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March 2005 |
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26th |
History is
written by the winners. Someone said
that, and I would attribuate it to them if I could remember who said it first
but it is true. Today’s class was on The
History of Ukraine, as told by three Ukrianians of various ages. It was an eye opener to sit there and be
told by someone you have come to respect for their open attitude and ability
to teach Americans, that they were all members of the comunist party, Young
Pioneers and Comistal members. Our
technical trainier was on the Comisal board.
Then they told us about their history as thery knew it. We have been
visiting different organizations and businesses here during our training so
that we will be parepared for what is in store for us. We see a very hard working people that
still see the soviet model in front of them.
Hard work will not make things better, it will just make it harder for
you. We are here to provide a role
model and show them people how have made it work for them. We visited a store last week where the
owners are making the American dream come true. They work hard and have been rewarded by
creating a prosperous store in a small Ukrainian town. They are a perfect role model and I think
that we are here to inspire other people to work just like that for their
future. I do not mean by that that
they should abandon their old traditions but that they should allow them
selves to hope and build for a future that they can not see. They can not do that as yet. This entry is
more jumbled that I am use to but I had to get it down once so I could go on
with the rest of my journal. Tomorrow we take
a day off and head for Russian. We have progressed to the language skills
of a two year old, at least we can communicate with children for a couple of
minutes before they start laughing at us.
It is amazing to me just how much we know but I still can not hear it
as it is spoken to me. It will
come. Today I start a Journal in
Russian, That should be a short entry
at first because it is a labor to spell the words and get them down on paper
even if I know them. У люблю
кофе вез
сахар. That took 5
minutes to type and all it says is that “I like coffee without sugar” I need that phrase just to survive because
sugar is added to everything here. One
of the other trainees here in this town is also from |
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20th |
Five days, it
seems like it was just yesterday when I wrote last. Time compresses when you are busy I guess. I see that the
trip to the farm was put off as it was never mentioned and we stayed home to study
once again. This week I should be
interviewing for an internship at the local I thought I had
written this down earlier but I did not see it when I scrolled down so I’m
sorry if I am repeating information that I missed. The The word came
down yesterday that April 13th we go back to our starting point
for a coordinators conference, where we will be introduced to our future
coordinator and told which city will be taking us on. Then we travel to our future site for a 4-5
day visit with our second host family and a look at our permenate work
site. We have to get back to In the mean time,
I study. Today I feel a little down
because they gave us a test that was very challenging and difficult to
complete. For some reason they printed
part of the test in Cursive. To
understand that I need to expalin something more. Russian has an entirely different alphabet
from ours and Russian cursive seems to have an entirely different alphabet
from the printed version. This
computer does not have Russian Cursive installed so I can not show you but to
give you an idea the printed T looks just like english but the cursive T
looks like a m and the G which looks like a r in
block form looks like a backwaqrds s in cursive. Those should give you an idea about what we
had to do. We had to look up the
cursive answers to determine which form to use in the question. It made for a difficult period of time that
left us fustrated and tired. Enough
complaining. Back to work and I hope I
can up load soon because I am feeling disconnected from you all. Mark Outside Kiev,
Ukraine |
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15th |
Well, I did not
get to update on Saturday but I will continue to write down my thoughts as if I could update every
day. I’ll explain later why I am
unable to upload and why I may not be able to for a while. Today was very hard for me. I actually blew up at one of the other
trainees. The pace of our study is very
fast and condensed, add to that our frustration at actually having a
conservation with the couple that we are living with and the problems of
living with another family well as trying to fit in to a community while the
good people at PC are trying very hard to help us get involved with the
community. Everything just got to be
too much, so when this helpful trainee corrected everything that I said in
one of our lessons I lost my temper and explained to him just what a bad idea
that was for him to do. I hate losing
my temper. Russian is turning out to be a
very hard language to learn for me, mostly because I never learned the
correct terms in English for the grammar that I knew how to use. I sit here in class learning about the
Genitive case, the Dative case and four other cases for the nouns, cases for
the adjectives, conjugations for the verbs and then everything changes based
on the gender of the word. Each word
has at least 12 other endings that you have to know and sometimes they change
into completely other words before they are finished changing. I have to constantly remind myself
that I have been working on Russian for only 12 days and I do know a lot but
we have covered over 120 pages of very comprehensive material in that time
and I feel like I know only 5 % of what I have learned. I know that I still do not hear it when it
is spoken to me and getting the words out is a real challenge. I can say the word in my head, and given
time I can say the word out loud but give me the opportunity to use it and I
can not say it to save my life. Life here right now for us is
study, study and study some more. We
are supposed to be going with our hosts to a farm, either theirs or their
daughters, this weekend for some event.
I’m not sure because the conversation was in Russian and sign language
but I know that it will be different.
It will be fun and challenging. Yesterday we visited the extra
cultural center here in town. This is
the place that takes over for the school when it comes to Art, Music, Drama
and Computers. We were serenaded by a
very good Bandera player, treated to singers, watched rehearsal for a play
and puppet show saw some very good artists learn how to do traditional art
forms and enjoyed some extraordinary needlework. I took video and have edited it down to a
twelve minute piece but I need to make it smaller so I can upload it when I
am able to do so. I know that it will
not be with this batch when ever I get to upload because I do not know how
long it will take to upload nor do I know how long I will be able to stay on
line. We were able to get to our
e-mail on Saturday but we could not download it to our machines so we had to
read it there and write our replies at the same time. We had prepared several messages to send
but the internet café here has the machines totally blocked as to access to
disk drives or USB ports so we could not attach the messages. Our address book was also on the USB stick
so we had to rely on replies. We went
back on Monday and unfortunately we took some wrong addresses as several of
them came back to us. We will try
again as soon as we can. Well the
break is over and I must study. Bye for
now. |
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11th |
It’s Friday, but that does not mean the end of the week, it
just means that we get to do something different tomorrow. Each Saturday we get to join with another
group of our fellow trainees and go on a field trip for cross cultural
training. Tomorrow we get to travel to
the other group’s site so we will be the first to test our language skills on
public transportation. It will take us
about two hours to travel each way and we will need to change buses at least
once. When we get there we will spend
one hour in cross cultural training and one hour in technical training before
we get to try our hand at an internet café.
This will be the first time we will get to our e-mail since we have
been in The language thing is really very hard. We study and work but it just seems that we
are not getting anywhere whenever we interact with a shopkeeper or member of
the town. I have to keep reminding
myself that a little over a week ago I found out I was to learn Russian and
today I can conjigate verbs in Russian and order Borscht and black
bread. When I say I can I mean that I
know how not that I can actually go out and conjigate with someone else
listening. Virginia and I sit home
each night and practice the language hoping for the day that we can hear the
words as words instead if something to work out. Today we went to the city Administration and met with the Deputy Director for Social
Services. It was an interesting
meeting but I am not sure what we accomplished. We are trying to find out what we can do to
help the city in the small amount of time that we have to devote to this
internship project. Basically we are
going to work in an internship for about 6-10 hours over a period of 4 weeks
then we have to present a workshop or presentation or finished project that
will help somewhere or someone in this city.
It seems like such a small thing but it will get us aquainted with the
Ukrainian system and give us expereince working in a forgien language. I included a few pictures down the side that you might find
interesting. The first picture was
taken on the main street of this town and what I wanted you to see was the
Grandmother pulling the sled home from the market. This is a common sight here, you see big
bags of rice or barley on a sled headded home from the bazaar I took some
pictures at the Bazaar but I chose this one to give you an idea of how it is
set up. There are just cloth covers
over a metal stand to protect the vendors from the show that falls every day
here for at least a part of the day.
The bazaar is where you go to buy pretty much any of the everyday
supplies needed to run your life.
There are stores and specality stores and they are well used but the
bazaar is fun. We have yet to find a
store selling the nice russian fur hats and coats that we see all around us
so we do not have any price information on them as yet but we will. The third picture is the front of School
number 1 as the city workers shovel the snow away from Lenin’s statue. I know it is hard to see but we will put
larger pictures on the site as soon as I figure out how long it takes to
upload. This time I am just going to
upload the journal but after I do that I will get an idea about how much time
it will take. Maybe during the next
few months it would be good to start an e-mail list that I can send to of
people that want to know when the site is updated becausce most of my writing
will be here since I have such a limited amount of time to actually write
anything. From Mark Pulver |
There better be an e-mail from my
Grandkids waiting in my mail box when I download. It’s not like it every day you know so push
a finger at a key and tell me you are alive. If you want to be notified of updates to this web site
please e-mail pulverpa@pulverpages.com
and I will send out an update notice when next I upload. Mark |
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9th |
It has been a few very full days here
in Ukraine so I will try to fill you in on what is happening here in our world
and what you as readers can expect to see on this web site. First off the details. We are 2 hours by bus away from an Internet
café where we can upload to the internet and when we get there we will not be
able to use our computers but must rely on the café’s computers to get our
e-mail. We will be sending out e-mail
with a different address on it so if you receive any thing from us it will
not have our return address on it but some Internet café in Ukraine. We will make it clear in the subject line
that we are the ones sending it. As we
get to our permanent site we should be able to refine this process somewhat
but we may not have internet in that town either so we will have to just wait
and see what is happening. Right now
it will be only every two weeks or so that we will be able to update and send
e-mail so don’t despare we will write an answer and we
will write letters. We went on a field trip on Monday to the post office
(poчta). We were able to buy
stamped envelopes for the United States that cost us 3.6
гривня each and we toured the telephone
company to find that it cost 4 гривня per
minute to call anyone in the USA.
Needless to say we will not be calling very much until we establish a
landline of our own. This country has
been able to bypass many of the problems that the US had to struggle through
so cell phones are a better means of communication through text
messaging. They tell us that we can
buy a text messaging phone here and |
If you are trying to follow the
money I’ll tell you that we received 238
гривня when we got here and that amount
was to pay for our expenses for two weeks (about 17 per day). Each
гривня is worth about 18 cents so we get
about $3.04 per day to spend. This amount does not include
housing which is paid for and dinner which is also paid for. Марк Пулвер Я
доброволеч
Корпуса
Мира Yes this is a lot of work to write
down but I can have a little fun here I guess. |
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use it to talk to you very
cheaply. Each text message of 128
characters cost about .70 гривня to send
to the Language class occupies all of our
time right now, we study, we study and then when we get tired we write in
this journal before we study some more.
I have never worked so hard in my life and it is tiring to study so
much. I know words but the grammar
still alludes me and I still can not hear the words when they come from the
people I meet on the street. I went to the market to buy
tomatoes for the special dinner that I cooked for our host family. The whole conversation was point and shoot
on my part and when it came to the bill I just handed her a big bill and
hoped she would not cheat me on the change.
I do not mean that she would have just that I would not know if she
did. The people here are great and the
whole town is our teaching staff.
Every where we go the people want to talk to us and make sure that we
are made to feel part of the town.
Today for lunch we went to one of the local cafes and butchered the
language as part of our language training and I think it was also to amuse
the teacher, at the end of dinner we met some of the local working men and
they tried to tried hats with me. The
first hat was a simple cloth one that I did not want but the second was a
Russian fur hat that I rather fancied so I started toward the door. This did not happen as the owner of the hat
and the guy with my hat were not the same person so they just took pictures
with their phones and we went back to class.
Now I have to admit that I did not tell this as well as it went down
but I will get better at this story telling thing as I get back into the
practice of writing down my daily thoughts and expectations. Tomorrow we are off on our first
official work site visit as we toddle off to School Number three to visit a
Ukrainian school. The host family that
we live with consists of a retired railroad director and the vice principal
of this school. That will not give us
an edge but the visit will prove interesting as we compare answers with our
information on American schools. I’ll
write more about that tomorrow night when the visit is over. Well. I can hardly keep my eyes open and I
must spend a little time practicing my introduction to the school students
and faculty tomorrow. It must be in
Russian and sound professional so I had better practice, practice and then do
it all again. Bye for now. |
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5th |
We
arrived yesterday at our first host family’s house an hour or so south of the
capital. I will not be exact in any of
this information as we have been asked by our security officer not to give out
exact information that could help anyone to find us or our host family. We were
greeted by our host father with his car so he could help with the luggage and
I was very glad even though he did not live very far away, because the bags
were heavy and the ground was very slippery.
Please note the snow on the ground because underneath the snow is
several inches of Ice. The house in
the middle is where we are staying and we are better off then most, we have
hot water on demand. Last
evening we ate Borsht and shredded Beets as well as a small piece of breaded
beef or chicken (there was both but you chose one to eat) and crashed at The snow
continued to fall as our trainer took us to visit the post office to show us
how and where to make international calls, the market to buy water and
supplies, and the paper store to buy a notebook or two, We explored the town just a little then
headed back to home to study. I am a
student again and we are working hard to learn the language. We have little or no distractions to
interrupt us and our host family is turning out to be very helpful even
though they speak no English. This is
their second time hosting a peace corps volunteer but the first time for a
married couple. |
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We do
have a disadvantage over the other students because we have each other to
talk to in English where the rest of the volunteers just have themselves so
they have no one to talk to except Russian language people. We will meet 6 days a week at least 6 hours
a day for language training but we will continue on our own at home the rest
of the time. We do get to travel about
a bit to visit other towns and places but until we have been escorted a few
times we are not allowed to travel alone.
There is no internet connections in this town so this and future
postings will be a little late in showing up.
We should be able to connect every two weeks but sometimes that will
change and be longer. In about two
months we should know where we are going to spend our time but we have been
assured that it will not be in the capital.
We are here as NGO (non government organization) facilitators which
means that we are here to help people do many different things but they will
all relate in the business field. We
can and will write grants and resumes and some Public relations work. One of the suggestions would be to work in
the customer relations field. You
think of Ukraine as a developed country and they are but remember that as few
as 15 years ago they were a Soviet country with Soviet control and ideas to
work from, the biggest of which was “I have what you need so I can be
superior”. The concept that there
might be competition for the customer is new to them and only in the last few
years has it mattered. Enough for now,
I need to get back to the books so Das Vedonya. (Phonetic Spelling). ДО СВИДАНИЯ (Russian Spelling) Da Svidaniya (Transliteration) |
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3rd |
We are in
Training,
Training, and more training to start us off.
We need to know how to buy train tickets and ride the public
transportation, how to catch a taxi or small bus and of course we need
language training. The letters in the
words are so different that it is like starting all over as a baby. We found out today that we will be learning
Russian instead of Ukrainian. The
Letters are 95% the same in both languages but those differences make a lot
of changes in the way words are pronounced.
The disadvantage to learning Russian is that we will also have to
learn to read Ukrainian because the signs are all in Ukrainian. The trainers just tell us how good that
will be for us to learn two languages instead of one, and what it will mean
to our future employment. They say
that if we learn Russian we will be able to understand 5 other countries
languages but I can not remember right now which ones. Later I will try to write in Russian but I
need to do some work on the computer before I can really do the Cyrillic
letters. I can do the transliteration
and here is komputyerye or computer.
In Cyrillic it has several letters that you would not recognize. |
Taken
from Airplane and Bus trip to training. |
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1st |
The first
of March saw us getting on the plane in |
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