Perpetual Change

First Impressions II – Mike Volk’s comments

I good scout friend of mine from high school came to visit me in December. Here are his thoughts; I did read these first, but I did not edit.

Alright. Its not lack of wanting to add something to the general body of knowledge about John Sheetz, his peace corps experience, and those of everyone who visited, but more a matter of mood and time. I think that it is good for me to process this experience a little after the fact. Feel free to edit or delete or not include anything that you want, I think it is naturally going to ramble a little and be a little stream of consciousness, and I didn't worry much about grammar or sentence structure.

Of course whenever I have spent time in another culture it has been a broadening experience. It takes work to be understanding of a bus system where the buses don't leave on a schedule, but when they are full. Even though I can see the logic, from my experience, this means that you don't know exactly when you are going to arrive at your destination- which is a frustrating thing for an American with things to do.

I had been living with a family in Paris before I came to visit John in Ukraine, and we noticed how one becomes more perceptive (by survival necessity) of the significance of the actions and words of people around you using a different language. It was interesting that after struggling to understand the French, I could begin to understand the general emotion or significance of the conversations in Ukrainian. I think this could fall under the category of a life skills- attention and perceptiveness to the thoughts, needs, and ideas of others, perhaps taking a little focus off of oneself. Of course, I have not even the beginning of a chance to understand Cyrillic writing [editor’s note: not as difficult as it looks, ask my parents]. It feels similar to swimming out in the open ocean- you're out of your element, and you realize that the world is a much bigger place and that you are a very small part.

Still there are things that make you feel that the world is small on occasion, as well. It is well worth it to visit Eastern Europe; it is strangely similar and different from Western Europe all at the same time. Visiting John was exceptional. I knew that we would have a lot to catch up on, and I looked forward to the things that I knew we could talk about- in English- for a long time. As Sando wrote in his blog entry, it is exceptional that someone can spend 2 years of life in which every action is devoted towards the betterment of someone else. I can see that this level of devotion is difficult from visiting John, and I think that he will be glad to come home, but I think that he will find his experience was worth doing (for him and the Ukrainians), and I know that I will continue to gain from it.

[editor’s notes: I am going to tack on a few of Sando’s thoughts that have been floating around since last year:
The toilet paper rolls have no inner tube
the ice IS slippery
the Kyiv escalators are very fast and they still take 5 minutes
you need a passport to exchange traveller's checques
they put shops in the walking underpasses.]

posted by jjs @ 4:06 AM