Things Like School and War

From R to L: Lilya, Sasha, Kcenia, Vyacheslav, Yulia, Oleg's bunny ears. Real live Ukrainian children.

26/01

I would like to describe to you the place in which I spend most of my daylight hours. Verkhnyodniprovski Shkola (School) #1 is usually a warm and happy place. The happiest of all these places in the English language classroom in which all of my classes are taught. It is on the second floor of the building, which itself somewhat reminds me of my own elementary school (this building was built in 1937, my own in 1938). The second floor location is advantageous, as it’s usually a few degrees warmer up there than the rest of the school. Giant windows open the class up to the southeast, and on the rare day that the fog has lifted and the sun is shining, it floods the classroom so thoroughly that my students are forced to squint. A colorful and impressive English-language mural is painted on the wall opposite the windows. It was created by our resident artist/art teacher, Yura Yevgenevich, and spans from floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Every morning this wall greets me with a Mickey Mouse, the Union Jack, a rabbit and a mushroom in multiple positions (used for showing prepositions) and a list of irregular verbs. Above the mural are two air vents. These normally would not catch one’s eye, but these grilles do. Apparently the door key factory also doubled as the air vent grille factory (much as the abandoned factory I now live next-door to produced both children’s toys and red-hot irons), for the holes in the grilles are not so much holes, but the negatives of about 60 keys punched out of a metal plate in cookie-cutter fashion. These punched-out plates were then shipped directly to my school and installed into the wall to make my day a little more interesting. Ah, good old days of Soviet practicality and resourcefulness- they are missed.

In the front of the room, the teacher’s desk is completely covered by a prehistoric tape deck. The accompanying control panel baffles in its complexity, given the fact that it was only used for controlling this one tape. But this is something I will never have to seriously worry about, because the cassette player is broken, as are the little earphone jacks, volume knobs and call buttons that are built into each of the students’ double desks. In another time and place, this was a very impressive classroom. Now the school can’t even afford to put salt on the front steps of the school after an ice storm.

20/01

I’ve heard it before, I’ll hear it again, and now I know exactly what it means. Teaching is hard work. I’ve just wrapped up my first week of school at my permanent site. Most nights I stayed up until the wee hours planning lessons. I teach 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th form English and Business English classes, and have taken on two 7^th form German classes as well. In all, I have 19 separate lessons to plan per week, and I hope this first week will go down in my books as the singularly most difficult of my Peace Corps teaching career. I’ve also become acutely aware of my penchant for sitting and staring at a blank (lesson-planning) page for periods of 30 minutes or more, and being completely content (if not entirely conscious) in such a state.

Nevertheless, I can report that I’ve survived my first week of school. Yesterday I came home, lay on the floor of my room, and slept for three hours. I look forward to the day when my routine won’t be taking such a toll on me, but this might be a while in coming. Let me explain why- I top off my week with a German lesson every Friday afternoon. This is my sixth lesson of the day, which is more than the average load for a full-time secondary-level language teacher here. At that point I am still on my feet, if only for the beginning of the lesson, because by the end I am rolling around on the ground with a migraine. This is usually how a German lesson goes down: I am trying to teach an immersion class in German, although the students’ level is rather basic. This means that when they have no idea what I’m talking about, I will translate the idea or sentence into Russian, the language I learned in order to function here. BUT if I am quizzing them on German vocab that they do not know, their default answer will be that vocab word in English. And when they need to ask or explain something to me, it is done neither in German nor in Russian nor in English but in Ukrainian, the language they have been speaking in school their entire lives. But for as much pain as this inflicts upon my brain- and I just about lost all language ability in that class yesterday- I can still take a step back and see what an amazing thing it is. And I can be thankful that I likely have one of the best primary projects in all of Peace Corps.

15/01

The eternal flame is back on today. I pass by the town’s monument to the Great Patriotic War (WWII) on the way to the post office, and was disturbed to notice that the flame was as much a victim of natural gas problems as the rest of Ukraine. The monument itself is a bleak concrete thing- a plain square spire stretches up about 50 feet in the air from a granite foundation, and a plaque informs that almost 6,000 Verkhnedneprovskians were casualties of the war. The current population of the town stands at about 18,000. The monument is entirely gray, save the old communist star tacked onto the cement spire about 15 ft up. It stands guard at the end of our ‘Main St.’ (here, that would be either Lenin Street or Lenin Prospect, in this case Lenin Prospect), which is also one of the highest points of VP. From this hilltop you can look down onto the town as it descends towards the river about a kilometer away (for friends and family back home, the view is not unlike standing at Canandaigua City Hall and looking down onto Main St. and the lake). On a clear day, you can see for miles. The Dnepr River winds through flat country, sweeps around the town in the north and the west and then flows south, down to the Black Sea. As I write this, however, it is a pretty bleak scene. Gray monuments, gray buildings and a windswept, barren countryside surround me. This winter bleakness can only be compounded by fact that this memorial stands for the terrible things that happened here during WWII. First, the Nazis moved through and decimated the Jewish population of the town. Then, the entire region found itself on the front lines of the war- the Eastern front- which quickly became the biggest and bloodiest struggle that has ever stained the earth. More people died on the Eastern front than all other theatres of WWII combined. It is appalling that this is such a little-known fact in the West, and this is not to demean or degrade the sacrifice of any other country in the war effort, especially our own. But in human lives, Russia and Ukraine by far paid the biggest price of the war. In total, almost 30 million people died as the result of the action on the Eastern front, and many, it seems, have been forgotten. That is why this flame will burn for as long as my town, Verkhnyodniprovsk, stands.