As usual, my prolonged absence has been due to the ever-increasing number of projects I’m working on (and the random fun things I find to do when I’m not working on projects).
And, as usual, I find it easier to update in the form of a nice little bullet-point list of what I’ve been up to. Much easier than sitting down to write a big long narrative with all the details, even if that would be nice.
So I’ll do a little back-tracking here in an effort to update what I’ve been up to lately.
March
- Climbed Mt. Hoverla! Or at least climbed almost to the top of Mt. Hoverla. Even though spring was certainly on the way at this point, the weather was still fairly disagreeable close to the top of the highest peak in Ukraine (in the Carpathian mountains) and so, unfortunately, the peak itself was closed and we couldn’t get quite to the top. The adventure was still amazing, though! Definitely one of the coolest things I’ve done since I’ve been in Ukraine. Along the way, the weather went from slightly overcast and gray to intermittent rain to driving hail to freezing cold and as windy as you could imagine. It was wild! Before we went, we were told that it was more of a “hill” than a mountain, but the 7-9 inches of snow and steep-as-a-ladder slopes at the top definitely made me think “mountain” as I was digging my feet into the ice and praying I wouldn’t fall backwards. At the top, it was so icy that we could hardly walk without jamming our feet into the ground and holding onto each other to hop from one less-icy patch of ground to the next. The wind was so strong I felt like I was being slapped in the face over and over again. But the view…oh, the view was worth it.
The view from almost-the-top
As high as we could go!
- Began training for a 10k. I’m extremely happy to report that I’ve finally been able to get back to running regularly. Anyone who knows me knows how excited this makes me! After injuring my IT band a couple years ago, I’ve had a hard time running regularly. And being super busy during grad school didn’t help. But thankfully, as busy as I get with all my projects and teaching here, I’ve been able to find a lot more time to get back to running. I started out pretty slow (well, I’m still pretty slow), but I’ve been able to increase my mileage enough that I decided a few months ago to participate in a 10k at the end of April. So starting in March I began an 8-week training program to work up to a 10k (6.2 miles). This coming Saturday I’ll put all my training to the test in a race located in a beautiful part of the country I haven’t had a chance to visit yet — so I’ll be killing two birds with one stone! The race is located in Berehovo, a town in Zakarpats’ka Oblast (in the far west of the country) known for making wine. All race participants get a wine glass to sample all the local wines at a festival after the race.
- Worked on various school/Peace Corps projects. Specifically the International Writing Olympics. This project is currently coordinated by Peace Corps volunteers in Armenia, and 2011 was the first year that Ukraine participated in this event. The basic idea is that students (6th grade-University) from around the world sit down for one hour and respond to one of three creative prompts. No dictionaries, no references allowed — the main goal was to inspire and produce creative though. One of my dear friends and cluster-mates (from training) was the main coordinator for this event that went from ambition to huge project. Because Ukraine is such a large country with so many Peace Corps volunteers, we organized the competition in three tiers — local level competitions (in schools across the oblast), oblast-level (18 of 24 oblasts participated), and finally, national-level, in which the first-place essays from each oblast were judged against one another. I helped coordinate our oblast-level competition and judged the oblast-level winning compositions. Some pretty amazing compositions came out of Ternopil’s'ka Oblast! Unfortunately none of them won at the national level, but I was still really impressed. Then I judged the national-level University compositions and was again very impressed. Finally, I uploaded all 140 oblast-level winning compositions to our website. It took a while, but it’s worth it to showcase the work of all these amazing, creative students. Take some time to check out the winning compositions! You can read them all at our website and if you want to read the work of two of my students who made it to the national-level, check out the results from Ternopil’s'ka Oblast. I’m pretty proud!
April
- Saw a lot of castles. Ternopil’s'ka Oblast has some of the most castles of all the oblasts in Ukraine. Unfortunately, not all of them are very well-preserved, but they’re still pretty cool to check out anyway. The first weekend in April I went to visit my friend Ian with a few other local PCV’s. He lives in a town called Kremenets and at the top of a very tall hill that looks out over the town, there’s a fortress. The weather that weekend was beautiful, and since most of us were still coming down from our Hoverla high, it seemed only natural to hike on up to the top. The view might not have been quite as majestic as that from the top of Hoverla, but it was still a great time. Then the next weekend, I went to visit another friend who lives in a town closer to mine — Terebovlya. I pass through this town anytime I take the bus to my oblast capital, but since there was no volunteer there before, I’d never gotten off the bus to explore. While the bus stop certainly isn’t much to admire, the rest of the town is adorable. There are actually two castle-fortresses — one of them located near the center of the town and the other about a 30 minute walk from the center on a ridge overlooking miles of fields and villages. We explored both castle-fortresses and the woods around them. The weather was bizarre that weekend — one minute it was beautiful and sunny and the next it was raining or pouring hail. This made for quite the adventure while walking through the woods!
View of the castle-fortress in Kremenets from the bottom of the hill
One of the castles in Terebovlya
The other castle-fortress in Terebovlya
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More work on various school/Peace Corps projects. Along with the other volunteers in my oblast, I’ve been working on an oblast-wide healthy lifestyles and sports project. You might remember it from previous posts — we’re calling it Camp KLAS (Kids, Lifestyles, and Sports). This month, we held our first KLAS day seminar in Chortkiv. Kids from my school and another school in the region came together for the day to learn about sports and healthy lifestyles. They had a blast! We taught them how to play ultimate frisbee, they did a few different teamwork exercises, and learned general information about how to live a healthy lifestyle. It was a great success and hopefully we’ll have one more day seminar before the semester is over. Then in July we’ll have the summer camp, an entire week dedicated to sports and healthy lifestyles! This means lots of sports, games, and fun outside! I’ve also been working with some of my students on our ongoing HIV/AIDS education project. The students are amazing — when we meet to talk about our project, I don’t even have to tell them what we need to do next — they suggest it themselves! It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling, to see how much they’ve clearly learned about planning and implementing projects. Hopefully by the end of the semester we will have assembled a team of peer educators who will have been trained to teach about preventing HIV/AIDS. Then next semester, after the summer, these students will go out into the community to teach other students about HIV/AIDS. I’m pretty dang proud of them!
Those are the big things. In other news, the weather is beyond gorgeous — nearly 70 degrees every day, sunny, and bright. The flowers are blooming and the trees are getting greener and greener. I thought that winter this year would be absolutely terrible — I braced myself for the worst. And then it really wasn’t so bad. It didn’t get nearly as cold as it did last year, and it didn’t seem to last nearly as long. But maybe I was just so prepared for the worst that nothing could really have been that bad. My favorite thing about spring has always been that it seems like a surprise. By the end of winter, it’s hard to remember how beautiful spring can be, and so when the weather finally warms up and the plants blossom, it comes as a shock that things were ever this green and warm. I feel that even more than I ever did before here in Ukraine, probably because winter here is particularly dismal. What a wonderful surprise spring is every year!
