Last night with my host family

I was very lucky to get placed with such a great family. They are good, funny, charming, enjoyable people and I am glad that my site isn't so far away so that I can visit them again with relative ease. Goodbye Kozelets--for now anyways :) 

Even a smile from the boy! :) 

We tried to get the plant in the picture, but it didn't work out

Mother and son <3 nbsp="" td="">

My last weekend in Kozelets

Tomorrow will be my last weekend here in Kozelets (read: my last weekend with my host family and my clustermates/TCF and LCF). An end to a beginning really.

(also, I want to add. Never talk yourself into a political conversation with people with whom you are attempting to keep a good report with. Also (and probably most importantly), never talk yourself into a political conversation when you are not able to formulate sentences more sophisticated than "I like cakes, what do you like?". It's dangerous and frustrating and i'm still not sure how I got into it but I think I swiftly and sufficiently (although anything other than elegantly) got myself out of it. Now if only my host mom would stop trying to drag me back in).

Here's what's happened in picture format. First of all snow:

I'm going to miss this view

Lots of snow. And i'm not amused. Sure, I like snow when I can play in it and have fun. But when I must walk for an hour in it to get to work. Nee dobre my friends, nee dobre. 

On a related note, I heard that it snowed in Portland. The world must be ending over there. It is rather relaxing to know that when it snows here, people are not going to go into apocalypse mode and buy out all the grocery stores and then proceed to crash their cars everywhere because they don't know what else to do. Although there were a couple car crashes here but we'll let them slide (haha, punny). 

Also, Thanksgiving happened!

It was super duper successful. I mean, I had my misgivings about being able to pull it off with all of our host families and finding ingredients. At best I expected it to be me and my clustermates eating mystery dishes that we almost cooked because we 1) didn't know exactly what ingredients we were using because we simply went off instinct and packaging and 2) I didn't believe that our host families would let us all cook in their kitchens because of some strange ritual rites one must pass before entering into a Ukrainian host mama's kitchen.

However, everything was fantastic and all the host families showed up! We even got to hold it in our LCF's house (which is huge) because the land lady loves us! Really, it was one of the best Thanksgivings I've had due to the fact that we were all truly very thankful to our host community for taking us in and helping our hopeless selves as we floundered. We were also very thankful for each other for being such an amazing group of people that refused to let any one of the group fail. Truly, an amazing Thanksgiving with amazing people that I will miss dearly.  

Kristie made some apple pie

Jake made stuffing that actually tasted like stuffing!

Also made cranberry sauce

It was supposed to say "Kozis" with a heart. At least you can sort of see the heart

Kristie finally let us taste "old bay" and it's rather good. I doubted her. 

Pumpkin pie

That Katie made, by herself, from a real pumpkin that she was told was "a pumpkin for pigs" but we don't really know what that was supposed to mean.

Part of the host family gang

Everyone is paying the puppy and the cats way too much attention

Such a "harnee" group we are

There was singing as well preformed by everyone. I had a video of it but I somehow erased it like a dummy. 

(I also found out that I am definitely lactose intolerant. I've been in denial for many years but it is definitely true and it sucks). 

Also, jam sessions. Jam sessions with pasta. Very important. I'm a little sad but also a little relieved that we didn't discover that we all liked to play guitar and sing because 1) we would have done it a lot sooner and more frequently and 2) we would have done it more frequently which would have resulted in less productivity.

Musician faces a go go

Whitney's artist face

Pasta! With the Ostair group and our wonderful TFC in the background

This is us preforming the song we wrote about Kozelets and our time here. It's to the the tune of "we are going to be friend's" by The White Strips. 

It's a pretty great song

And finally our last session with our LCF

That's the landlady, Lida, on the right

The best group of people to be stuck in a foreign country with <3 br="">That plate, by the way, was given to us by the bookstore ladies because we gave them
a present for always helping us when we went into their store to buy things and copy
things and ask general questions. Really, we went in there so much that one of them
knew Whitney by name. The plate says "Ukraine" on it and we all signed it.

And now what you've all been anticipating (i'm sure). Here is where i'm going to be living out the rest of the 2 years of service:

Bohuslav, Ukraine. Located in Kyiv Oblast. It is about 2 hours away from Kyiv (the capitol) and about 3 hours away from Kozelets. I am very far away from my clustermates which hurts a lot especially because I am also rather far separated from the other volunteers in my region. But no matter, I will make friends i'm sure. The last time this site had a volunteer was 5 years ago and Peace Corps used to use this place as a training community like Kozelets so they are no strangers to gangly, bambling, Americans in their town. The town itself is around 16,000 people which is a nice size. It is close to a city called "Bila Tserkva" (or "white church"). Things are gonna be good. 

I will be teaching at a pedagogical college for the humanities (which means i'll be teaching 15+ year old students--see what talking to the right people does for ya? Haha!). My tentative teaching schedule looks like i'll be teaching all the first years. I will live on my own (for the first time!!!), in an apartment that is located on campus (they call it the teacher's living quarters--actually they threw around the word "dormitory" and "apartment" in the same sentence so I don't really know what my expectations are). The college has internet and therefore it shouldn't be difficult for me to get internet in my apartment. I am super stoked to have my own place and meet my colleagues! Squee!! 

Sunday we depart for Kyiv where we will meet our "counter part" who will become the person we will rely on to help us out when we need it. Then we will swear in at the US embassy and become official Peace Corps volunteers, whoop whoop!

-Jamie

My life in a nutshell

Usually I make a comment here about how fast time is going, and how i can't believe it, it's flow by so quickly. But I won’t this time around. Time is time and it always moves in a linear direction because that is its nature. So obviously right now I am at 2 weeks left to go in my training because time has drug me here. But still…I have two weeks left of my training.

Next week we will hold our seminar with our English teachers at school #3. 

Topic: How to effectively teach culture through English. Have I left grad school? No, apparently not. But it will feel good to finally have that out of the way because then we will have our language test soon following before being whisked away to meet our regional managers for our new sites (YEEEEE!) 

Here’s a quick recap of my life to fill the gap I have left you in:

Food:

Always, always food. 

Vereneky. Simple, delicious

Cheese vereneky 

I did some gardening.

Shovel in hand, hole was dug!

We made a good team!

I are strong!

See! Show that corn who be boss!

Chickens were rather happy about our upheaval of the yard.  

There was a birthday! 

Surprise Katie! 

Now is not the time for a quarter life crisis. 

So happy with her Frisbee and cards!

"Dane Harozhenya" in Ukrainian

There was English week at school number 3 that included some "wonderful English lessons" (literally, the English teachers called our tech coordinator and asked her to ask us to create "wonderful" English lessons for English week). We decided to teach the youngin's about holidays in America. We did this with 4th, 5th, and 8th graders. We all had a station where we conducted a mini lesson on the holiday of our choosing--mine was Thanksgiving--and then we rotated until all the kids had been at each station. I decided it would be fun to show them how to make hand turkeys.

I should never be in charge of fun. 

I never want to see another hand turkey or talk about Thanksgiving ever again. I see hand turkeys in my dreams now. Likewise if I hear "jingle bells" or "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer" one more time I might scream.  

The kids were cute though, however exhausting. I have a new appreciation for elementary school teachers now. Keeping those children's attention for 7 whole minutes was torture.

I may look calm and collected but on the inside i'm like:
"dear god there's so many of them. And they're all looking at me"

"Stay calm. I'm pretty sure they can sense fear." 

"They seem to be responding well. Keep it up." 

"Oh god, they're starting to loose interest, what do I do? Don't panic!
What did I get myself into...just keep talking, this will all be over soon"

 They all successfully drew a hand turkey though!

Whitney on St. Paddy's day

Robertiv on Valentine's day

Katie with the fourth of July

And Jake with Christmas carols. Or rather, with Jingle Bells, over and over and over and over....

"Jingle hell, Jingle hell, when can I go home"

Before our lesson though, these adorable little hellians put on a play for us. In English. About some animals that lived in a house and then a fox comes along and they sing a song about not wanting the fox in the house and then it was over. 

Gotta tell you. I about lost it when the kid with the bird declared proudly
"I am a cock!"
Really, Jamie? You're terrified of children yet your maturity level is here? For shame. 

Here's a taste of what traversed. Did you know that there were more verses to that song?

I also had my last class I had to teach here in Kozelets. It was a little bitter sweet but also it's nice to think that I don't have to do anymore lesson plans for a while haha.

I don't have any pictures from this class but I can tell about it. I taught my 9th graders that I wanted so desperately to like me and the English language by the end of this and well, I think I at least got them a little interested in me at the least but they probably feel the same indifference towards English as they did when I first came into their lives. 

The topic was "protecting our environment" (which I learned that I have been spelling "environment" wrong for YEARS"). It's a tough subject with difficult vocabulary but they have been going at it for a couple weeks and I taught them a couple lesson in the topic so I figured we wouldn't have much trouble. I created some materials that featured Portland and our green-ness, naturally. I had lots of activities that went over really well, they all seemed to be responding to them and things were happening. 

And then, I look up from helping a group out with putting sentence strips in the right order to see Valentina, their Ukrainian teacher, holding one kid by the ear while yelling at another. 

I don't know what happened to cause her to react so, and I probably don't want to know. Whatever it was though, ended quickly, with little disruption for the rest of the class. However, one of these clowns did have to stand at the back of the classroom for the remainder of the lesson. 

Whatever though, I thought the class went over rather smoothly with about 65% student participation and by-gone-it, those kids were able to tell me what it meant to be green by the end of the lesson so, well done!

-Jamie