March 2005

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. 

Ukraine is old.  It goes back to 862 BC and just 25 niles from where I sit there is a world history archelogical site that is verifiable to that date.  They were a civilized tribe and a lot of the rituials that the Ukrainians use, date from that tribe who’s name I can not remember right now.  Ukraine has the most productive soil in the world and the people know how to work it, with that fact in mind you will not be surprised to know that from then until 1991 Ukraine has been fought over and controled by some other nation or people.  More wars have been fought on this soil then on any other soil in history, and none of the battles were fought by the Ukrainians though they died in the millions over them.  Vikings, Rus, Norsemen, Russian, Poland, Tatars, Caussacks, Germany and a slew of others have fought here.  It is amazing that there is still a Ukrainian people to populate the land here. 

Ukraine became part of Russia because they needed help getting out from under Poland so they signed a treaty with Russia only to find that they were not a Soviet state subservient to Moscow.  That is a long way from having Kiev know as the Mother of Russia to becoming a satilite state.  Karl Marx came along and introduced the idea of Communism and Lenin took off with the idea.  The Russian people at the time fought for the idea and even the Ukrainian people fought for it because it was all that they knew.  Lenin was a God to them, he introduce an idea of equality that hit home in a world of royal excesses and very uneven income levels.  Then Lenin died and Stalin took over.  On paper and to most of the Russians Stalin was just as good as Lenin.  Because information was not desminiated to the people it was possible for Stalin to starve 10 million Ukrainians and still be their hero.  He needed to get rid of the well off over fed farmers that worked the soil of Ukraine so he could move collective farms onto the land.  He moved whole populations of people around the USSR to intergrate the population so that they would be only Russian and not members of their own previous country.  It was not until Gorbachov came into power that the Ukrainian people learned of Stalin’s excesses and policies, and of how he had made them suffer.  It is hard to believe that this could happen but it did.  They, and by they I mean people of my Host Families age,  were content with the system under Brezhev because they had a stable income, could save a little, and ate regularly.  They did not know about the problems that beset the overall plan because mother russia did not let them know.  I know that my hosts are die hard Breznev fans who just hate the changes that have occoured since he died.  Gorbachov opened the country to information and that led to the downfall of Communism.  Now they are independent for the first time in their history and they need help understanding what is happening to them.

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 Kiev.  We will visit the Peace Corps headquarters and wander around town looking for all the world like tourists with bad Russian skills in an Ukrainian speaking town.  Hicks from the sticks gawking at the tall buildings.  It will be fun to just relax and let it happen instead of pushing all of the time like we have been. 

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 South Carolina and she was telling us about her experience the other night.  Her host family made Macaroni and Cheese, their rendetion, and when it came out of the oven they poured three serving spoons of sugar ontop of the dish before they served it.  As a Charlston girl she was use to sugar in a lot of foods but this took the prize.  Right how I am glad that I told them I was diabetic and my host family is on a diet so they havfe not bothered me about it much.  Sometimes They forget and like today I got a thermos of coffee with sugar to take with us on our training trip to our cluster mates town.  Well I need to sign off for now and start my homework.  Good night.

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 Extra Curicular Center.  I mentioned the center earlier but  let me explain what that is.  The Schools in Ukraine teach the basic course of study only.  7-8 classes a day of 40 minutes each with one 10 minute break and a 20 minute break for lunch.  Lunch is provided free of charge to all students.  Each student is required to attend school until graduation, by law, and the drop out rate is 0.  Every student gets a diploma and a test score that determines where he can go after school.  For those with high scores, University is, or can be, free, the rest pay something depending on the school they go to.  About 70% go on to higher education, 25% go into trade school or stright to work while 5% are unemployed right out of school.

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 Extra Curicular Center is a government supported after school program that is entirely voluntary for the student.  The center provides the extra stuff that the school system does not.  I did speak of what we saw on our visit so I will not repeat that.  Right now I have an appointment with the director to determine my ability to work there for my internship.  I’m not sure what I will be doing in such a short time but I think I will enjoy working with the students. 

Virginia has an appointment to interview with a group working with Youth on leadership issues which should be like working with Afjrotc except here the students set up a government similar to the city plan.  We are both interested to see where this leads us because the internship and how we handle it will help determine our permenent work site. 

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 Kiev by ourselves so for some this can be a tramatic event.  They say that for most trainees this is when the language kicks in and gets better.  For some reason, they can not explain, once we have visited our work site we, trainees as a group, tend to greatly improve our language skills.  We shall see I’m sure.

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

 

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.

 

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 Ukraine so it might be a while before we get to read it all.  The logistics of doing it for the first time will be fun because we have to move everything to a jump stick and take it to a russian computer or a computer in russian and figure out how to accomplish the upload.  Add to that the problems of trying to order internet service in a forgien language.

 

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 Ukraine

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

 

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. 

use it to talk to you very cheaply.  Each text message of 128 characters cost about .70 гривня to send to the US.  We will not buy a phone right now because I do not think that any of our relatives have test messaging at this time.  If some of you start to get this type of cell phone let us know and we will reconsider the purchase.

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.

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 7:30 as the time delay caught up with us.  This morning we had breakfast on the leftovers from the night before and oatmeal before we headed out into the newly fallen snow (about 3 inches) to our Language trainer’s house.  In the bottom picture you can see Virginia and our host mother making their way up the hill in front of the house.  The town we are in is in a river valley and is hilly as well as beautiful. 

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.

 

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)

3rd

 

We are in Ukraine.  Actually we arrived yesterday but my body did not recognize it until today.  The 8 hour time difference from Chicago is catching up with me.  From South Carolina it is only 7 hours difference but that extra hour meant more here then I thought it would.

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.

1st

The first of March saw us getting on the plane in Chicago and leaving the familiar comforts of the United States.  We loaded our luggage onto the bus and traveled to the airport where we stood in line to check our luggage.  We got our bags checked without complications but some of our fellow trainees had to pay extra for oversized or heavy luggage.  We came in just under the wire and let me tell you, I am glad we had less and sometimes wish it had been even less then it was.  I determined that we have too much stuff to carry and some of it was not necessary right now.  A good portion of the stuff we brought could have been stowed away until we reached our own home 6 months from now. 

 

T