Traveler, Writer, Aquarius, Peace Corps Volunteer
The evidence
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It�s cold outside. Damn cold. Ukrainian cold. There�s a slicing wind that lops off earlobes and noses, not to spite your face, just to remind you who�s in charge. There�s snow piled up everywhere, and where it�s not piled up it�s trampled down into slick sheets of sheer ice. The whole city is whitewashed. For a week it snowed, at first small ice flecks and then flakes the size of maple leaves for three days, and then back to flecks. This year Winter might have been late to the party, but She wasted no time ringing the bell. She just blew the friggin� door down and crashed right in.
There are two things I still find very odd about Ukraine with regard to winter. The first is that every architect and engineer in the world knows that Ukraine is going to get more than its fair share of snow and ice for three to four months a year, yet for some reason half the sidewalks, promenades, underground walkways, steps, and entranceways are made out of slippery stone. It�s wacky. There are some sidewalks I literally skate down, fumbling every step like a newborn foal. The steps are even more terrifying. If I�m carrying a heavy backpack, sometimes I won�t even go down them.
The other is the winter work crew, diligently shoveling at the first sign of snow and working all season long, braving the elements, heaping mounds of white from street to curb. Who comprises this sturdy group? Rugged miners? Fierce Cossack warriors? No, even tougher. Babushkas. Old ladies. It�s completely wild to see a phalanx of hunchbacks in headscarves digging the city out on a daily basis. Grandmas in Ukraine aren�t the sit at home and make hot chocolate and smores variety. These sexagenarians will kick your ass.
It�s with this wintry backdrop that my final year and new semester began at the Institute yesterday. I would like to say that I was ready and rearing to go for school to start after my long lazy hiatus mostly spent sleeping until noon, going to Russian lessons and the gym, and eating six times a day (more on that later). I would like to say that returning to a normal schedule motivated me for a big push into the home stretch. Truth is, however, that sleeping until noon is more enjoyable than waking up at seven, and it�s been a bitch so far getting back into the swing of things.
There�s one thing I will say, however. I have definitely acclimated to the Ukrainian school system and way of doing things. Case in point: when I left school yesterday afternoon, the schedule showed that I had the first class, starting at 9am, the third, and the fourth. When I arrived at school this morning, the schedule in our office hadn�t changed, but the one in the hallway had. Apparently, though it was only the second day of school, the schedule was already in flux. How did I handle finding out that I got up early, threw on clothes while I was half asleep, ran out the door into the cold, waited for a crowded bus, and hurried to make it to class just in time only to find out that I didn�t have a class until noon? Well, a year ago, I would have screamed, yelled, cursed, demanded an explanation, and then thrown a fit. Today, I just laughed a bit, pulled out my back issues of Newseek, my Russian book, and my iPod, and kicked back for two hours until the Internet room opened up. That, my friends, is the difference a year out of New York and in Donetsk makes.
The other news about this semester is not only my changes, but the changes my school is making as well. Get this. Announced this morning, they are now grading the students on attendance, home work, and participation. Can you imagine? Students actually having to show up to class and do the required work? I�m not sure what the impetus was for the new rules, but the incentive is that this combination will now constitute the students� final grades, and they only need to take a final oral proficiency exam if they believe the grade is inaccurate and want a better one. The student response? Anger, of course. I actually had one girl in my class today say that it�s not fair that the school is grading them on attendance. When I asked her if it was because she had a job that she had to work at and would have to miss school time, she said no, but that as a human being she simply had other important things to do.
Student life here isn�t like America, folks. The whole idea that a student�s job is to attend classes, study, and do homework doesn�t seem to exist amongst the students. They don�t even see being a student as a responsibility. It�s more of an inconvenience for four to five years. Okay, that�s not everybody. But it�s a lot of them. Also, the students in the language department don�t really get exams. Actually, testing isn�t really big in the educational system here in general. Most tests are only at the end of a semester, and they�re oral. We Americans seem to be in the minority, consumed with scores and competition.
Another interesting thing about the school system here, at the high school level, is that students take all their classes for all their subjects at the same time for all four years. Unlike America, where we take biology, algebra, and US history one year and then chemistry, geometry, and world history the next, in Ukraine, they take biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, trig, literature, and languages all at once, every year.
But the big difference is in freedom (cough, cough). Freedom of choice, that is. In Ukraine, the curriculum is set and students are assigned to a track. They�re told what courses they must take, including what language they�re going to study. Want to learn French? Too bad, you�re learning German. And coming out of high school, they have to decide what they want to be. That determines what college they study at, and once at that college, the curriculum is again set for all four years. No such thing as electives. No animal called independent study. And the system just churns them out.
So here it is that I find myself with more than one year down and less than one to go. I remember having the �two year� conversation many times before I left. �Two years is such a long time,� some people said. �Oh, the time will fly by,� said others. Want to know the truth? It flies by and it�s also a really long time. I�m not at all ebullient at the prospects of spending a whole new year here. That isn�t to say that I�m ready to quit and come home. It�s more along the lines of, sigh, I�ve still got one more year here.
Though most volunteers say the second year goes really quickly, it�s dragging for me right now. That being said, it�s also wild to think that it�s already February and once May comes, it�s all downhill. The summer is traveling and playing, and then the fall is packing and figuring out what to do next.
Though it�s already a month ago, I had a fun New Years. Okay, it didn�t really start out as fun. First the rain poured for two days. Really poured. Transportation was at a standstill when I needed to move, and moved when I needed it to stop. I got sprayed with street filth on my walk to school by a bustling bus. I crammed onto a wet, nasty minivan and got dripped on on my way back. I sat in traffic for fifteen minutes on my way to the market to buy ornaments with my girlfriend, and when I got there the place was so crowded I just turned around and left.
Then the power went out in my apartment. For two days. So much for my New Year�s party. I made the call, or rather my girlfriend made the call late Friday night, that the party would be at her place. Five minutes later, my electricity came back on. That�s the way it goes. At the party, my friend Sergei and his cousin Kolya were so drunk when they arrived that when playfighting in the hallway, Sergei got a big cut across his forehead. They have a Russian saying that it�s not a party until the men are drunk and fighting. I guess we had a party.
What else? The �revolution� came and went, and Yushenko is now president. It wasn�t really a revolution people. It was more of a large scale protest. They tried the same thing here in Donetsk for Yanukovich, but it was almost sad. There were many people on the square, some of them camping out, but it was more contrived than patriotic. There was all this talk about a Donetsk revolution and everyone speculated on what would happen if Yushenko was announced president. Guess what? Nothing happened. It�s life as usual. A surprise and a relief.
Not much else to report. In an effort to get back into shape, which stretches back to Thanksgiving, when I arrived in Florida at an emaciated 160 pounds and spent a week eating my way up to 167, I returned to the gym with a personal trainer in tow and a dedication to fine tune my machine. The workouts have been solid, and strength-wise I�m almost back to the workout weight I was throwing around last May before I fell off the wagon for six months. Eating-wise, my trainer now wants me to eat six meals a day, as I previously mentioned. But not just six meals. Six meals that add up to nearly 300 grams of protein a day (and of course a requirement of fat, cards, and calories). But to put that number in perspective, that�s like eating a pound of steak, a pound of fish, and a pound of chicken a day, along with a few eggs, milk, cheese, and then all the accoutrements. I told him he�s out of his mind. We�ll see. I�ll either get big or fat. Of course, between the trainer and the food regimen, I now have little money to do anything else. Truth is, it�s probably better for my liver and kidneys, not just my muscles.
The Russian lessons are going well too. I�m an ass for wasting as much time as I did last year not taking them when I could have. The grammar is ridiculously hard, but I�m coming along. Now I sound less like an imbecile and more like a child. Hopefully before I leave I�ll be at least a toddler.
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