So What's It Like?

Peace Corps has completely impressed me with how well it’s organized.  Our introduction to Ukraine has been a highly-polished affair, organized by top-notch professionals.  During the first two weeks of the experience we’ve been through three distinct phases: staging, the arrival retreat, and the beginning of Pre-Service Training.  Each one of these phases is designed to prepare us for life at our permanent site (where we’ll move in December), taking us step-by-step through cultural integration and language skills as well as training us to do the jobs we will be taking on as Peace Corps Volunteers in Ukraine.

Staging

Staging is the Peace Corps term for getting everyone in our cohort together somewhere in the United States.  It’s a sort of meet-and-greet that allows us to get to know each other before traveling overseas as a group.  For Ukraine Group 46 that meant all 49 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) trainees were scheduled to meet in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. on 16 September, 2013.

Kathrina and I flew out of Chicago early in the morning on the 16^th.  As Kathrina’s parents drove us to O’Hare Airport in the predawn hours, our puffy sleep-rimmed eyes belied the anticipation of what the coming days and years will bring.  The goodbyes went more smoothly than expected, and the flight to the nation’s capitol was over before it began.  By noon we were right back where we had started from several weeks before: Washington, D.C., our adopted home from the previous twelve months.

The Peace Corps volunteers were easy to spot as we arrived at the Georgetown Holiday Inn.  Each of us was loaded down with up to 100 pounds of stuff crammed into two suitcases and a carry-on bag.  Everyone schlepped, shoved, dragged and cajoled their prized possessions into the hotel lobby with the twin engines of uncertainty and excitement causing the great crushing weight of their belongings to feel as light as feathers.  (Carrying it through the airport in Kyiv after 12 hours of air travel was another matter entirely…)

Arrival Retreat

The arrival retreat was the next phase.  The two-day retreat is designed as a warm-up exercise for culture and language training and to start teaching us about our new jobs, although I think it’s also intended as a chance to help us shake off the jetlag before we’re introduced to our host families.  A bunch of groggy Americans reeking of travel and mispronouncing basic courtesy phrases isn’t all that inspiring…

We landed in Kyiv on the afternoon of the 18^th after an overnight flight across the Atlantic and a layover in Germany.  Outside the airport we were picked up by buses that drove us two hours north of Kyiv to the ancient city of Chernihiv, whose history stretches back over a thousand years.  The entrance to the city is marked by a beautiful Orthodox church called St. Catherine’s.  Its five golden onion-shaped domes glittered in the fall sunlight and were visible from miles away (to those whose eyes were still open at that point).

In Chernihiv we were sequestered in a hotel for a couple of days while Peace Corps processed our visa paperwork.  This squirreling away of neophyte volunteers is known as the arrival retreat.  It was during this time that we found out several important pieces of information about our Pre-Service Training: which language we would study and where we would do our 11-week Pre-Service Training.  These are the burning questions that occupy Peace Corps conversation, pretty much from the moment we meet each other.

The reason that we don’t initially know which language we are going to learn is that both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken in Ukraine.  Russian is more common in the east and south and Ukrainian is more common in the central and western areas of the country.  (To make things more complicated a mixture of both, called Surzhyk, is spoken in some places.)  Each trainee is assigned a primary language to study during training, but the training managers keep everything hush-hush until The Grand Unveiling.  Anticipation is so thick you could cut it with a knife!

We also found out what cluster we would be assigned to.  A cluster is a group of five trainees who will work closely together during the 11-week training period.  All members of a cluster learn a common language and train for the same type of job.  A link is a pair of clusters (10 trainees) that is training for the same job and meets weekly to discuss technical, medical, and safety issues.  Your cluster-mates act as a surrogate family during training, while your link-mates become your extended family.  Our link is training to teach English as a Foreign Language in Ukrainian universities.  The other four links are training to teach English in Ukrainian high schools.

Kathrina and I were assigned to one of three clusters that would be staying in Chernihiv after the arrival retreat.  The other two clusters were assigned to learn Russian as their primary language; however, we are in the group learning Ukrainian.  Everybody will eventually learn both languages; typically when a volunteer finishes service they are fluent in one language and proficient in the other.

Bottom Line: We will be training in Chernihiv and learning the Ukrainian language!

Pre-Service Training

Pre-Service Training is an 11-week program that includes intensive language lessons, cross cultural discussions, informational sessions about health and safety issues, and technical training (which includes an internship teaching at the Pedagogical University in Chernihiv).

We just finished the first week, and the pace of Pre-Service Training has been intense.  Language lessons consume four hours every day, Monday through Friday.  They’re given as group lessons within our five-person cluster.  The small class size means plenty of practice (and no hiding at the back of the room.)  Additionally, we each receive sixty minutes of one-on-one tutoring per week and a small pile of homework each day.

To give you an idea of the pace of language learning, on Thursday (of the first week, remember) we learned both the past and future tenses of Ukrainian verbs.  On Friday we learned the present tense.  (Luckily Ukrainian only has three tenses!)  During my tutoring session on Friday afternoon, my language instructor admonished me to work harder at building more complex sentences.  One and two word answers are for beginners; we passed out of the beginner phase by the middle of the first day!

Cross cultural discussions are designed to give us information that we might otherwise only learn the hard way.  Faux pas were discussed immediately: don’t sit in such a way that you are pointing the sole of your foot at someone, it’s rude; a man and a woman shouldn’t shake hands, and no one should attempt to shake hands with gloves on or over the threshold of a door; wearing your coat when you meet someone, particularly someone important is uncouth; don’t smile at random people on the street, it makes people think you’re touched in the head!

The final and arguably the most important piece of the Pre-Service Training experience is the home stay family.  Kathrina and I are staying with a retired woman named Vira.  She has a heart of gold and a smile that radiates warmth.  She has dazzled us with the famous Ukrainian hospitality and stuffed us with home-cooked Ukrainian dishes.  We are so grateful that she’s opened her home to us and that she puts up with our incessant use of the dictionary as a communication tool and mush-mouthed attempts at Ukrainian.  For example, my Shakespeare-like formulation, “May I calendar October?”  (She did agree to allow me to change the calendar page to October, however.)

Back to the language grindstone...

Я думаю, що українська мова…

View from our apartment during Peace Corps training in Chernihiv, Ukraine.