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| Borscht <3 td=""> |
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| It's an old Ukrainian book for kids. Look next to the giraffe's butt. Is that Morse code? |
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| The cat likes the compost bin. |
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
