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| Lenin Square |
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| Lenin Himself |
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| City Center (Check out our Russian Mig Jet!) |
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| Bridge overlooking water at the park |
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| Trinity Cathedral |
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| View from my balcony (overlooking Lenin Square) |
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Kodak Moments
Thursday, June 23, 2011
I have Arrived!
I feel like it's been a really long time since I wrote here, but it's only been a few weeks! SO much has happened between then and now that I can't remember it all. On Monday, the 13th, I went to Kiev for 4 days of official meetings and introductions, but also had dinners with old friends whom I had met in Washington when I first started on this crazy journey back in March. The strangest thing is the feeling that the past 12 weeks of training happened to someone else. I cannot explain this, but as difficult as it was, I am experiencing it from another point of view now. Weird.
Which brings me to the present.
I am living in a good sized city of 70,000 people, in a place called Novomoskovsk, which is eastern Ukraine...but not too far east. The city is just outside an even bigger city with millions of people! We arrived here the morning of the 17th at 7am with no fuss at all. Everything went as scheduled. The Peace Corps are pros, I can tell you. They have to ship 105 people with tons of baggage (at least 3 big bags each plus another humongous bag with a space heater, fire extinguisher, and a new smoke detector). Incredible. SO, we got on our train and in our sleeping compartment. We decided to leave all the bags on the lower berths and sleep in the upper ones. I felt like I was in an old movie! It was very comfortable and I slept okay. It took 8 hours to get here from Kiev but of course it seemed very fast because I slept through most if.
We came immediately to my apartment to drop everything off. A colleague of Katya's (and now mine, of course) had her husband pick us up. The apartment has 2 good sized rooms…very old but serviceable. I am trying to have some more outlets put in because there is only one. There was nothing in the apartment so my school had to buy me some towels and bedding, glasses and cups and silverware and stuff like that. I still need to purchase an iron and other essentials. The PC gives you a resettling allowance but this will not cover everything I need.
I have hot and cold running water…Bonus! There is a DSL line coming into the apartment which means I can soon have internet access…Double bonus!
My counterpart is named Katya and she is wonderful. She is an English teacher and also the assistant director at the Lyceum where I will be teaching. Her father is the director of the local arts school, which I visited the other day. We will be planning some future project there this fall, and I can hardly wait! Katia and I hit it off right away and I hope we become good friends as well as colleagues. The Lyceum is a private school for advanced students. They specialize in mathematics, languages and engineering. I am teaching 8-11th grade, with very small classes. This week I worked everyday. I met the students and did a few fun activities, but no actual lessons. The students were so excited for my coming they wanted to attend classes...in the summer! I can't see this happening in the States. So, my schedule is made up of 9 classes, which will be meeting 2x a week starting in the fall. 18 hours a week doesn't seem like much but there is a lot of planning involved. I am also working on formulating an art club and an English club. It turns out many of my students are musicians and love art!
When I first came to the Lyceum, many of the teachers were in their office and I was welcomed like family. Everyone was so incredibly warm and welcome and really excited that I was here. The director herself came down to meet me and came up and embraced me and told me how happy she was that I was here. As a matter of fact, she has sought me out everyday this week to give me a warm welcome and a hug. I never expected this kind of welcome. Ukrainians are said to be warm and open but only when you know them for a long time…which is pretty much what I have experienced up until today.
The lyceum is small and has (I think) 180 students. I will get to know most of them, I expect. They have a small computer lab...this was such a surprise because they had nothing of the sort in the last little town I was teaching in. I have access to laptops and film projectors too. This school is not so rich but it has a lot more than I expected. I am really pleasantly surprised. It's clean and cool inside and it is wired for internet and I am excited about this too.
The city is really great. It has that small city/big town feel. This is a University town, so it has many little shops and cafes. I am very much reminded of the Brown/RISD section of Providence. There are lots of tree-lined streets but also a good sized shopping district. Our city center has a Russian Mig Jet sculpture. Authentic! Like the tanks in all the little towns I visited while in training, this serves as a reminder of the once powerful might of the Soviet Empire. There are also many statues of Lenin here in Ukraine…my balcony overlooks Lenin Square, which boasts one such statue that stands about 30 feet high!
I live in the city center so everything is in walking distance. School is a 3 minute walk, my counterpart lives perhaps 5 minutes away, and all the shops are all around me. I can hardly believe how lucky I am to have landed in this wonderful place. When you are preparing to go into the Peace Corps, you expect to live in so-so conditions…some down-right primitive. I feel right at home here. The hardest thing I have to do is wash all my laundry by hand, and even that I have gotten used to. I love it here…I have everything I need (except spaghetti sauce) and there is also a pool in my city! (Can you believe this?) I have to take a bus to get there but I don’t care. I am hoping it won't be too expensive.
So, this is my situation at the moment. Living and working in Ukraine is a bit of okay for me now.
Which brings me to the present.
I am living in a good sized city of 70,000 people, in a place called Novomoskovsk, which is eastern Ukraine...but not too far east. The city is just outside an even bigger city with millions of people! We arrived here the morning of the 17th at 7am with no fuss at all. Everything went as scheduled. The Peace Corps are pros, I can tell you. They have to ship 105 people with tons of baggage (at least 3 big bags each plus another humongous bag with a space heater, fire extinguisher, and a new smoke detector). Incredible. SO, we got on our train and in our sleeping compartment. We decided to leave all the bags on the lower berths and sleep in the upper ones. I felt like I was in an old movie! It was very comfortable and I slept okay. It took 8 hours to get here from Kiev but of course it seemed very fast because I slept through most if.
We came immediately to my apartment to drop everything off. A colleague of Katya's (and now mine, of course) had her husband pick us up. The apartment has 2 good sized rooms…very old but serviceable. I am trying to have some more outlets put in because there is only one. There was nothing in the apartment so my school had to buy me some towels and bedding, glasses and cups and silverware and stuff like that. I still need to purchase an iron and other essentials. The PC gives you a resettling allowance but this will not cover everything I need.
I have hot and cold running water…Bonus! There is a DSL line coming into the apartment which means I can soon have internet access…Double bonus!
My counterpart is named Katya and she is wonderful. She is an English teacher and also the assistant director at the Lyceum where I will be teaching. Her father is the director of the local arts school, which I visited the other day. We will be planning some future project there this fall, and I can hardly wait! Katia and I hit it off right away and I hope we become good friends as well as colleagues. The Lyceum is a private school for advanced students. They specialize in mathematics, languages and engineering. I am teaching 8-11th grade, with very small classes. This week I worked everyday. I met the students and did a few fun activities, but no actual lessons. The students were so excited for my coming they wanted to attend classes...in the summer! I can't see this happening in the States. So, my schedule is made up of 9 classes, which will be meeting 2x a week starting in the fall. 18 hours a week doesn't seem like much but there is a lot of planning involved. I am also working on formulating an art club and an English club. It turns out many of my students are musicians and love art!
When I first came to the Lyceum, many of the teachers were in their office and I was welcomed like family. Everyone was so incredibly warm and welcome and really excited that I was here. The director herself came down to meet me and came up and embraced me and told me how happy she was that I was here. As a matter of fact, she has sought me out everyday this week to give me a warm welcome and a hug. I never expected this kind of welcome. Ukrainians are said to be warm and open but only when you know them for a long time…which is pretty much what I have experienced up until today.
The lyceum is small and has (I think) 180 students. I will get to know most of them, I expect. They have a small computer lab...this was such a surprise because they had nothing of the sort in the last little town I was teaching in. I have access to laptops and film projectors too. This school is not so rich but it has a lot more than I expected. I am really pleasantly surprised. It's clean and cool inside and it is wired for internet and I am excited about this too.
The city is really great. It has that small city/big town feel. This is a University town, so it has many little shops and cafes. I am very much reminded of the Brown/RISD section of Providence. There are lots of tree-lined streets but also a good sized shopping district. Our city center has a Russian Mig Jet sculpture. Authentic! Like the tanks in all the little towns I visited while in training, this serves as a reminder of the once powerful might of the Soviet Empire. There are also many statues of Lenin here in Ukraine…my balcony overlooks Lenin Square, which boasts one such statue that stands about 30 feet high!
I live in the city center so everything is in walking distance. School is a 3 minute walk, my counterpart lives perhaps 5 minutes away, and all the shops are all around me. I can hardly believe how lucky I am to have landed in this wonderful place. When you are preparing to go into the Peace Corps, you expect to live in so-so conditions…some down-right primitive. I feel right at home here. The hardest thing I have to do is wash all my laundry by hand, and even that I have gotten used to. I love it here…I have everything I need (except spaghetti sauce) and there is also a pool in my city! (Can you believe this?) I have to take a bus to get there but I don’t care. I am hoping it won't be too expensive.
So, this is my situation at the moment. Living and working in Ukraine is a bit of okay for me now.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
The Home Stretch
This is it, folks. Two more days and I leave Myronivka for a new, permanent site where I will live for the next two years. I won’t know until Monday where that will be, but I am excited to find out.
A few things I will miss about Myronivka.
1. Tanya. My host mom is an awesome person. She is more like a host sister, since we are close in age. I will miss her getting angry at me for whistling in the house. (Yes…a major superstition in Ukraine is that if you whistle in the house, you will run out of money or something) There are a ton of these crazy superstitions but they are taken very seriously here. I will miss her coming in to visit me first light and chattering away a mile a minute in this crazy mix of Russian and Ukrainian (what they call Sorgik) which I can almost never understand, but she doesn’t seem to care if I can understand her or not.
I will miss her quirky way of doing things, for instance; When Tanya brings home chicken wings, she doesn’t like that there are sometimes little hairs on the skin. Understandable, as we have all witnessed a stray feather or two. She removes the burner from the stove and turns up the gas and has this huge flame shooting up like a fountain. She holds the chicken wings over the fire to burn away the fuzzy stuff. Now, this seems like not a big deal but there is a certain 'smell' that permeates the air when she does that. Last night she came home from her little farm and laid something out on the counter and was doing something with it. I leaned over to look and wished I hadn’t. It was whole chicken, which she told me she had just killed herself. I never saw anything like it. She had cut off the head and plucked it and removed some of the other parts like the feet. She laughed at my expression, which you can just imagine what it looked like. Ugh. So, off came the burner and on with the barbeque which smelled even worse than usual.
About Tanya's chicken…it's very tasty. There is nothing like a fresh bird. What we get in the supermarket at home...well, lets just say it tastes nothing like that. Who knows where it comes from, what it's been eating, and how old it is when we finally get in on our dinner table? Here in Ukraine it's killed and eaten within a few days. Fresh as fresh can be.
2. The goat lady.
3. Horse-drawn wagons in the streets competing with cars for lane space.
4. Watching the sunrise over the river from my kitchen window every morning and watching the sunset from my bedroom window every evening. (Something I haven’t taken the time to do since I was a teenager).
A few things I will miss about Myronivka.
1. Tanya. My host mom is an awesome person. She is more like a host sister, since we are close in age. I will miss her getting angry at me for whistling in the house. (Yes…a major superstition in Ukraine is that if you whistle in the house, you will run out of money or something) There are a ton of these crazy superstitions but they are taken very seriously here. I will miss her coming in to visit me first light and chattering away a mile a minute in this crazy mix of Russian and Ukrainian (what they call Sorgik) which I can almost never understand, but she doesn’t seem to care if I can understand her or not.
I will miss her quirky way of doing things, for instance; When Tanya brings home chicken wings, she doesn’t like that there are sometimes little hairs on the skin. Understandable, as we have all witnessed a stray feather or two. She removes the burner from the stove and turns up the gas and has this huge flame shooting up like a fountain. She holds the chicken wings over the fire to burn away the fuzzy stuff. Now, this seems like not a big deal but there is a certain 'smell' that permeates the air when she does that. Last night she came home from her little farm and laid something out on the counter and was doing something with it. I leaned over to look and wished I hadn’t. It was whole chicken, which she told me she had just killed herself. I never saw anything like it. She had cut off the head and plucked it and removed some of the other parts like the feet. She laughed at my expression, which you can just imagine what it looked like. Ugh. So, off came the burner and on with the barbeque which smelled even worse than usual.
About Tanya's chicken…it's very tasty. There is nothing like a fresh bird. What we get in the supermarket at home...well, lets just say it tastes nothing like that. Who knows where it comes from, what it's been eating, and how old it is when we finally get in on our dinner table? Here in Ukraine it's killed and eaten within a few days. Fresh as fresh can be.
2. The goat lady.
3. Horse-drawn wagons in the streets competing with cars for lane space.
4. Watching the sunrise over the river from my kitchen window every morning and watching the sunset from my bedroom window every evening. (Something I haven’t taken the time to do since I was a teenager).
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Language
With a renewed sense of vigor about life, I am beginning once again to study the Russian language in earnest. I have started from the beginning, in the hope of figuring out just where the hell I took a wrong turn and got lost so many weeks ago.
Of all the challenges we have all faced here, the language has been the most frustrating and the most difficult for me. My cluster-mates are amazing. They have absorbed the language and all its idiosyncrasies with a degree of clarity and ease of which I am the envy of, and at the same, so very proud of. I watch and listen to them holding lengthy conversations the likes of which I never would have believed possible 10 weeks ago. I am so amazed at their abilities.
This is where I get frustrated, however. I am so lost. I can’t understand what everyone is saying, so I can’t participate, and I can’t share in the laughter that is so prevalent in the class. I always want to ask "What's so funny?" but if I do, I'll just be annoying. Why should they repeat everything for me? It would just suck the life out of the joke.
So I just sit and wait, and hope that the next time, I’ll get it.
Of all the challenges we have all faced here, the language has been the most frustrating and the most difficult for me. My cluster-mates are amazing. They have absorbed the language and all its idiosyncrasies with a degree of clarity and ease of which I am the envy of, and at the same, so very proud of. I watch and listen to them holding lengthy conversations the likes of which I never would have believed possible 10 weeks ago. I am so amazed at their abilities.
This is where I get frustrated, however. I am so lost. I can’t understand what everyone is saying, so I can’t participate, and I can’t share in the laughter that is so prevalent in the class. I always want to ask "What's so funny?" but if I do, I'll just be annoying. Why should they repeat everything for me? It would just suck the life out of the joke.
So I just sit and wait, and hope that the next time, I’ll get it.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Crossing Over
Well, I did it. For those of us who swore they would never do it…well, we all do it. I am convinced of it. If I did it, we will ALL DO IT. It's confirmed. Read on my fellow middle-agers…
Having to go into Kiev last Sunday at 6am I had a bit of a dilemma. It being so incredibly hot here, I didn’t want to be in the city all day with lots of junk to carry…namely, warm shoes and sweater, and whatever else one needs to wear early in the morning when it's a bit chilly.
What to do? I didn’t want cold feet. I could wear my sneakers and socks to keep my feet warm, only to have to remove them and carry them the rest of the day in my bag…which was heavy enough, thank you very much. I could wear my sweater and remove this at some point and stick this in my bag as well. What to do? What to do?
I would never have imagined I would ever come to this, but this was my solution….
Having to go into Kiev last Sunday at 6am I had a bit of a dilemma. It being so incredibly hot here, I didn’t want to be in the city all day with lots of junk to carry…namely, warm shoes and sweater, and whatever else one needs to wear early in the morning when it's a bit chilly.
What to do? I didn’t want cold feet. I could wear my sneakers and socks to keep my feet warm, only to have to remove them and carry them the rest of the day in my bag…which was heavy enough, thank you very much. I could wear my sweater and remove this at some point and stick this in my bag as well. What to do? What to do?
I would never have imagined I would ever come to this, but this was my solution….
Creative Space
Over the years my idea of the studio space has changed dramatically. In the beginning I needed to have a studio in which to create, to think, to "let the magic happen". I had believed that having a space in which to work was critical to my success as an artist. Without a space to work in, my work suffered in ways that could only be blamed on my physical surroundings. Or so I thought. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the work was actually meaningless.
Have matured as a person and as an artist has made me realize that physical space and creative space are really two completely different things.
For the first time in many years I am without a studio…and all the trappings that make a studio, well, a studio. I am without ink, paper, bindery equipment, glues, paints, textiles, needles, thread, and the hundreds of other little things that were in my repertoire of materials that I kept in my studio at home in America.
I am currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine. I packed 2 suitcases for a two year stay, and there was no room for anything other than the bare necessities for everyday living. Translation: no studio and no materials.
I never thought I would be able to find the time to create anything here in Ukraine…let alone even THINK about a future project. However, as busy and physically demanding as things have been these past few months I could not shake the feeling that there is a piece of artwork inside me someplace. I just needed to dig down really deep to find the creative space within myself….and studio be damned.I began to collect the little bit of ephemera that I am known to make work with…namely used tea bags…and began the process of transformation. Borrowing a needle and some thread from the woman I am currently staying with, I painstakingly assembled a tiny wall quilt. As well I transcribed a poem I had written in Russian onto it.
Being in a "space" where I can create art has always been important to me. I just didn’t realize until today that it does not need to be a physical one. The space within my mind will do well enough, I think.
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