Happy Halloween...

Just when I thougth nothing else exciting would happen this week... Tonight was our advanced English Club - Hooked on English for Success! - and we carved pumpkins in honor of Halloween. I almost totally forgot I had English Club tonight. I have too much on my plate I don't know what is going on from one minute to the next. Anyway English Club was so much fun. We had some new people come that were in Dan's English Club last year but hadn't come to this one yet so that is always fun meeting new people. Everyone was totally into the carving of the pumpkins. They are super creative too. You would think they have been doing this all their lives. But this was most of their first times even knowing what this tradition is from the United States let alone carving a pumpkin. We got some great shots of the whole process and a group photo with our pumpkins.

The best is the American trying to put the candle in the pumpkin! The top was too small for this huge candle that we were trying to maneuver into the pumpkin. Then someone decided to cut the candle up...great idea! The candle, unfortunately, dissipated to almost nothing with a wick so that was difficult. Then trying to light it from inside the pumpkin. We starting using paper as if we were out in the woods somewhere. We probably could have burned the school down. We are pretty sure these buildings aren't equipped with fire alarms in the ol USSR. However, after much determination we got it lit!

What a great day!

Just chillin....

I don't have much to report this week. Things are starting to slow down a little. Which is nice! I have been moving so much I feel disconnected. I am still traveling the next few weekends but then I should be here for... well...hmmm one weekend! Oy. Thinking about Thanksgiving in Lugansk. All of my cluster mates and several of my fellow volunteers from my group will be there. It seems silly not to go. It is a long trip but I miss my East Side friends and there might not be many opportunities to visit them.

This weekend is Halloween in Kharkiv. Many PCVs will be there. I just hope it doesn't get too out of hand. I need to have a little fun considering I haven't acted up since Odessa but I am not interested in "too" crazy. I am excited to see Kharkiv! I hear it is a gorgeous city. And I love the East because its like Russian Language Heaven for me. I can understand people! There are 10 of use heading to Kharkiv from Konotop so the train ride will be a good time. Let's just hope we get some sleep. It is only a 6 hour trip and we are going over night to get there at the ripe ol time of 5am! Oy!

I taught English class this week for the first time by myself. Jud had been helping me to date. I think I sucked but my students (only 8 this week) said I did fine. I am not a teacher that is for sure. I will try to step it up a bit in the future. Planning lessons is a lot of work!

This week has been filled with three days of tutoring, three days of English class/club and a meeting at the blind center. Just that and I am exhausted! Next week I will visit Internaut, which is a school system for orphan children and children with special needs. I am working on a human trafficking project with the schools in my town, I am trying to do this project with the Blind. I am still trying to figure out where I fit in in this town! And trying to figure out this "PC Volunteer" thing. WE will see how it all works out!

Well I should have something to tell you next week. Enjoy your weekends.

Dirty Dancing in Donetsk

I had a really good time this weekend traveling to Donetsk. I haven't stayed much in Konotop on the weekends and I am bummed about that but my trips have been for work and have been unavoidable. I just have to work extra hard during the week on my relationships which is proving to work out just fine. Which is good because I have a few more trips planned before the end of the year. I have become quite the train/travel expert but there have been one too many lonely nights on the train.

Speaking of trains and lonely nights my first train ride on my way to Donetsk I met a nice young man traveling home from Kiev to see his mother. He is young around 20 and studying at Kiev National University. We both had a top bunk and he speaks English so we started talking. He told me about himself and his family and a lot of history about Ukraine. He has traveled to many places near Ukraine and is a really smart young man. He had a lot of information for me for Crimea which I plan to spend a lot of time in next summer. We traded emails and in the morning when we arrived in Donetsk at the ripe ol hour of 7am he was already gone. He had gotten off at an earlier stop so I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. But to my surprise on the table that sits between the beds was two candles in two mugs with a note from my new friend Revaz. He had left me a gift. These are the things that really make you smile and help you remember why you joined the PC. It was very sweet of him to leave me such a nice gift.

When I got to Donetsk I got on the trolleybus and I heard RUSSIAN! I was so happy. Everything is in Russian here. EVERYTHING! When I heard the trolleybus digital speaker talk in Russian instead of Ukrainian I thought I had died and gone to Russian heaven. It is so refreshing being around the language that you are learning and being able to understand!!!!!!! You have no idea. People usually speak Russian or some type of Russian/Ukrainian/Curjik mixture in my town but nothing is in Russian and no one speaks pure Russian so sometimes I understand and then I don't know if I am learning new Russian words or Ukrainian ones. It is annoying!

I wasn't meeting Larrissa for a while so I found myself a nice little cafe and had some breakfast. I ordered all the good stuff off the menu and then rolled out of the cafe to meet my hostess. Larrissa is a woman that runs the Typhloid Center in Donetsk which is a center for the visually impaired. She is doing what I want to do in Konotop and I went there to meet her and see how everything works so I can do it in Konotop. The center was great. She has 9 students, most pensioners and half are completely blind. She teaches them English for the first two hours and then the second two hours they have computer training with a program called JAWS that helps them by reading the entire screen contents to them. It is pretty amazing. Watching these people and their willingness to learn especially at their age was just something you have to see with your own eyes and it was truly amazing.

After she loaded me up with information she took me to the gym! Oh yeah that is right there is an Equinox in Donetsk. Donetsk is a big city so I am not surprised that they have these things but I am certainly not used to the luxury of using them anymore. We did some swimming training for an hour and then we went to do some SAMBA! Now before I get to that it must be said that this gym ain't cheap. Oh no to go to this fine venue you must pay 600 UAH per month!! That is more expensive than my gym in NYC. So back to Johnny Castle. So we were doing moves right from Dirty Dancing and it was awesome. We had so much fun with this. They guy (Victor) was so fantasticly gay and so much fun. And of course he loved the American that couldn't really speak Russian and looked like a silly ass trying to do these moves. Now I wasn't completely bad. There isn't anyone in this world who has seen Dirty Dancing more than I have, well except my cousin who liked it just a little bit more than me, so I know those moves and I am quite certain I tried them when the movie first came out in my living room but doing them in a dance studio was a whole other thing. It was great. I wish I had taken pictures! I have Victor's number and apparently his fellow school mate that studied dancing with him in Kiev lives in Konotop...uh oh! "No one puts Baby in the corner." There might be a "last dance of the season" in Konotop in June 2012 stay tuned!

That night I stayed with a friend of Larrissa's. Her name is Nadia and she and her granddaughter Alia put me up and fed me. We talked for a while over some chai and then we went to sleep to the Ukrainian version of "You think you can dance". It was a good day and I was exhausted.

Up bright and early the next day we have some good breakfast and more lovely chats over some chai and off to site seeing we go. We didn't have much time because Larrissa wanted to take me to English club at 1pm so we rode around the city in the car. I got to see the Ukrainian version of WalMart or Costco and then we went to the new KICK ASS STADIUM FOR EURO 2012. Apparently the richest man in Ukraine built this stadium for Donetsk and it is the most modern stadium in all of Europe and the best one in Ukraine. It was pretty sick. I have some pics of it on facebook. I didn't get to go inside but we checked out the museum and the cafe and I took several pics of it.

After the site seeing we went to English club and discussed the political system in Ukraine. I can't talk politics so I didn't say much but they asked me all kinds of things even about our pound and SPCA. Stray dogs is a real problem here so I hope I helped give them some ideas on how to correct it. That's how we did it anyway. The two days were so cramped with stuff it was difficult to stop and smell the roses but I stayed after the club to talk to some of the people. Everyone spoke great English and it was nice to be there amoung so many people who wanted to practice. I wish we had that kind of following in Konotop!

I met up with Conor and Amy afterwards and we got a beer at a local pub. Then we went to this really delicious Turkish restaurant and stuffed our faces with good cheap food. It was a great weekend! I am tired now so to bed I go. I will update this post with pics. Good night.

From the West to the East...

Not much to report this week. I spent the first part of it sick as a dog with a high temperature. That was joyous. I got my butt up and out of bed at 430 am on Thurs though to go to Kiev...my favorite place in the whole world. This week was my first VAC meeting which was very important. Basically what that is is a meeting of the minds... It is a meeting with PC Staff and selected PCVs and they discuss issues and concerns of other PCVs. The meeting was 2 days in Kiev but it was very successful.

I was supposed to head to Lugansk or Brody or Sumy this weekend after the meeting but for the first time in 4 weeks I stayed home for the weekend and it was really nice. But for the next 3 weekends I will be back on the train gang! Off to Donetsk this weekend.

The trains are a cool place though. For all my travels last weekend was the first time I had been alone on an overnighter. I slept on the top bunk of platzcartni which I explained in my last post and no one really bothered me but on my way back from Kiev this time I had to buy a train ticket instead of an elektrichka and I also had to buy kupe which is a cabin oriented situation. There are 4 bunks still but you are in a room with a door as opposed to an open space. There was a nice gentleman in the car when I came in and we both had the bottom bunk. He started talking to me in Russian and I responded that I couldn't speak well so he asked me if I spoke English in English which was fantastic!

The train was headed to Moscow and he was from a city called Kazan which is about 800 km east of Moscow. He is a scientist and works in the field of sports medicine. Very interesting man. He learned English in a peculiar way. When he was a young boy they had an experiment at his school where they brought English teachers to teach math, science and biology to children who had no prior knowledge of English so not only did they need to learn the subject but English too. As a scientist he has to write papers in English so even though he never practices English his English was excellent. He gave me a magnet from his city when I got off the train in Ktop. What a nice man!

So last week was Ivano in the West and this week and next it is Donetsk and Kharkiv in the East. I am just making my way around the country.

Until next time.

Special Needs Fun Days!

Last week I met with the volunteers of Konotop. I have been working with the director of one of our youth organizations on developing a better volunteer organization and I would like to mold them into a leadership group as well. I had the opportunity to meet a handful of them and share my stories of volunteering with them and describe to them what the Peace Corps is all about. It was really great to see so many people interested in volunteering but I really want to get them out and doing more work.

So the special needs working group which I am a member of has implemented a series of "special needs fun days" where volunteers at their sites organize lesson plans about children with disabilities to advise other kids that there are "different" people in the world and how to deal with them that they are people too and then we have a "fun day" where the kids play games.

I headed to Ivano-Frankivsk where I took a marshrutka to Tlumach to meet a few fellow PCVs and help them out with this exciting day. I came late unfortunately because of the train times so I missed all of the lessons but I was there for some of it and the lesson plans they put together to inform children about people with disabilities was really good. They made it very easy for children to understand and they made it fun!

We had a great group of children show up. There were mainly children from the orphanage so not too many kids had a "disability" but we did have one child come in a wheelchair. We were able to include him in the games as some of them weren't necessarily equiped for disabilities. We had such a fun day. We had six different fun stations and we started with younger children and then we played with the older kids. At the end one of the PCVs played his guitar for the kids and they loved it!! It was super fun and the kids really enjoyed themselves.

It was my first overnighter on the train by myself and it was a 13 hour train ride but I did great. I slept on the top bunk going to Ivano and the bottom coming back. They both have their plus' and minus'. If you are on the top you have to get up there and your only option is to ly down or you have to sit down on someone else's bed if you stay on the bottom and maybe they want to sleep! You don't know. If you are on the bottom you have to worry that the person on top doesn't want to go to sleep yet and he/she will sit on your bed until they are ready to get up there which means you can't lay down untli thy move. You also have to figure out where everyone's luggage is going to go. If you put it in the compartment under the bed at the bottom you might have to wake someone up to get it out when your stop comes and risk not getting it or you have to lift up above the top bunk or sleep with it on your bed. You can view it either way. It is an experience all the time. You just have to love the traveling situation in Ukraine. I actually do love it. It is pretty damn convenient and "knock on wood" reliable too! There usually aren't late trains and if there are they make up time somewhere along the ride but you sure enough show up on your track on time and so far my train has always been sitting there when it is time to get on. Of course I still have to ask people which track the train is on. Most cities haven't caught on, like Kiev, about putting up a digital board and putting the track number there when the train arrives so people know where to go. They just announce it on a sometimes awful loud speaker and if you don't know Ukrainian you can't understand it anyway so you always have to ask somebody!!

Ivano was a great little city. Not much to do there. You can get around it in a few hours and pretty much see everything which we did! Although I didn't find out until I got back to my site that they have a waffle house...DAMNIT! Now I have to go back just for that!

Rememberance...

Today I, other PCVs, my city, his family and so many other people lost a great man! Gregory, whom I've talked about many times and blogged about a few weeks ago passed away today. He was one of the first people I met in this city and he was so welcoming and helpful and knew everyone and everything about this city and so many other things. I loved hearing about history and war from him as he was a survivor. He always had so much to tell. He introduced me to the Jewish Center here in Konotop and the lovely ladies that I used to visit on Thursday's. A part of Konotop will be missing from now on. I only knew the man a short time and for the last few weeks he has been in the hospital and I haven't been able to talk to him or see him around and I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. I know his grandson well too and I feel as though I lost a grandfather today.

I will pray for his family. His wife, his daughter and his grandson you are in my thoughts and prayers always. Gregory was a great friend and will truly be missed!

Random adventures

I left off with the Village of Popivka. I returned to the village on Friday for "Old People Day". Friday was a big day there were lots of celebrations going on. You had "Old People Day" and "Teacher's Day". Teacher's Day is actually Sunday but they were celebrating it on Friday. So I raced to Popivka to have a wonderful lunch with the village and the village Mayor. I sat next to him. There was lots of food and singing. They presented all the babushkas with little cards of congratulations. Some of them were teachers in their past lives and others were just special! I even got a gift! They presented me with a coffee mug. A really nice one! Me and the Mayor got the same one. It was awesome. I told them not to do that but they did it anyway! They are such wonderful people.

After shoveling the food in my mouth and rushing out the door we took a few more photos of all of us together and then they rushed me in the car and off we went to the House of Culture for more singing and dancing from the students of Konotop for teacher's day.

So back to Kiev on Saturday. I should get an apartment there for the next 2 years considering I am there all the time! I went to Kiev for the HIV/AIDS working group. I was excited for this to come. I am on a few different working groups but each one of them is very interesting to me and I am excited to get some project ideas as well besides meeting great new PCVs and learning a thing or two. I am extremely exhausted from all the traveling but it is fun and part of my job here is to see Ukraine so I will do that. I am off to Ivano-Frankivsk this weekend for a project with my special needs working group. I can't wait to see Ivano and learn how to start a fun day in my town for children with special needs.

I got to meet this new person in PC that I have been hearing lots about. I left from Kiev and went to a town called Kovalivka. It was really cute. It was like a mini disney land. Apparently, there is a woman there that paid for the brand new school, brand new restaurant that looks like wedding hall, the brand new church and the brand new hotel. She was in politics or something which is where she got her money from. She has done some amazing things there hopefully all for good things.

A strange turn of events the HIV/AIDS working group got tickets to see Bill Clinton in Kiev. He is giving a speech on the subject and the things he has done to prevent HIV. They had a big concert and a bunch of cool Ukrainian singers came and put on a show. There were so many people and there was a lot of shoving and crazy moshness going on but it was super awesome. We got to see Bill and his 15 minutes of fame in Ukraine. We tried to shake his hand at the end. We were even yelling "We are Americans"..."We are Peace Corps Volunteers"! But he wasnt hearing us!

Good times and back to site for 3 days and then we do it all again...