Whirlwind of Training

I am a bad blogger, it is official. Now that I have much more free time I am presuming I will automatically get better. Here is for an optimistic outlook on upcoming posts! I arrived in Ukraine at the very end of March. It's crazy to think that training is already finished and I have officially been sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was placed in a town of 16,000 people called Миронивка. I grew to love this place and my host family and already miss it. I lived with a Бабушка named Вира in a small but nice apartment. Near my house were several ponds and a river. Every day I would walk to my language instructor's (Лариса) apartment along with four other fellow trainees. We had Russian language class every weekday for four hours. After this we would often meet at our Technical Trainer's (Оксона) apartment to learn things such as classroom management, working with Ukrainians, needs assessments, English clubs, cultural differences, and so on.

After three weeks we began teaching healthy lifestyle courses at the school in Russian. This was probably one of the more difficult things for me. Preparing a lesson plan in another language and co-teaching it with other trainees is stressful at minimum. We also co-taught a couple of English classes. Most Saturdays we would meet a bunch of kids near the school and play soccer, basketball, Frisbee, kickball, and whatever other games we could think of. At the end of training we conducted a three day summer camp and a festival to raise money for sports equipment for the school. Both were very successful.

My Бабушка and her family were amazing. They took me in as family immediately and I foresee a relationship with them for years to come. The night before I left they all came over and we had a big dinner and party. They gave me some going away gifts and I said goodbye. The following day we were bussed to Кyiv where we got to see the other 70 some odd volunteers we hadn't seen in over two months. We had our site announcements and got to meet a colleague who we will be working with very closely over the next two years. There was an official ceremony where the United States Ambassador spoke along with a variety of other people. Following that we said our final goodbye to those we had spent every day with the last two months and hopped a train to our new home. More to come on my new home in my next post!