Life in Kalynivka

(photo: Kyiv on October)

05-10-06


Yes, Justin finally managed to get his computer up and running. After a spectacular but smelly display of electrical fireworks last night, I worked up the courage to plug in after my host father's heroic (and eventually successful) attempts at reading the voltage output of my computer plug with two sewing needles and a voltmeter. Everything's fine. Thanks Dad!

Today was the first full day with my new host family in Kalynovka, Ukraine. I finally feel that I can start settling in, as training has been a whirlwind of activity since it started less than one week ago. Staging started on Sept. 28th in DC, where a group of 110 of us shiny green PCVs flew in from about every state in the lower 48 and convened at the Doubletree in Arlington, VA, for two days. Loose ends were tied up, goodbyes were said, seminars were sat through, cell phones were thrown into the Potomac. We flew out on the 30 th and arrived- eventually- in Kyiv on the afternoon of October first. But when groups of over 100 travel internationally, you can expect that even the simplest of tasks- like getting up, checking out, and going to the airport- can take pretty much all day. That particular one did. And having not slept for one minute on any of the flights over here, I was in pretty miserable shape by the time our bus rolled into the old Soviet retreat center outside Kyiv called Prolisok ('snow drop'). But recovery was quick. After three days at Prolisok, our big group was split up and sent to about 20 different towns surrounding Kyiv for the next phase of training, which will last until the end of December. We learned these 'cluster assignments' only a day after learning our language assignments- I'm learning Russian, huzzah! Ukraine is a bilingual country; everyone understands (and mostly everyone speaks) both Ukrainian and Russian, so over the summer none of us knew which language to study. PC said to learn Ukrainian, which many people got a head start on, including myself, but when the actual language assignments were given, we seemed to be split about 50/50. The linguistic boundary splits the country in half too- Ukrainian is spoken in the north and west, and Russian is spoken in the south and east. So, chances are that my eventual assignment will be somewhere far from here (Kiev is in the north and center of the country).

Now getting to where 'here' is…I live on Lenin St. in Kalynovka, Ukraine. Yeah, there's still a Lenin statue at the train station. Right now I can hear the freight trains rumbling by but their horns seem to have been ripped from Thomas the Tank Engine. The landscape around here might be pretty easily mistaken for the northeast, but similarities stop there. I probably shouldn't go into any detail yet, considering I've only been here for a little while, so hopefully as the blog progresses some things will be illuminated about Ukraine too. But I wanted to put this out there so my whereabouts are known. But this may be it for a while because they've got us running on a pretty tight calendar for the next three months. When things calm down, the blog will pick up, I promise.