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!