A Month of Lasts

This May will be a month of ‘lasts’ for me.

My last spring in Ukraine; my last Last Bell Ceremony. I’ve already had my last lessons with my third- and fourth-year students. Undoubtedly, this month will probably be the last time I see some of my students.

These days it’s impossible not to think about how soon I’m leaving (potentially less than three months, if I’m able to leave on August 2nd, as I hope to). Every night as I’m falling asleep I think of something I need to write down on my t0-do list — some miscellaneous paperwork I need to fill out, another appointment to make, another e-mail to write, another souvenir to buy — and the list goes on.

It’s no big surprise that leaving is a process — not something that just happens overnight, although sometimes I think that would be easier. Getting so bogged down with all the paperwork and the sorting through stuff, and the checking things off of lists, and the miscellaneous odds and ends that make leaving an ordeal makes it hard to concentrate on those final moments.

The problem is that the last of anything never feels like the last.  When you say good-bye to a person for “the last time” it’s hard to believe you won’t see them again tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever you’d normally expect to see them again.

I’ve been doing my best lately to write here at least once a month, but I haven’t written many real reflections about this last part of my service. In part that’s because I’ve been busy and easily side-tracked, but I think it’s also because it’s really hard to think about the last few months of my time here in Ukraine. Where did the time go? How is it possible that I’ve been here for over two and a half years? I feel like I was just getting on the plane to come here. I can’t believe it’s time to start thinking about saying good-bye.

This isn’t the long-overdue reflection that I still need to come up with, but hopefully it’s a start in the right direction.

More to come soon.

Time for May Flowers!

It’s late and I should be sleeping, so this one’s gonna have to be quick. Just wanted to get something in before it’s officially May. Yeesh! Can’t believe April is already here and almost gone.

April’s been good — school’s been busy and good; we held the first KLLAS Day Seminar a few weeks ago, which got everybody (including the 130 students and 13 PCV participants) pretty pumped for the summer camp, which will be at the end of June. The weather is finally spring-like, and classes will be over by the end of the month.

My time in Ukraine is nearing the end…I’ll be leaving in about three months. Hard to believe.

But there’s still a lot to be done during those three months, so I’ll post more soon with more details about what I’ve been up to and what I’m getting ready to get up to soon!

Hope your spring is happy, bright, and warm, wherever you are!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Last Wednesday I turned 27 and received the best gift I could have asked for — a three-month extension on my visa. So I’m once again a legal resident of Ukraine, and will be until June 11th. The entire registration process is still fairly murky, so I’m not sure what’ll happen after the 11th, but hopefully I’ll be able to complete my entire extension (which will mean that I’ll leave, as planned, in August). Even if not, at this point I’m not nearly as panicked about everything as I was, because this way I’m at least here through the end of the school year (one of my biggest priorities) and even if I have to leave early, I could potentially leave the country and re-enter on a tourist visting term of 90 days and sleep on the couches of friends for a few weeks, until the summer camps I’ve committed to are finished.

So there’s that. A big weight lifted off my shoulders.

The weather here has turned gorgeous — lately it’s been sunny and in the fifties. Perfect weather for spring running…and as I’m hoping to run a half-marathon in May, I really should be out on those roads putting some miles behind me. But I’ve been having a hard time getting myself in running mode lately. February really took a toll on me, and I didn’t run a single mile the entire month. I’ve gotten out at least twice a week in March so far, but that’s nothing compared to the four times I should be running. And considering the fact that tomorrow is Thursday, I’ve got some real making up to do if I want to run four times this week (I’ve currently run zero times this week. Oops.) I’ve let myself slack this week because I have a minor cold, but it’s definitely not a legitimate excuse. I’ve run while significantly sicker than I am this week.

So hopefully tomorrow I’ll get my pitifully slow feet on the ground running. And then maybe sometime next week I’ll have something interesting to write about. For now, at least I’m finally legal and officially staying in Ukraine until June 11th, and honestly that’s the only thing I’ve cared about for the last few months, so color me happy! And 27. Yikes.

Loose Ends

February was a wretched month. The weather was miserably cold, ice covered every inch of the the ground for almost the entire month, each and every one of my students appeared to be fed up with school and, as it always seems to happen, seemed to have taken some kind of pact to abstain from doing all their homework in alternating groups. So just as I recovered from being angry with the first-year students for not having their homework, the second-year students would take their turn to forget all their books and assignments. And so on and so on.

And then to top it all off, I had to deal with the entirely new experience of attempting to register myself as a foreigner living in Ukraine.

My previous visa expired back in December, but because I extended my service, I needed to get a new visa. In the past, this wouldn’t have been such a complicated affair. But sometime last year, Ukraine changed its visa laws and the new process is, as far as I can understand, still incredibly foggy and complicated for native Ukrainians, and, not surprisingly, even more incomprehensible for foreigners.

The new process required me to go to Moldova to obtain a new, single-entry visa. Upon re-entry in Ukraine, I had 45 days to register at the local, regional, and oblast authorities, with a series of forms and documents that needed stamps from various and assorted local authorities. Unfortunately, said authorities had no clue how to complete said forms. So my counter-part and I spent the better part of two weeks making phone calls, and going to different offices talking to different people trying to figure out what to do. But I’m quite possibly the only foreigner living in my small town, and even if I’m not, I’m more than likely the only one to attempt to get registered according to the terms of the new policy.

My visa expires on Wednesday and unfortunately, I’m no closer to being registered than I was forty-two days ago. I’ve worked closely with my Peace Corps regional manager, who’s been beyond helpful with this whole process, and she’s assured me that we’ll figure something out. I guess U.S. Embassy staff are working with Ukrainian ministry officials to develop some process that will allow those of us who are having trouble registering to register in Kyiv, or through some more streamlined process. But that’s still in the works and I’m certainly not privvy to the details.

All this uncertainty — not knowing if I needed to start preparing myself to leave or not (still not knowing, really), or whether I’ll be able to stay until August and finish as planned, has made it difficult to relax (throw myself?) into my work like I usually do. No matter how much I try to convince myself to relax and not worry about, I can’t help but worry that I’m going to suddenly be informed that unfortunately I only have a week left, that my visa situation can’t be resolved, and I need to pack up and go home.

I know that’s an unlikely scenario, and I do have a decent amount of confidence that everything will work out and I’ll be able to stay. But all of last month, I couldn’t shake that fear as my visa situation started to become clearly more complicated than I’d initially hoped. And that fear, however deep I managed to bury it on any given day, leaked its way into everything — all of my interactions with students, my free-time, my running, my sleep schedule — absolutely everything. I found myself taking stupidly long naps every day, getting crazy-frustrated with my students. I completely stopped running, I couldn’t sleep at night, and no matter how calmly I started every day, I ended up frazzled and anxious by the end of it.

At this point, though, with my visa expiration rapidly approaching, I’ve simply resigned myself to my fate — whatever it may be. I hope that I’ll be able to stay through August as I’ve planned, and I hope that I’ll know soon what exactly my situation is. But I’m mentally prepared for whatever happens.

And in other good news, my HIV/AIDS Peer Education project at site is going increasingly well. And I now feel confident that if I had to leave tomorrow, I’d be leaving the project in the hands of some very capable young adults. After attending the PEPFAR (US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) Conference back in early February with a colleague and a student leader, I’ve been working with my team of student trainers to gradually hand off the entire project.

They organized and conducted their first independent fundraiser while I was at the PEPFAR Conference (they took orders for and sold cute little candygrams) and today we had a “work party” — wherein we reviewed basic information about HIV transmission and risky behaviors and watched a documentary about the spread of HIV around the world. Then we ate an “American lunch” that I prepared for them the night before (spaghetti, carrot sticks and ranch dip, lemonade and no-bake cookies!) and elected leaders. After they voted on a president, a vice-president, a secretary and two treasurers, I officially handed the meeting over to them!

I think they’ll definitely benefit from having my help over the course of the next few months, but I also think that they’ve learned enough about leadership and project planning from all the various projects we’ve worked on together and all the seminars they’ve attended that they’d be able to carry on one way or the other. I’m excited to watch their progress — they have a clear vision of what they want to do (they wrote their mission statement today all by themselves! — “to educate local youth (12-18 years old) about the dangers of HIV/AIDS) and they have a lot of ideas and energy.

So at the end of the day, underneath all the anxiety and stress that’s been bogging me down for the last month, I can take a great deal of pleasure in this achievment. When I decided to join Peace Corps in the first place, one of my biggest hesitations was in my discomfort with teaching English as a foreign language. As helpful as it is to know English in the world today, I wasn’t entirely sure that it was enough. I felt like I had more to give.

And this month of wondering whether or not my service is about to be over, suddenly and before I expected it to be, has really given me perspective on the things that I’ve done during my service here. If I had to leave out of the blue, it wouldn’t be the teaching that I’d regret leaving suddenly — it’d be the friends that I’ve made and the families that I’ve grown so close to. It’d be my dear dear students, who I can only hope have learned much more than English from me. It’d be the projects that I’ve started and hope will be sustainable without me. It’s everything except English, which, as it turns out, has really just been a vehicle for everything more than I did have to give.

Here’s to hoping that March brings the documentation I’m crossing my fingers for, and with it, a return to semi-regularity so that I can tie up all my loose ends properly and finish this experience the way that I always intended to.

As the spirit moves you…

Quick post:

Consider donating to a very worthwhile Peace Corps project! Read the details and donate here.

When it comes to these projects, every dollar counts!

 

Things to Think About Before I Can Sleep at Night

I’ve never had problems sleeping. I’ve always loved it and I’ve always been very good at it. I can go to bed early and sleep through the night. I can wake up early in a good mood. I can sleep late with the latest of sleepers. I can nap in the middle of the day. I sleep like a rock on Ukrainian trains and sometimes, if the stars align, I can even get in a quick nap on a Ukrainian bus.

Sleep and I have always had a sweet, uncomplicated relationship.

But in the last few years, sleep has become a bit more cantankerous, a bit more unreliable than it used to be. I’d like to blame it all on sleep, but of course it’s not that simple. It never is, right? If sleep and I were having a break-up conversation, sleep would probably say something like, “it’s not you…it’s me…” But the truth of the matter is, it’s not sleep, it’s me.

And I suppose I’m glossing over a few of the troubled spots in my relationship with sleep when I forget about the periods in my life when I’ve been the most stressed. In most recent history, that would be the period of time before I left for Ukraine. It’s almost funny, really, when I look back on what I wrote here in September, 2009:

These days, when I have even the slightest bit of a hard time falling asleep, I’m doomed. My mind begins to race and I can’t shut it off for long enough to fall asleep, no matter how tired I am. I can’t stop myself from adding about this mental list I’ve had going for the last three or four months (titled: “Things to take care of before I leave the country”) or I won’t be able to quit thinking about what it’ll be like in Ukraine. What it’ll be like to be apart from my family and friends for so long. Whether I’ll have enough money, enough stuff, whether I should pack more or less.  All of these things and more.

When I was lying in bed tonight, tossing and turning, trying to sleep, I remembered the trouble I had sleeping just before I left for Ukraine. And that’s what prompted me to get up and write. When I looked back over what I wrote those last few weeks before I left, I had to laugh at how much I’ve forgotten. It should be no surprise, but it turns out I worry myself in the exact same way over and over again. My current mental list is literally titled “Things to look into for my future life in America or Elsewhere.” And my current preoccupations are more or less exactly the same.

For some reason, though, the stakes these days feel higher. I know they aren’t — I’m still me, I’m living the same life I always lived, things will all work out fine. But it’s hard to convince myself of that at midnight, or at 2:00 in the morning, when I’m still rolling around in bed, thinking about where I’ll be sleeping in seven months. It’s hard to get back to sleep when I wake up at 7:00 on a Sunday morning, and as tight as I squeeze my eyes, I can’t get rid of the shadowy list of things to do that lurks in the depths of my mind.

In just a few weeks, I’ll be 27 years old. Ten years ago, I thought that when I was 27 I’d be married, maybe even have a kid. I don’t remember what else I thought I’d be doing, but I certainly didn’t think I wouldn’t know. And I don’t. I have no clue what I’m doing after I leave Ukraine. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I don’t really even know how to figure it all out. I know I will, but that’s really about all that I know. I never thought I’d be 27 years old and this clueless and what to do next.

It turns out things aren’t so different than they were two and a half years ago. The same things still scare me — I don’t know where I’ll be living, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, I don’t know if I’ll have friends or not.

And the rational part of my brain says, “Look, silly! Those things scared you when you were 17 and trying to decide where to go to college…and then again when you were 22 and deciding what to do after you graduated from college…and then again when you were 23 and making the decision to join the Peace Corps. And that all turned out fine. Time and time again it turned out fine. So what are you doing losing sleep over it??”

But the freaked-out little kid who resides in the soft, mushy part of my brain just responds with nervous, clenched fists and panic, and it’s difficult to calm her down.

And so I did the same thing I did two years and four months ago. I got up, turned on my computer, and turned on the song “Big Country,” which has a magical ability to calm me down. And I read that blog post from two years and four months ago, and although I’m worried about slightly different things tonight than I was then, it helps looking back, having this record of what made me so afraid then and knowing so resolutely that I had nothing to be afraid of.

It’s comical, almost. I suppose no matter how old I get, I’ll be afraid of things that I can’t control and scared of the unknown. But maybe at some point, having gone through the experience of surviving the unknown and successfully enduring all the things I can’t control again and again, I’ll learn my lesson and get a little more sleep at night. It might be a little too late for tonight, but maybe tomorrow sleep will be able to remind me of that friendly, gentle relationships we’ve enjoyed for so many years and we’ll get a chance to spend some more time together.

Moldova and Me

Or should it be Moldova and I? Maybe “Me and Moldova”?

One way or the other, I’m hoping it’s not really something I have to worry about, because Moldova’s not a place I’d like to return to anytime in the near future.

Not that there’s anything with Moldova — far from it. My impression of Moldova, gathered from approximately 33 hours in the country (8 of which were spent driving and 8 more of which were spent sleeping), was that it’s a perfectly decent place. I ate good food while I was there, saw hummus and peanut butter in the grocery store, and went to a fairly interesting museum (where I saw dinosaur bones!).  Nevertheless, I hope that if I ever return, it’ll be under entirely different circumstances.

If you read my last post, you’ll remember that I was preparing to take a quick trip to Moldova to renew my visa. Those of us who were going to Moldova gathered in Kyiv on Sunday evening. There were 26 of us and we were accompanied by two Peace Corps staff on a chartered bus. The trip was supposed to take about 11-12 hours and we were told that Peace Corps Ukraine had done their best to communicate with the Ukrainian Embassy and the border police about our arrival and visa issues, the possible hang-up being that nearly all of us had expired visas (they expired about a month ago, and due to some dramatic changes and confusion about the new visa laws, we hadn’t been able to get them renewed yet).

So we got on our bus at 7:30 p.m. and left Kyiv. We were all in a fairly good mood, enjoying the company of friends we hadn’t seen in a while and the prospect of a unique road trip ahead. By the time midnight rolled around, though, we were all fairly uncomfortable. It’s hard to sleep on a bus under any circumstances, but the roads in Ukraine are absolutely not smooth enough to enjoy a comfortable night of sleep, even if you try to knock yourself with 3 Benadryl, an eye mask, and ear plugs (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything…)

At around 3:30 in the morning, we arrived in the border town. Most of us were awake at this point, and if we weren’t, we quickly woke up when the border police got on the bus and started asking us questions. It turns out that they weren’t expecting us after all, and in fact they appeared to have no clue what to do with a bus filled with Americans attempting to exit Ukraine on expired visas. Oops.

So we sat on the bus, which was pretty chilly once the driver turned off the engine to save gas, waiting at the border for somebody to figure out what to do with us. The administrative assistant who accompanied us spent most of that time on the phone, communicating with Peace Corps staff and God-knows-who-else. We saw the sun come up at the border around 7:30 in the morning. And that was around the time that they appeared to have come to a solution for our border issue — each of us was given a written warning, documenting our attempt to cross the border on an invalid visa. This required us to go inside the border station in pairs to fill out paperwork. I don’t know exactly what took so long after that, but it was another several hours before we finally pulled out of the station.

When all was said and done, we spent eight hours just at the border station. We still had another four hours ahead of us on the way to the capital city. We finally arrived in Chișinău at around 4:30 in the afternoon, approximately 21 hours after we’d left Kyiv.

Needless to say, we were all fairly relieved to get off the bus. We spent the evening seeing a little bit of Chișinău — I ate dinner with a group of friends at a really cute little Moldovan cafe and then we all gathered at a bar for a beer. The next day we wandered around the city – went to an interesting museum and ate some pretty decent pizza.

And then it was back on the bus — just barely 24 hours after we’d arrived in Moldova. The return trip was significantly less eventful and significantly more subdued, considering how tired we were. It only took 12 hours for us to get back to Kyiv — which certainly made us happy.

I finally got home this morning at 4:15 a.m., after taking the train home from Kyiv last night. I slept almost the entire 12 hour ride and slept another 5 hours after I got home. Guess I was a bit tired after all that travelling.

So now I’m home and ready to go to school tomorrow, and rather excited to have a one-day school week! Then next week it’s back to school for one week, and then off to Kyiv again for the upcoming HIV/AIDS training. Hard to believe that January is nearly over and soon it’ll be February. Time really flies when you’re spending half of it travelling to and from various places!