Thursday, December 07, 2006

Almost done with training!

Don’t worry, I’m still alive and well! Things have been so busy in the past month that I haven’t had any chance to get to the internet in my town, and then when I did have time, it wasn’t convenient for the person who provides me internet use. So much has happened, I hardly know where to begin. Well, most important, I know where I’ll be living for the next two years! In the middle of November, all of the training clusters got together for our site announcement. I’ll be living in the south-eastern part of the country. I had been hoping for Crimea (as were 90% of the trainees!), but I think I’ll be happy where I’m going. They say the city has a population of 24,000, but they must be including all of the surrounding villages. I would say it feels more like about 15,000 at most. I’m the first and only volunteer to ever be there. Two days after we found out our sites, we were off on site visit. I took an overnight train to get to my city. What an experience! I was in a compartment with three other Ukrainians. I lucked out that none of them drank or even talked much. We pretty much just went to sleep soon after the train started. Well “sleep.” I don’t think I slept more than a few hours, just because I was a little uncomfortable being in a tiny compartment with complete strangers and not used to sleeping on a train either. I got to the oblast capital early in the morning and was met by my director and his daughter, who is also an English teacher at my school. I don’t think my director speaks English, but she does very well. They drove me to my site, which took about 2 hours. It was 8 in the morning by that point. By 9am, I was at the school meeting the rest of the administration and English teachers. Everyone was so incredibly friendly and happy to have me there! Throughout the next few days, I observed classes (and taught one!). I think my regional Peace Corps manager must have said something to the school that made them very nervous about me liking the city and coming back, because every time I was introduced to a class, they always said something like, “This is Kathryn, and if she likes us and we’re good enough, she’ll come back in December to teach here.” Of course I like them! The school has about 575 students. I believe I’ll be teaching 6-10th grades. Most of my classes are English classes, but I’ll also have two social studies classes, which I’m pretty excited about. My school has a gymnasium, an auditorium, and two computer classes. And, one of the computers has internet!!! I think I’ll be able to use it fairly regularly. What a great resource to have at the school too! I’m not thrilled about the quality of the English books I will have to work with (to put it mildly). I’m hoping to be able to pretty much design my own lessons without the book, but I still need to talk that over with the director and my counterpart.
I will be staying with another host family for one month once I move in December. I thought it was going to be another three months, so I’m happy about that. Plus, my school has already found a place for me to live. And get this – it’s not an apartment. It’s a house!! It’s the cutest house I’ve ever seen, actually! It’s a small little typical Ukrainian cottage. It has whitewashed walls and bright blue windowsills, and in the peak of the roof, there are two cute dove decorations. It shares a driveway with the house next door. The mother of the landlady lives there, so I’ll have my very own babushka next door! The house has a living room, a small bedroom, a nursery (complete with crib, just in case!), and a kitchen/bathroom together in one room. That’s a little awkward, since there is no door between the two, but since I’ll be there alone, I’ll make it work. I’ll probably put up a curtain or something. The house is heated by gas, which I believe means that I’ll be able to control the heat (in the apartments you have “central heating” which means you have no control over how hot or cold it is), and I think it also means I’ll have hot water. So, indoor plumbing and hot water – I’m set! Those were the two big things I was worried about in terms of housing. I was so shocked about it being a house that I didn’t really look for any of the security point that Peace Corps will have to check out to make sure I can live there. I sure hope everything is ok though, because I’m incredibly excited about having a house. I could even plant a garden in the spring!
We got back to our host families from all this traveling and extra training the day before Thanksgiving. Peace Corps actually gave us the day off for Thanksgiving, which I was indeed thankful for. I finally got to sleep and catch up on all the laundry that had accumulated during the past two weeks. The rest of my cluster (five people total) came over for a little party. Whenever I have friends over, my host mom cooks up a huge plate of pancakes for us. I made some sopapillas too (fried tortillas with honey, sugar, and cinnamon). So it wasn’t exactly your traditional Thanksgiving, but it was nice to spend it with friends.
I’m moving to my permanent site at the end of December, I think around the 22nd. It kinda sucks that we’re moving right then. Ukrainians don’t celebrate Christmas on December 25th, so it would be nice to at least still be near all my American friends for Christmas. But anyway, even though it won’t be what I’m used to, it sounds like I’ll get plenty of celebrating in within the next month or so. I, for one, will celebrate Christmas on December 25th…with whoever wants to celebrate with me! Then Ukrainians celebrate the way we celebrate Christmas for their New Years (which may or may not be December 31, I don’t know!) They have a “New Years Tree” which I pretend is a Christmas tree, since that’s exactly what it looks like. They celebrate Christmas, as in actually the birth of Christ, a few days later in mid-January. I will start teaching, I believe, on January 9.