Pre-Summer Post – Just in the Nick of Time

If I don’t finish writing and uploading this post within the next thirty minutes, June will have been the first month in which I didn’t blog at all.

Can’t let that happen!

So a quick update…

Things I’ve done lately:

• Finally finished school for the summer. (Today!) Hurrah! Lessons were more or less finished by the beginning of June and then I had a week or two of very few or no classes at all, and then starting last Wednesday, had a week of summer-school. I talked all about the process of writing. In the beginning it was pretty tough — my students have never done any sort of academic research before (it’s not taught here in the same way it is in the States) and have never had lessons on how to properly incorporate research into their writing. Copying and plagiarism abound here, and so getting my students to use their own critical thinking skills to analyze an idea and write down their own opinions took a bit of finesse. I don’t think it went perfectly and I think it could have been a lot better. But all things considered (it was really hot, it’s the end of the school year, everyone’s really tired, etc. etc.), I think it went really well. And I’m really happy to be done!

I guess that’s really all I’ve been up to lately, to speak of. A few of my friends have come to visit over the last few weeks, so I’ve been entertaining and hanging out with them, which has been really nice. I went camping about a week ago with some friends and we had a blast setting up camp near a beautiful waterfall. I love summer in Ukraine!

Things I’ll be up to in the near future:

• Camp IKnow (the Peace Corps Ukraine Environmental Working Group’s summer camp). I’ll be heading to Lugansk Oblast (wayyyyy out east) for a week of ecologically-minded camping. I did this camp last summer (in the west) and it was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to doing it again this summer.
• Camp KLLAS (Ternopil’s’ka Oblast – Kids, Lifestyles, Leadership, and Sports Camp). I’m organizing this camp at my site for kids from all over my oblast. We have about 40 kids ready and willing to participate, about 6-8 junior counselors, and 12 Peace Corps Volunteers. Should be fun! I have a TON of work still yet to do in order to be really ready for this camp…and unfortunately Camp IKnow runs right up to the day before Camp KLLAS, but hopefully I’ll have everything ready to go by the end of next week, so that I’ll just have to return to site and get ready for the next camp. We’ll see! Keep your fingers crossed for me…I’m sure I’ll run into a few snags along the way.
• In August, I’ll go to Turkey for six days with my dear friend Yente (from Holland). I’m VERY excited about this, although I don’t think I’ll really feel as excited about this as I could be until I finish with camps. The camps are just giving me so much stress that I can’t really think much further into the future. But once camp is over and I have a few days to relax before I go to Turkey, I’ll be really excited to start planning for the trip. It should be a lot of fun!

That’s more or less everything that’s going on right now, in a very small nutshell. Hopefully sometime later this summer (maybe next week?) I’ll have more time to sit down and write. But these days it just gets harder and harder to find the time to sit and write. My life is filled with work and personal projects (guitar-learning is coming along!) and updating my blog unfortunately doesn’t always make it to the top of the list.

I hope that summer is warm and sunny wherever you are!

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