Let's Lose the "Day X" Routine, Shall We?

This blog entry begins with a sigh. My tummy is full. I just got back from Vika's house where we ate pizza and played with her daughter, Nastia, who's 2. Nastia loves a) our friend Yulia and b) running around without her pants on and c) moving her potty really close to whoever is sitting on the couch, facing them, and grinning while she makes "foo" as it's called. It makes me nervous, but then I've never had a little munchkin of my own around 24/7 to make me an inveterate tolerater of other people's body fluids.

Vika and Yulia are English teachers at our school. They're both around 23 years old, making me feel like the older sister. Yulia almost never speaks English, but Vika forges ahead pretty well. It's fun to hang around them. We watch VH1 Europe and I listen to them giggle and gossip. It's great practice for my Russian, too.

Today was a pretty good day. Although I should let you know that last night I smelled something funny in my kitchen, and it was the electrical socket where my space heater was plugged in. Burning. So I unplugged the heater and felt the wall. It was cold and the burn seemed to not be growing, so all I could do was take pictures and wait until a normal time to begin the negotiations that would bring about the repair of this situation.

First thing I did when I got to school this morning was triumphantly deliver the books Grandma sent me, to the absolute delight of the English teachers and my zouch. (Results! Yes!!!) I then followed the zouch into her office to attempt communication: my apartment was on fire. It must be repaired. ASAP.

"Ah-ha, ah-ha, sure, fine," she said, leafing through a cosmetics catalogue. I tried desperately for eye contact, but to no avail. I had to settle with a vague promise to do it sometime today or tomorrow. "By the way," she asked, never looking up from the pages of wide-eyed, sparkly women promising you'll never look beautiful without spending that cold, hard cash, "Have you gotten around to defrosting your refrigerator?"

(You know, one of the things that really bothers me, that I just can't get over, is that my zouch has a key to my apartment. My landlady doesn't want one, for some reason. Whenever I leave, and she knows it, I come home to find some small thing changed, indicating someone has been in my place. For example, I always close the kitchen door, but when I came home last week, it was wide open. Another thing - and I notice these things with a level of scrutiny bordering on slightly autistic - my glasses were put away in the cupboard, not left out to dry, and they were stacked in threes, not twos. And they were sticky. Eeew. Anyway, when she got back into town from a seminar last week, the first thing my zouch did was come to my house to instruct me how to defrost the fridge. It's like she had entered my apartment while I was gone with the express purpose to look around for things I wasn't doing right. Then she filed them away and had no qualms about telling me to shape up, never mind the fact that she was basically revealing the fact that she'd been in here while I was gone. Privacy? Never heard of it.)

Let's see, the rest of the day was spent going over plans with Tatiana for delivering the awards for the Olympiad we put on a couple weeks ago, planning a pumpkin carving party, planning an autumn festival fundraiser, planning an English teachers' club, and brainstorming about a resource center and sister city project. I felt like we made some headway. At least she's really enthusiastic about the parties. The enthusiasm wanes in inverse proportion to the seriousness of the project, however. Ah, well, I can start small. And she fed me borscht, which was delicious.

Then I taught my tenth graders about "Environmental Protection". It was pretty boring. The teacher wanted me to cover a text from their Plakhotnyk book, so (being that the deal with my school is I do whatever they say when I'm in the classroom) we spent an agonizing 45 minutes dealing with such scintillating sentiments as "We must do everything possible to save the nature, to make our rivers and air clean. The importance of this task is pointed out by scientists." Not only that, but our classroom was a solid 55 degrees, I'm sure. My students' poor little noses (and my poor little nose!) were bright red by the end of the period. We did talk about our school environment, though. We all agreed: it was cold.

After that I met with one of my seventh graders, Zhenia. She's really cute. She mixes her sentences with about half English, a quarter Ukrainian and a quarter Russian. But that's cool with me. It shows her goal is communication and someday she'll be a superstar at whatever language she wants to speak. We spent an hour and a half reading Charlotte's Web. Again, many thanks to Grandma for sending those wonderful, wonderful books. The timing is perfect. It was so fun reading a book I adored as a child with Zhenia. She's in love with the story already, too. We finished Chapter 1. Not bad at all.

Finally I went home, got the word from Peace Corps HQ that I should put a rush on this repair of the electrical socket business, and called my zouch again. "Have you gotten ahold of the master yet?" I asked her ("master" refers to someone with a higher level of technical expertise than, say, an amateur. Usually they are trained with a two-year degree of some kind, but their skills might cross several fields, such as plumber, electrician, and mechanic all at once. Renaissance!).

"Why would I do that...?" she started, then remembered. "Oh, um, no, I haven't talked to him yet. He was...out," she hedged. I wondered out loud if I should call my hazyaika (landlady). "Have you defrosted your fridge yet?" she asked again, by way of response. "Um...no. I'm going to do that later in the week, when I have less food to deal with," I answered, privately wondering what my fridge had to do with an extreme fire hazard in my immediate environment, so to speak.

"Then you shouldn't call your landlady," my zouch stated firmly. "You might end up talking to her mother. No matter what you do, don't tell her anything. She thinks you're destroying the fridge by not defrosting it, and things could get messy." Ah, things were becoming clear. I appreciated the advice, seeing as how burning down my entire apartment building was fairly trivial compared to the wrath of my landlady's mother when it comes to the state of my 15-year-old tank of a refrigerator.

"I'll call you in 5 minutes," she finished quickly, and hung up. I spent the next couple of hours doing my laundry (why do my shirts insist on retaining chalky deodorant marks and sweaty armpit smells even after I've soaked them and scrubbed them and swirled them and soaked them and scrubbed them again? I am really, really missing a washing machine. People, you have no idea how lucky you are) and puttering around my apartment, working and planning as usual.

Soon it was 6:00 and time to leave for Vika's. Still no call, so I set out. At around 7:30, I got the call. "Sarah! Why aren't you at home?" demanded my zouch. I decided to turn the tables. "You said you'd call in 5 minutes, but you didn't!" I exclaimed. She explained that there had been a parent-teacher meeting at school. I said I understood. We agreed to take care of the electrical socket after school tomorrow, and that was that. As I hung up the phone, I felt like I had pretty much taken care of things in a culturally appropriate way. I didn't feel used or manipulated, and I felt like things were in motion. We'll see how far they get tomorrow, but for now, I'm feeling pretty much like I can handle things here in Ukraine. And that's a good feeling.

Not only that, but Vika fed me another bowl of borscht. You can't go wrong with a 2-bowl borscht day, that's for sure.