The Long Ride

Well folks, just when I'd snagged your interest, I was called into Kyiv for some medical testing. I headed in on Sunday night, the night of the big storm here. Everyone is talking about it. Five ships were sunk, including an oil tanker which spilled a ton of oil into the Sea of Azov, and eight other ships were run aground. Houses in Berdyansk, the city about an hour south-east of me, were flooded. Some sailors died. Signs and billboards were twisted and crumpled by giant invisible hands of wind and icy rain. It was pretty intense. The wind gusts were so strong they'd twirl you around in place. Awesome.

Anyway, when I got into Zaporizhia at about 5 in the evening I found out that there were no train tickets left. Everyone wanted Kyiv. All around me at the ticket counter people were shouting, "Kyiv? Tickets left for Kyiv?" Hearing that, I figured my chances were slim, but I elbowed my way up there anyway. The harried lady didn't even look up. "No tickets, at all, for Kyiv," she stated flatly.

A lady behind me said there was a bus leaving at 9 p.m. from the nearby bus depot. I hurried over there (that involved catching a marshrutka right outside the train station) and got my 9 o'clock ticket. Then I headed over to Rich and Cathy's, aka "Hotel Brownell" (their last name), and they fed me lasagna soup and cheese and crackers. Heavenly.

The bus, on the other hand, was no such thing. When I got back to the station about eight, the lot was deserted. Thin flakes swirled in the blowing wind. Crowds of people milled about. I waited until 8:50, then I headed in, only to find a big group of people standing at the one open ticket window inside.

"May I ask a question of her?" I said to the next person in line. "Of course," she answered, so I stuck my head into the window. The red-haired woman sitting in the gloomy little ticket office leveled a frosty gaze upon me that said, "Dirt is better than you, dearie, and by a long shot," and when I inquired about the bus, she coldly replied, "It has lost itself."

"I have an 80 hrivnia ticket!" I exclaimed in disbelief. "What should I do?"

"It's not my problem," she snorted. Hearing the bus had been cancelled, the crowd behind me buzzed. People started shouting at her. We have tickets! It is so your problem! Just then a woman's voice announced on the intercom, "The 9 o'clock bus to Kyiv has been cancelled." It was 9:00 on the dot.

I begged a nice-looking little man behind me for help. He turned a kindly eye on me and told me there was another bus leaving at 9:25. The other people had already started forming the mass of elbows and grunts to hustle their way to the window, where the lady was changing the tickets for a 10 hrivnia surcharge. I heard someone in the crowd say, "There's only 15 spots left on the next bus!" People started complaining, saying they had morning appointments in Kyiv, giving all the reasons why they needed that ticket. I felt I had them one-upped. After all, I was a stranger in their land. I needed to get to Kyiv!

Not only that, the crowd had become thicker. After the announcement, all the people left waiting on the platform had come rushing in, jumping in line as if all the people already waiting were invisible. One lady, when informed that we all were waiting to change our tickets for the Kyiv bus too, affected upturned eyebrows and gave a small rising "Ohhh?" as she turned her back on us and promptly shoved her ticket through the window.

I, being smaller than the largely male surge of humanity around me, wiggled my way up through the center of the group. I cast a pleading glance on the stern guy to my right. He glared at me, but his shoulders softened and he let me change my ticket in front of him. Batting your eyelashes gets you places here, I'm telling you.

So the deluxe bus pulled up and the fifteen lucky winners of the golden tickets were left standing at its doors. A lady dressed like a stewardess (indeed, she came around in the morning offering coffee and tea) checked us off on a list. She randomly assigned us to the leftover spots. I got a place in the very back, where the five bench-style seats don't recline, in between two enormous men. Well, that wasn't actually so bad, because after midnight on a ride like that you get so frantic for sleep that normal societal things like "personal space" mean less to you, and so I was able to use their general bulk as props and their shoulders for pillows. The night passed in a stupor of fitful slumber.

Kyiv was snowy and cold. It was very pretty, with about 10 centimeters of snow piled up on all the flat surfaces. I made my way into the subway and found my way to our new office on autopilot, taking in the cityscape around me, so different than the architecture of my village or even Zaporizhia. The people are chic, dressed in expensive western European styles, with accessories like fancy cars and shiny handbags to match. The pastel buildings seem so gentle and historic, there are statues and monuments everywhere you turn, and the kiosks and stores seem modern and busy. Not only that, it's not built in a straight line on "Europe's longest prospect" like Zap, but in circles and angles and hilly, interesting curves.

I spent the next couple of days getting various tests done (all are fine. Don't worry. I'm healthy as the girl next door) and hanging out with a bunch of volunteers who were COS-ing (Close of Service-ing to you non-acronymical humans out there, otherwise known as NAHs). They griped about paperwork and forms, complained about Ukraine and America, daydreamed about the food they were about to eat, the things they were going to buy with their COS money, and the particular comforts of home they missed most. Many were planning trips abroad, cruises, hikes, or siestas in places like the Mediterranean or Thailand. Sounded interesting, but not alluring to me. At this point, I like Ukraine. After a year here, it feels closer to home than Minnesota in some ways.

We ate pizza at Vesuvio's, a great little joint off Kreschatyk (the main drag in Kyiv), one night. As we walked through the sleepy, wintery nighttime city, we capered in the snow and generally acted like loud, crazy Americans. There was another guy from Minnesota in the bunch and we instigated a snowball fight. The two other girls looked at me, Trisha and the four guys with disdain, but seriously. How can you resist all that wonderful, fluffy wet snow? It was perfect.

Tuesday morning on our way into the office, Trisha and I wandered through the bustling city, walking most of the way there and taking pictures. The sky was a brilliant blue and everywhere people were hurrying somewhere else. I'm at the point in my service where I've started to realize that if I don't start snapping photos soon, I'm not going to have the chance. I only have a year left! Gotta hop to it!


Independence Square, "Maidan Nezalezhnosti"

I caught the train home on Tuesday night, finally getting some rest after crashing on the sofa in the cold apartment with seven other people. The rolling train and warm (the retired officer across from me complained "hot") car soothed me and I slept like a baby.

After that, I grabbed the next marshrutka out of Zaporizhia and got home by 10 a.m. Wednesday morning, in time to get to school to meet with my coteachers. I brought them a Kyivan cake (it's a special type of cake made with meringue and cream frosting, light, crunchy, and sweet enough to melt the teeth in your mouth) to thank them for my medical leave. We ate that today with coffee. As we crunched our bites of cake, they started discussing cake, which seems a common occurrence when cake is being consumed here.

"My favorite cake is chocolate, with that [something I couldn't understand] in the middle," said Sasha.

"You know, that cake is alright," countered the other Sasha. "But I like [some other word I didn't understand] better."

Olya gave a snort. "No way!" she said. "The best kind of cake is [something], with [something] and [something] in it."

Tatiana sighed and washed down a bite with a sip of instant coffee. "I like Kyiv cake," she whispered to me confidentially, winking and bumping me on my shoulder with her shoulder and laughing her soft little Marge Simpson laugh.

Yesterday after school we were supposed to have our inaugural Teachers' English Club meeting. I'd done some leg work on that, surveying the teachers at our methodological seminar on the best days to meet (Wednesday and Saturday), and Tatiana had personally called all the teachers in the area, receiving several promises from them to come. I bought tea and sugar and little rolled cakes (these were really decadent, like ho-hos, but with apricot and raspberry filling and dipped in white chocolate). I got a chainik all ready and laid out on a desktop the magazine articles I'd copied, the ice-breaker exercises I'd printed, the survey I'd written, and the "All About Me" introduction text I'd made.

It was 2:15. Everything was ready. In the teachers' room we caught Olya and Yulia and made them promise to come after the seventh lesson (3:05). Vika joined us in the English room and the three of us chatted for an hour. We kept casting little glances at the clock and every now and then, when we heard footsteps in the hall, muttered, "That must be another English teacher!" But no one came.

Finally Yulia showed up. With time spinning out into darkness as the three o'clock hour rolled around, the four of us decided to go ahead and use the materials I'd prepared. I think the others were just humoring me, but in my mind at least they got to practice their English, too.

Finally we wrapped up about 4:00. "Don't be offended, Sarah," Tatiana said, squeezing my hand. With a squeaky note of incredulity in her voice, she added, "I don't know what happened! I called them and they promised to come!"

Today I had three good lessons with my eleventh formers. They are the hardest for me to handle. My 11-A group is made up of 22 students, with varying degrees of language skills. They range from not being able to answer the question "How are you?" to giving nearly-fluent (memorized) dissertations on the political state of Ukraine. There are about eight key students who, when absent, make the class an enjoyable experience. When present, they tend to exert a vacuum-like suction on the rest of the class, draining the capability or desire of the rest of the class to nearly nothing. Sometimes, when it's going badly, I look out and meet the gaze of one or two students, and I think that must be what drowning eyes look like. "Please," they seem to be saying, "Please teach us...please don't let this stop you from teaching us."

So I don't. The eleventh graders are already old enough that if I stray too far from the teacher-centered methods they are used to, they get really rowdy and wild. They focus a lot better when I stay in the comfortable zone of me telling, them repeating/memorizing/regurgitating. So I've learned to adapt my lesson plans accordingly (not without some hilarious incidents, however. One time I tried to do "tongue twisters" since that was the theme in their Plakhotnyk readers. Tatiana had suggested I focus on speaking during my lesson, and liked the idea of discussing some popular American tongue twisters. I chose some classics, like "One smart fellow, he felt smart" and "A skunk sat on a stump..." amongst others. Those necessitated explaining what it meant to "smelt fart" and what a "skunk" exactly was. As I drew a picture on the board of a stripey animal with a cloud coming out from under its tail, one student in the front muttered, "Beautiful girl," in disgust, crossing his arms and staring at the floor. The rest of the students were laughing and chattering in Russian and Ukrainian. When I tried to get them to say the tongue twisters, all hell broke loose. They rebelled, refusing to speak, and I blustered, caught in the trap of a lesson gone horribly wrong. I later regretted this lesson on another level when my administration admonished me to my Peace Corps manager. "She does whatever she wants in class!" my zouch exclaimed. "Her ideas are crazy! Just look at what she tries to teach them!" As I blushed and tried to swallow the giggles rising in my throat, Tatiana, sitting to my left, gave a choking sound and I could see she was trying desperately not to laugh, too. After a moment, she explained that I did follow their lesson plans, but too late. The damage was done. At least now I know that I shouldn't talk about noxious fumes in class!).

Today we had two American Country Studies lessons. I used one lesson to discuss new vocabulary, defining the words on the board in English while the students happily and busily copied into their books. As I acted out or drew pictures to represent the words, they discussed possible translations. It was actually pretty cool. Then I laid out strips with the vocabulary word on one side, the definitions on the other side. They stood around the desk and matched the vocabulary to the definitions. Finally, in the second lesson, I passed out a text with the words missing. As I read, they filled in the right words. It was gratifying to see them referring to their vocabulary lists and know that I had given them some new information. Even the three students who never participate, when I told them they couldn't play the matching game unless they had written all the definitions, seemed almost bothered enough to participate. Instead, though, they sneaked around the room, hiding the other students' bags and books and moving their chairs. Of course I saw that happening, but I didn't want to reward their behavior with attention. When the game broke up, the students happily admonished their unruly classmates and rearranged their stuff so quickly that all I could do was suppress my smile. I remember what it was like to be a kid. Why have another adult around who just screams at you? I'm not going to change the fact that they don't want to learn by berating them or yelling. If I make it more fun to learn than to sit around not learning, maybe they'll get it before I go.

That was 11B. In my 11A class, our theme was "inventions". Tatiana asked me to find extra related materials, so I used my World Book Encyclopedia on my mac to make ten short texts. I made two copies and passed them out. Each student had to find their partner with the same text, then read it, understand it, and discuss it. I was gratified to hear even weaker students shouting, "Who has [this word]?" in English. Then I walked around the room as they read their texts, explaining unfamiliar words. Finally, I facilitated a discussion with them, and it seemed to work. All 22 of them were quiet and listening to each other, giving examples and rewording their texts a little bit, not just repeating them word for word. I felt really pleased with this lesson.

After school we had our Culture Exchange Project club again. Eight students came and we finished the posters of the American students who had written us letters. I got Ludmila Ivanovna's (my director) permission to tape the posters on the wall in the corridor. I'm excited. This will be a big, beautiful result. The kids were so focused, pleased with their task, and chattering away in a mixture of mostly English and Surzhyk. They're seventh graders, so I'm more and more pleased with the transformation of their English, from stilted, memorized utterances to incorporating some of the same flow I use when I'm teaching them. It's cool! As they say.

Tomorrow I have my first meeting with a local businessman who found me at school to take business English lessons. I'm really excited. He bought books and I'll get to see what level he's at. It could be fun, and I look at it as a way to make another connection into my community. If I tutor him for free, his business might make a donation to a project in the future. Right?

I also have my long-anticipated Pumpkin Carving Party! I'm so stoked. Tatiana and I bought candles after school, which necessitated a trip to almost all the shops in town. Since most of southeastern Ukraine lost power for over a day last weekend, people had bought out all the candles in every store. But tenacity paid off and we got some at Victoria's, a great little combination grocery, knick-knacks, cloth, slippers, lottery tickets, and odds-n-ends store. I've made some crosswords and word searches for the kids to do, and we'll have a couple of contests, like a cake walk to take a prize from my prize box and have a "guess how many candies in the jar" contest. It should be a fun time (cross your fingers that some kids come)!

Whew! Catching up is hard work on cold fingers like mine. The electricity is still not fixed in my apartment and the cold is pervasive. My little convector is working hard, but my bedroom is still only 17 degrees (aka 62 degrees Fahrenheit). Brrr! When I called Elena to ask her about the electrician, there were a lot of reasons why he hadn't been contacted yet. She promised to do it "tomorrow", so all I can do is wait and hope. "We're not in America, Sarah," she said apologetically. "Thus we live."

Thus we live.