Digressions from 27 months of Peace Corps in the Borderland.

Friday, December 11, 2009

notes during training to my dad...

11/27: Thanks for calling me yesterday, dad. it was comforting and really sad all at once. you know how it is.

ukraine is loving me, everyday. and i love it just as much. i cant believe ill be leaving my host family in two short weeks. theyve been my rock and i think i might be lost without them.

11/3: I've been learning how to cook Ukrainian food. I usually try to watch my host-mom in the kitchen as much as I can and she always ends up letting me help her. well, last night: I "skinned", gutted, and chopped the head off of my first Ukrainian fish. I cleaned a 2 foot fish that my host-dad caught that morning) :D Someo...ne told me that you know you've arrived when you start to get treated like a Ukrainian and stop getting treated like an American. After last night, I think I've arrived. (probably not, there's a lot of other things that I'm sure that I need to do to prove myself... but I'm climbing that ladder. fosho.) and, I'm learning how to cook it tonight ;)

ohh. I don't eat the fish here b/c I'm scared of radiation. and my family knows that. they laugh, but my fears are grounded in truth. I think that I will have really "arrived" when I take my first bite of their favorite fish dish. ... what to do, what to do.





10/10: WOULD YOU RATHER... have explosive diarrhea in a stranger's match-box sized house with paper-thin walls with no toilet paper where you can't even speak the language to ask for some? OR eat a bowl of straight-up, raw, un-cooked pig fat with the pink, freckled skin still attached with a side of "natural" co...ttaged-cheese that you saw and smelled "being naturalized" on the kitchen counter for the past 15 days?

from personal experience on both accounts, I would rather have neither but I think that I'll go with the explosive diarrhea on this one.

...I thought that you would be the only one who could relate to those stories and I understand if you delete this post. :D ... its not the one hole that bothers me. its the smell. it makes me vomit, literally

Fear Factor Ukraine, anyone?

AND ... the pig fat is endearingly called "celo" and the "natural" cottaged cheese are deemed quite delicious by many people and a lot of volunteers. I'm just a slow adjuster to these delicacies. ... im not being critical at all. to each their own taste buds.

The Alpha and Omega of Training

In the beginning, I all but HATED my 3rd grade class. On the first day of teaching, when everyone else from my cluster was team-teaching – it somehow landed on me to teach by myself and to 3rd graders, no doubt. Of course, my class was the first one to be viewed by our TCF and… I was practically the premier example of everything NOT to do. I mean, I was teaching the “Present Continuous” to 8 year olds who are only supposed to be spoken to in Ukrainian. I've been learning Russian and I don’t even know how to say “hello” in UA… although, I do know how to say “police”. Regardless, it was only my 3rd week in Ukraine, so even if I had been able to speak better Russian… it didn’t really matter.

… more detail, I can’t help it. (Now that I'm remembering that first class... I have to explain how terrible it was... Those first 45 minutes were incredibly painful. My TCF was glaring at me, the regular English teacher was trying to avoid eye contact from the back of the classroom because she felt so bad for me. And my students were incredibly lost and totally out of control. They wanted to please me, but I was making it way too difficult for them.

After that class, I was sure that there was no way I was about to spend the next two years of my life teaching complex grammar rules that I don't even know the names for myself to Ukrainian oocheniks.

BUTT although that class was an epic fail, it was also a HUGE learning experience. Lesson #1 – avoid explicitly teaching grammar at all costs.

AND Hindsight is always clearer than foresight. Now, I see that that huge flop made me work harder and it has also made me appreciate every successful class that I teach where students don't throw paper balls at eachother or pull eacother's hair. Seriously though, every class after that, I’ve had those little dears eating from my the palm of my hand. (I also have a growing bag of secrets to help me out with this feat... feel free to email with questions).

How do I feel, now ?? Well, Yesterday was my last day of teaching at Boguslav School #1. I thought that I would be rejoicing to hit this milestone, which I am, but I’m also surprisingly sad. I’ll miss my little 8 year olds who tackle me with hugs when I walk into the classroom and carry all of my pencil bags and books for me down the halls. And erase the board for me before class starts. And correct all of my Russian spelling errors on the board. And hang all materials on the board for our lessons. And ask me 100 times/ day, in this exact dialogue, no varitions, ever.:
3rd Grader: Hello!!! Mmyyyy nammmeee isss Vanechka… wwwhhhaaattt isss youurr nammeee??
Me: My name is Whitney. It’s nice to meet you, Vanechka. How are you, today?
3rd Grader: IIIII AAAAM FIINE.
(repeat at least 3x for each student before I’m saved by the bell and class begins)

And I’ll also miss my 7th grade boys who scream “Sexy are you! Sexy am I! You are Sexy!... Sexy! everytime I see them in school and around town. At first, I was really disturbed by this, but I’ve come to embrace the fact that they can successfully conjugate the verb “to be” (a pretty crucial skill for speakers of English). And my adorable 7th grade girls, who have begun to imitat my gestures…. Now, they like to make their eyes get really wide when acting really interested in what someone’s saying during class, or putting their hands on their hips when they’re waiting for an answer from someone during a dialogue, or clicking their tongue when thinking out loud for a word in English.
And of course, I’ll be slightly thrown off with out my students screaming from across the hall in school or across the road in town, “HELLO Ms. FARMER” (I haven’t actually decided if I’ll miss that or not)

So Despite my initial classroom culture shock and related qualms, I have decided that I really love teaching especially when I have those (more-often-than-not awkward) bonding moments with my students -- even when it’s a two line dialogue, the truth remains: … It really IS/(WAS) a pleasure to meet you, Vanechka.

One World, One Game

A few Saturdays ago, I played a game of pick-up soccer with my host brother, Vlad. It was the hardest that I’ve laughed since I’ve been in Ukraine (and the hardest work-out I’ve had since I’ve been here… a week later, and my muscles were still recovering. I’m getting too old for these games, but I wasn’t about to let one of my little students steal the ball from me behind on a breakaway… )
But Soccer is NO JOKE here in Ukraine. For these boys, it wasn’t even just a life or death game either…. It was more than that. So a few times, I thought I was surely going to be kicked out of the game for laughing. Honestly, I’m not sure if I was in more pain from laughing so hard or because of how hard they made me play. Still, I was just amazed how awesome these little 70 pound 10 year-olds were at soccer. Two other PCTs were playing with me and we were getting stuffed by these little kids and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Because Vlad is 10, it worked out that I was playing soccer with a bunch of boys around that age. Except, they don’t look like they were 10. The children in Ukraine are MUCH smaller than their counterparts in the US. So a 10 year-old boy really looks like he’s about 6 or 7. Girls of that age would look like about 4. Anyway, there was this one little boy named Serioge who was the goalie for Vlad’s team. I swear he looked like he just came out of diapers. Little Serioge was blocking shots left and right and the sheer unexpected element of his performance just made me want to die laughing (picture a 30 pound kid blocking shots like _____). Eventually, some older boys from the high school came and played with us. Ain’t nothin’ but a thang for Serioge, he blocked their shots, too. (After the game, I found out that Serioge had just turned five a few months ago.) … these kids are unreal. I guess if you play soccer 8 out of 12 waking hours everyday, you’re bound to be pretty amazing.

Anyway, my second favorite kid was Anton. Anton was about 8/9, kind of chubby, and the BOSS. If the ball came to you, after your first touch… you could hear Anton repeatedly scream “PPAAAAAASSSSSSSSS” from the other end of the field. He was my team’s cherry-picker, which was just funny in itself. But you could Anton’s voice echo all over Boguslav, I didn’t know whether to be scared for my life or laugh at his extreme urgency... (of course, I laughed). Anyway, Anton and a few of those boys are in my English class- I now have major street cred. in the classroom especially after I scored a few goals.

Moments like these make me love Ukraine more than I usually do. I hope I can play again next weekend if the weather is good… as long as Serioge is on my team.