Ukraine Here I Come!

After the many moenths of waiting, the package finally came in the mail! I am going to the Ukraine on March 3rd, 2006. I am pretty darn excited about this. I finally know! What a relief! I got this HUGE envelope with a ton of information, and files and forms. My favorite form is called "Your assignment" that tells me just about everything that matters to me right now. I am going to be going with a group that is going to be working with kids in different capacities. We will be teaching and mentoring at secondary schools, orphanages, youth centers and some NGOs. It looks like the assignment stresses that everyone will be helping to teach skills, not English. We are going to go into small towns and help the ministry of education plan ways to teach these small and poor towns how to stay afloat and succeed in the global community. It sounds vague, but I think we will be teaching kids how to work with computers, economic fundementals, health and environmental awareness. I am really interested to see how this is going to shape up. Instead of being alone in a remote village in Africa, it seems like I might be alone in a remote village in the Ukraine. Funny how things work that way.

This packet also said I might be learning Russian, or Ukranian...this was a little bit frusterating, since I am such a language fiend, I wanted to get a head start on the language that I will be learning. Perhaps I will pick up Russian, and if nothing else go to Russia and talk to people there. Plus, the refugee I am tutoring speaks Russian, maybe we could do some sort of language exchange (which is totally ok with the program people!)

Some interesting things that were brought up in the packet was that there is the possibility that I will need to start fires to cook my food. I realized that my days of frozen food is just about over. Well, I knew it was going to be over anyway, but this will be a whole new level of meal preperation...making my own fire and cooking things? Wow. I am thinking that for the first few months I'll live on cold food. I think that sounds like a fabulous plan, haha. They also talked about tatoos. They said if you have one you should seriously consider not going if it is visible. In Eastern Europe and Russia (especially) tatoos are rights of passage in the prison and gang system, so seeing a white chick with a huge visible tat is probably not the best thing. Good news is that I do not have any visible tatoos, or any tatoos for that matter!

Other than that the kit went over dress code and some expectations. They have a way of making you really nervous and really excited at the same time. It is so strange. I always knew that going there would be difficult and very different, but you never really know what kind of difficult or what kind of different. Now I am starting to get a better idea of some of the challenges that I might face, and how I can deal with them when I encounter them. It is going to be totally wild, I can't even imagine what it's going to be like. It is such a huge country, it has different minorities and languages and I could be bordering Russia, or Moldova, or Poland; and all of these things could influence what the experience is like. Is the west more westernized than the east? These are questions I would love to know the answers to! And of course, these are questions that I will not have the answer to until after I have already arrived in Ukraine.

I am already excited about everything, and to be honest, I am a total dimwit when it comes to Ukraine. I know a lot of things about Bulgaria, history and culture, but the Ukraine...I know nothing about it! There is a book about going to the Ukraine and finding out about the culture, which is going to be a movie with Elijah Wood. The book is called "Everything is Illuminated" and I believe the movie will be entitled as such. It is an indy flick, so it might not be out in the big theaters, but I am going to make a point to see it when it comes out. Not because it will be my cultural reference and guide, but because I am excited and I think I am some sort of celebrity when the Ukraine is mentioned. How funny is that? I sometimes can't overcome how dorky I am. Really. Other than that book I will probably pick up some travel guides and history books, and some language books. Yes, I know I don't know what language, but like I said before, learning some Russian wont hurt me one bit. That's for sure!

Now the next step I need to take is filling out a ton of paperwork and calling the Peace Corps people to tell them that I'll take the assignment, bring it on, I'm ready to go, let's get on this. I'll do that tomorrow, as I do not want to leave a message on some East Coast answering machine, I think talking to a real live human would be much more rewarding! Well, I am going to go make some more phone calls and write some more e-mails! I will be posting a lot more from now on, you can count on that!