final draft for my project. Cross your fingers for me.

***Click on photo to see large version. 

 Electreechka from Balaklea to Kharkiv

Kharkiv