September to mid December, 2012.

Welcome and добро пожаловать to the first, and possibly last, edition of Have a Rest.

I wish I could say that I have delayed creating a blog so that I could allow myself adequate time to reflect on my experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer and form coherent thoughts and quirky quips about them.  Unfortunately this is not true.  It’s been mostly due to a lack of chutzpah.

This post will deal with the first three months I spent in Ukraine as a young, starry eyed, Peace Corps Trainee.  Back then everything seemed brand new in this foreign land.  I still had an excuse not to understand what was happening around me.

The first three months of any Peace Corps experience can be summed up with one little acronym: PST.  You’ll soon find out what PST means if you don’t know already, but first I wanted to shine a light on how ridiculous it is to attempt to “sum up” anything about Peace Corps.  My experience during PST was of course different from other newly arrived trainees' in Ukraine, and I can’t even begin to imagine what other trainees went through while in various countries across the globe, from Mexico to China, to Swaziland.  While languages, cultures, and nautical miles separate us, PST is the common denominator. Also food sickness.

That being said, PST stands for Pre-Service Training.  It’s a relatively short period of time where Peace Corps feeds us copious amounts of information, trains us, and essentially gets us ready to live, learn, and hopefully laugh in our new countries.  As my incredibly wise language teacher once said “when you arrive you are like babies.”  I want to say that she ended the quote by saying something like “when you are done with PST you are like grown adults,” but my memory isn’t so good and that quote seems quite apocryphal and just plain invalid on several accounts.

During PST we are split into clusters.  My entire group had just shy of 70 volunteers when we came to the country and my cluster consisted of 5 humans, two of which were married.  In all honesty, before I met these people I was disappointed to learn that I had been placed in a cluster with a married couple.  They quickly proved me wrong as they are both outrageously good people.  I get proven wrong quite a bit throughout this story.  It’s a learning process, I am told.

Moving on, PST is a very busy time for everyone.  I thoroughly enjoyed the 4-5 hours of intensive language class every day.  I consider myself to be a language enthusiast and long stretches of Russian class is as close to academic nirvana as I have come so far.  The only possible exception would be long sessions of German practice, übung macht den Meister!!  The one other possible exception being team floor hockey during the 12^th grade, but I do not know if that applies.  I never deal in certainties.

When we were not conjugating verbs or arguing over the possible nuances of elementary Russian, we were team teaching at a local school (see attached picture).  And when we were not teaching at a local school we were learning how to teach at a trainer’s house located close by in the city.   It should be noted that Peace Corps does an excellent job preparing us all to be great educators, but sometimes their methodology of praxis before theory or “learning by doing” can be quite the challenge; albeit invigorating.

I mentioned earlier how different our experiences during PST are.  Some trainees are put in a cluster of 4 people in a small village in only god knows where Ukraine, while others are placed in a large regional capital with a stellar group of people.  I belonged to the others.   My training site was a great city called Chernigov about 100 kilometers East of Chernobyl and two hours North of Kiev.  My host family was spectacular for many reasons.  Both the parents were as friendly as could be, and the children didn’t fall far from the tree.  They had three kids aged 7, 5, and 2.  Apart from being incredibly nice, fantastic hosts, and very welcoming, they were also quite well off and I got to have my own shower (read: no bucket baths like some volunteers).  I still don’t know if being sheltered from the rough and tumble life during PST was a blessing or a curse.  It certainly felt like a blessing, but I always suffered from a mild case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).  Can you really be a Peace Corps Volunteer with hot showers, intermittent internet, and ample amounts of the infamous Ukrainian soup known as Borscht?

The words are filling up quicker on this page than was anticipated and I’ll leave you with the above questions to ponder… if anyone is still reading at this point then I say to you молодец (good job)!




Mixed emotions on the first day of teaching.



Chernigov



My host family.