One year ago I sat in a hotel conference room with fifty some-odd other anxious, excited, Americans, all in our finest business casual attire and we officially started this adventure. Of course, it began long before that day, but it was the next morning that we got on the big busses that dropped us off at JFK airport in New York where we boarded the plane that bore us toward Ukraine. In that conference room, with the muffled conversations of the other half of our group just audible enough to remind us they were still another fifty people we hadn’t even met yet, we sat at small tables with five other volunteers and talked about our biggest fears.
At first we joked—several of us mentioned squat toilets and we had a good laugh about that. We were all afraid of not knowing the language, of the cross-cultural divide. We were afraid of missing our friends and family. And then eventually we felt comfortable enough to talk about our most secret of fears. Finally I mustered up the courage to say aloud what I’d been most afraid of since I first began filling out my application paperwork: what if I didn’t make it? What if I couldn’t handle it? The other women sitting at my table all immediately nodded their heads and several of them said they were afraid of the same thing.
Just getting off the plane and stepping onto Ukrainian soil was a huge relief. Making it that far, finally being in Ukraine gave me a lot of confidence in myself and my own ability to do what I’d set out to do. For the first month or two, I was still afraid sometimes that I wouldn’t make it—but it was never because I was experiencing anything so difficult that I thought I couldn’t handle it. Rather, it was some kind of paranoia that things would suddenly go wrong in a way that I couldn’t imagine. I kept waiting for some kind of intolerable culture shock or deep, lasting homesickness. I waited and waited for what everyone assured me was the inevitable. It was only a matter of time, people said, before eventually I’d reach a point that I wasn’t sure I could make it any longer.
And then suddenly, training was over and I was at site. And I reset my waiting. I’d made it through training and it was a great experience…certainly there were some trying, difficult moments, but overall it was a really positive three months. Surely, I figured, at site I’d eventually have that unavoidable experience, the moment where things came crashing down on my head. So again I waited.
In the meantime, I made dozens of friends, fell in love with my students, became friends with my colleagues, and came to know Chortkiv like I was born here. When I travelled for extended periods of time, I’d long to go “home” and when I visualized home, it wasn’t the mountains of Kentucky that I pictured, but the sloping hills that surround Chortkiv.
And then suddenly, a few months ago, I stopped waiting for things to get bad. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d stopped waiting until a few days ago. Eventually it just sank in that I have been incredibly lucky. In the entire span of the past year, my worst day was simply a day when a vigilante spider got ahold of my leg and a few other things all happened to go wrong at the same time. It was a bad day, but it wasn’t bad because of Ukraine, or because of Peace Corps, or because I was away from my friends and family. It was just a bad day.
Of course there have been other less-than-pleasant days and I’ve had other less-than-positive experiences. But nothing has been so bad that it came anywhere close to being that day that I feared when I was sitting at that conference table a year ago.
The notion of leaving this place early, not to mention even just leaving on time in a year and three months makes me feel sick to my stomach. There is nowhere else in the world I would rather be. A year ago, when I still had absolutely no idea what to expect and was up late at night incapable of sleeping, I reflected on the lyrics of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” (complete entry here)
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come out right.
At the time, the last two lines of the song resonated with me the most. Everything felt topsy-turvy and I could only hope that, in time, and after enough turning, things would come out right.
Today, reading the same lyrics, all I can see are these lines:
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
This place is just right. I was made for this job. I have been luckier in the last year than some people probably are in a lifetime. Delight isn’t even a word I would have used before I came to Ukraine, but these days I think that word suits my life here more than any other. I’m thankful every day that I made the decisions that brought me here. This time last year, I wrote:
Here I am, leaving this Big Country for another, finally doing something that pulls me in the direction of the simplicity I crave. Away from Appalachia, from my apartment full of things, the comfort of a life filled with excess, for something I feel incapable of preparing for. And I think that is the point.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come out right
I suppose I’m still turning. By no means do I have everything figured out and there are still days when I feel overwhelmed, frustrated or confused. But the last year has been the most peaceful, happy year of my life. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop turning…and I don’t know that I want to. To some degree I hope that I will always be searching for something new to do, some way to make things better. But the last several months have been the first in my life that I felt completely and entirely like I was right where I should be—not months that were just to be endured so that I could move on to my next adventure. I’m right where I ought to be. And that is indeed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a tremendous, delightful gift.
