I just want to give a shout out to one of my friends, Zoe, from college. She recently accepted an invitation to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African country of Lesotho. Welcome to the family of crazies, Zoe. She leaves in October and won’t be home until January 2015 at the earliest.
Hey guys, get this. I’ve had two+ cups of coffee today. That’s some sort of record for me. I should be wired for a while now. I promised to make excuses, and here they are. I didn’t write yesterday because I continued with my deep cleaning of my apartment, I started work on my new […]
For the next week, I’ll be wandering around Ukraine with my sister. She booked a trip a couple of months back and this past Wednesday, she arrived in Kiev. We’ve spent the past couple days in Konotop. I showed her around the city and made sure she saw all the major monuments. We even tried […]
Today has already been a great day. We started the day with an American football camp at Jeramie’s school. Pat, a volunteer in our neighboring oblast, has taught his kids flag football and now is partnered with a Ukrainian NGO to travel the region teaching kids to play. We were his third stop, and his […]
I forgot to take a picture, but today I was walking around with 9,300 UAH (~$1,162.50). I emptied out the ATM to get this much. I needed to give Yulia the money so she could pay for our first shipment of books while she’s in Kiev this week. I had ~15 200UAH bills, ~25 100UAH […]
Maybe I’m off my rocker, but students in Ukraine today tend to have a different mindset about school than I did when I was their age (cue fade into flashback). I had a thought-provoking chat with one of the teachers at school today after our class decided they could collectively show up ten minutes late […]
Here’s a great picture of me with some of the 11th Form girls in the foreign languages department. They’re wearing the traditional school uniform (though most are missing the very poofy white hair ties, even the ones in the photo aren’t poofy enough) because they were getting their picture taken for official class photos. I […]
“Books help us understand the soul of a country.” -Anya, 9th Grade In other news, today I talked to a student from a group I worked with all last year and she asked me to come back and teach their class. She said they miss having me as a teacher.
I sat down in the teacher’s room today during my break to get some reading done, but I was interrupted almost immediately by my school’s director, Yulia. She beckoned for me to follow her to her office (which was weird because she has excellent English). She wanted to show me this: That’s right, the books […]
“I want to revise before I read. (hushed voice) Because I did not learn it.” -Vika (9th Grade)