Overview of week one

Borscht <3 td="">

It's an old Ukrainian book for kids. Look next to the giraffe's butt.
Is that Morse code? 

The cat likes the compost bin.

It’s been pretty hectic and it’s only going to get worse from here. Let me tell ya though, I got some pretty amazing cluster mates!

I can’t believe it’s only been one week because it feels like it’s been about 3 already. So far we have introduced ourselves to the principle of the school we’ll be teaching at, we have registered ourselves with the administration (which didn’t go so great for me—we had to all give a little introductory speech which I totally botched up), we have gone to our link cluster’s site in Oster (it’s another village about 16 kilometers away from Kozelets were another cluster group lives), we have met the previous volunteers from group 42 who trained in our village and are now on their final two months of service before going home. Not to mention all the language training and cross-cultural training and homework and studying. A lot of studying

I haven’t updated my blog as often as I was because I’m so tired after every day and my host mom wants to talk with me and that’s even more tiring that I just end up going to sleep. Which has also actually killed my studying habits and put me behind in class. However, it’s getting better, I’m slowly able to understand more and more of what my host mom blurts at me (I usually have to have her repeat things a second time; slower). I have yet to hit rock bottom on the culture shock scale but I feel it looming its ugly head and I’m not looking forward to the crash. But since my cluster mates are, as previously stated, such awesome people I think we will be able to help each other through it.

Like the other day.

I had a downer day (the day we went to the administration and I botched my speech) that was all topped off with my blowing a fuse in my host family’s house. I know that it wasn’t such a huge deal, that it’s cheap to replace fuses and these old soviet era houses contain soviet era wiring so I was bound to blow one someday. Never-the-less, due to me already being rather frazzled and upset at the rest of the day, blowing the fuse (and having the ENTIRE house go black) broke me down. It’s fixed now and my host mom is convinced that it wasn’t me that did it. However, the state of mind I was in made me spiral down to “they’re going to hate me and never want to host a volunteer again! I’m THAT American that everyone hates now!”.

Of course, that’s not the case at all but, you know, emotions. They can run wild sometimes.

It was rather funny (to me) how they reacted when the power went out. In America, when the power goes out one can hear people loudly pondering why the lights went out and fumbling around in the dark for some sort of light source. When I walked out of my bedroom here though I didn’t hear a peep. I looked into the living room and no one was there. I knocked on my host brother’s door and he responded to come in. I told him that it was my fault the fuse blew and he responded “no, probably not”. You see, because the power here is so shotty, power outages happen all the time and no one is surprised by them. My host brother just told me “go to sleep, we will fix it in the morning”. And that was that. Lol

It’s fixed now; however, it keeps going out. It totally was me who blew it because when I plugged in my surge protector there was a loud “POP” and then blackness. But oh well.

The past volunteers from our village stopped by to see us which was nice. We got to pick their brain about their stays here, what it was like, how they handled things, how their language improved. There was even a story about how two of the volunteers from their group had boyfriends in America that they stayed together with the entire 27 months. Of course the boyfriends visited and the volunteers went home for the holidays. I think that’s nice and encouraging J There were really no surprising/horrible stories other than one about one of their cluster mates who had trouble with getting cooperation from his school. Apparently it kinda ruined his experience here but he was a trooper and stuck it out at his site even when Peace Corps offered to move him to a different site.

I’ve visited my other cluster mate’s houses and determined that we all have pretty great host families.

I went to the bazaar without my host family or a native speaker and bought goulashes and black socks all by myself! (with the support of two of my cluster mates that is lol). My goulashes are fur lined even. Be jealous. Oh! Before I left for my outing my host mom thrust money into my hand and instructed me to buy half a loaf of bread at the Magazine (picture those old fashion grocery stores where you had to actually ask the clerk for everything). She told me she was challenging me and was curious about the outcome (as was I). Through the act of miming and the few vocabulary words I know which doesn’t actually include the word “half” the clerk turned out to be a master of reading mime and figured out that my hand gesture and my increasingly louder proclamation of “hleib!!” (which means bread) meant that I only wanted half a loaf. Done.

Nothing else interesting has really happened. I’ve been trying to be friendly with the people who live around me by saying “good day” whenever I see them and they usually respond in the affirmative “dobre den” and that’s that. I shouldn’t have been surprised when one of them finally struck up a conversation with me, but I was totally caught off guard. After saying my greeting to an older lady, she stopped and babbled nonsensically (to me anyway) for a good minute while holding a pamphlet. She must have noticed the panicked look in my eyes for she eventually stopped, handed me the pamphlet, smiled, and walked away. I sputtered out “dyakuyou” (thank you) and continued on. Turns out it was a Jesus pamphlet. FTW lol

Some of the kids on my street like to yell random English words at me as well (pencil, book, chicken) and I usually try and talk with them but they just giggle and run away. Today though one of them run up (backwards) to me and asked me for my name (in English) and I asked him for his (Sasha) and, thinking that I had something good going I said “nice to meet you Sasha” to which he just shrugged and said “ya ne rozomiyu” (I don’t understand). So I said it in Ukrainian and he looked at me funny and said something which I think was along the lines of “you are older so you shouldn’t say that to me” (Ukrainian is like Japanese in that they have very stilted ways in which older people talk to younger people and vice versa). However, before I could question him further he and his friends ran off giggling. Le sigh.

Also, soup. I have soup every day, almost for every meal and I am loving it. I love soup. I love making soup. However, my host mom puts my soup to shame because she makes her own broth and it’s amazing.

Also also, what we have been learning in school about how to teach is pretty much everything I learned last year in my grad program so, win for me. However, I was so excited to not go back to grad school this year that this revelation kinda makes me upset lol. Oh well, se la vie or whatever. It’s so hard not to start speaking Japanese to my host mom sometimes. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense but my brain knows I’m not supposed to speak English so it goes to the next available language which is Japanese and honestly, I’ve actually said things in Japanese to her (not that it matters because she probably just thought I was speaking English since she doesn’t understand anyway).

I’m also starting to write English letters backwards from all my studying of the Cyrillic alphabet.

My life, man.

Jamie