The Candy Bar

I am sorry it has been so long since I have written. I have been busy with the end of school and preparing for my summer camp. Camp activities as usual are taking a lot of my time. I am finishing my lesson plans for my country studies class, does anyone know the annual GDP of Morocco off the top of thier head? My sources seem to differ and it is driving me crazy.
Anyway two weekends ago we interviewed candidates for the camp. The group this year was generally amazing. Speaking with these kids makes me glad to be in Ukraine, just glad to be in the world. It makes me feel like we all aren't living in a society gone to hell in a hand basket. This all makes me even more excited for camp.
This year we did group interviews to see how campers would interact with each other. And one game we played was to have one kid (when I say kid I mean a student between the ages of 16 and 22) take a piece of paper at random, each paper had a noun on it. The student had to say one sentence and begin a story, the next had to add to the story and so on for several rounds. Well I wrote the pieces of paper, I picked the nouns and I made a classic mistake. I didn't think about the culture. I wrote the word "candy bar" on a piece of paper. And every student interpreted the word as a bar as in an establishment where you usually consume alcohol but in this case would eat candy. At first when I heard them interpret it as a bar where you eat candy instead of a piece of candy I thought they were all being so clever. It was a while before I realized that they were just being literal and interpreting the phrase in terms of their own cultural peramiters.
I have been in this country for one year and eight months and occasionally I feel like I haven't learned anything. Like I am back at square one and that turns me into a very pouty first grader. Like yesterday when I tried to buy laundry soap to wash things by hand and came up empty handed as no one understood me, a month ago I was successful in buying this product but on any given Wednesday you never know.
This is all especially strange as I generally think of peace corps service as its own life time. When you first reach country you are being born, the first half of training is like childhood, you learn to speak, read and interact appropriately with others. the second half of training is like high school and searing in is like graduating high school. You have the skills to be in the world but sill need further help and education. The second host family stay is like college and so on until you are where I am and you are about to retire. At the end of the summer yet another group will enter training and I will be retired, a "lame duck" volunteer. And yet there is still so much to learn.
My brother will arrive here on Saturday in Kyiv. I have missed him and can't wait to have some quality, international, brother-sister bonding time. We are going all over Ukarine, Budapest and Krakow. Watch out Eastern Europe: Here come the Georges!

Statues by the lake in Ternopil

There is this style of statue all over the city in the parks. They are all very beaten by the weather but they way they are worn makes them look like they just rose up out of the earth and are part of the land scape.

The castle ruin in Kremenets

Ukrainian Eggs at the Egg museum: Pisanky

Me and the Guys at an abandoned Park

Village Life

The Fam

This is me, my mom, host brother Bohdan, coordinator Halya, host mom Larissa and host dad Viktor when my parents were visiting last fall.

Kremenets

This is me on top of a huge hill next to a castle ruin in the north of the Ternopil Region

Mr. Trick

This is Mr. Trick. He was our cluster mascot and most useful learning tool. We would play a game where the person holding the monkey says a sentence in English and they they throw the monkey to someone else and they have to translate. It was the brillian teaching invention of one Andriy Chukin, pictured below. and now Mr. Trick goes with everyone for a few months at a time and gets his picture taken everywhere including all over the US and Eastern Europe. Here he is pictured on a watermelon in kharkivska oblast in eastern Ukraine.

My Ukrainian Role Model

This is my good friend and former teacher Andriy and his future wife Mandi busting a move at my 25th birthday party in Lviv.

The Girls of the 6th Grade

These are some of my favorite pupils, Ira, Ira, Oksana, Maria, Lessa, Ira and Tamara. They are wearing traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts at a school competition.

My Silly Friend

this is Arsen and his girlfriend Oksana at his birthday. He is a very silly person. In Ukraine they usually translate the word silly as stupid. But I explained to him what silly really means, that it is more funny, a little stupid and generally a terms of endearment. So now we call each other "my silly friend."

Arsen's Birthday

this is my host brother Arsen and I at his 19th Birthday party, he is ukrainian so he does not generally smile in picutres, although in general he smiles way more than anyother person in this country.

(my camera is very blurry with the flash at night)

This is the Sign for my School

It says: School-Gymnasuim, town Kopychentsi

Halloween

this is my friend courtney and myself at the big halloween party in Dnipropetrovsk. Courtney is a bug and I am a Hugo Boss designer paket (in Ukraine you are what plastic bag you carry, they are ubiquitous and Boss= quality)

Courtney is one of the peopel who works on the camp with me.

Me and the guys in the east

Mike Dunn, myself, Casey Petersen, Travis Burke and a dramatic soviet soldier.

okay picture time

so this image is from last fall but it will give you a good idea of what I did this past weekend. On saturday we played a three game round robin tournament with three american teams and on ukrainian team. \my team beat the pants off every one with my brilliant plays as second basewoman and some solid hitting that got me on base about every time. As a result i was drafted to the All Star team. There was an American All Star team and we played against a semi-professional ukrainian team and got our pants beat this time. It certainly didn't help matters that we had all been drinking and up til the early hours the night before and as we do not play sports super often we were all super sore. As I still am right now and it just keeps getting worse. Its a bad time to be in a country where you have to squat over a turkish toilet to go pee. But the weekend over all has been a lot of fun. Winning was fun, losing less so and seeing my far flung friends is always a huge treat (softball weekend is typically held in central eastern Ukraine). And on Sunday morning we went to an orphanage. We brought presents and played games with the kids and did lots of races and donated money that we have been raising this past six months. Going to the ophanage was simultaneously one of the best and worst experiences I have had in Ukriane. The kids are all so sweet and adorable and fun but it is very depressing to know that they do not have families and all they wanted was to be hugged which works out because peace corps volunteers need hugs too.