Perpetual Change

Random Thoughts VII- Something Old, Something new

I just finished re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia. They are really incredible. I realized how much the ethics and values have shaped my world. I didn’t realize how strong the Christian metaphors were.

When I first got to Ukraine, one of the first words I used in a public situation was yelling for a bus driver to wait (not totally unusual) from inside the bus, as one of our group members came running up late. My other group members were impressed I knew the word already. I am not sure I used it correctly. Then six months later, my language was good enough that I used it for crowd control at a testing center. It turned into an interview session as all the parents, waiting for their kids, crowded around me to ask questions about my language, background, and experience in Ukraine. Now, I use the word emphatically quite a bit in normal discussion.

My progress in toasting has also been marked over the two years, but I have a lot of them to do this week, and I am already tired of them.

By controlling everyone’s water (we only get it in the morning and evening in my area), it keeps most people on a pretty tight schedule. I sometimes wonder if this was a Soviet technique to maintain order.

There is a wide prevalence and affection for little joke books and funny anecdotes; I sometimes wonder if this, also, was an encouraged diversion from Soviet times.

Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t have a riding hood. She wears a derby-like hat; a riding hood would make her look like a babushka.

I was sitting on a marshrutka reading an old Harper’s of mine and I came across a personal ad from Bromsgrove, which is the small town where I worked at camp in England. The ad was for Lucy Man, a dog; it was in a collection of ads from Doggy Dating in England. On another page, (in another issue) I came across my Peace Corps recruiter. They were advertising a book (that I didn’t know she had written) about her time in Peace Corps Africa.

One day I overheard some teachers at a school I was visiting for the first time. They stopped talking when I came in and started to whisper about me, if I was the American. If they had continued to talk I wouldn’t have noticed, but the quiet, one-person-at-a-time whisper got my attention and was easy to follow. I turned around and replied to their inquiries in Ukrainian. An interesting conversation ensued where they asked about my background and commented on my European style.

I have created a bit of a movement with Bananas of the World here in Ukraine. I didn’t even mean to, and I only just recently found out about its spread. If my projects with Ukrainians have the same slow, but strong, and far and subtle reach that some of the things I did with Peace Corps volunteers, then my service will have been very effective.

This is the truly unbelievable: I looked down at my pajama shirt while I was brushing my teeth the other night. I read: Battle of the Beach, March 1997. I didn’t get this T-shirt at a consignment shop; I was there in 1997! I don’t even remember the last time I looked at it, certainly not in years, and I am not sure if I have anything else that old!

Standing in line is a prioritizing thing here. If you are more rushed or more important, you cut closer to the front. It generally drives Americans like me crazy, and I often think of all the things I want to say to the person when it happens, but I never do it. I’ve seen it happen where if they don’t get away with it, they just step behind the person that yells at them. I still think that if I try it (though there have been a few times, where culturally it would have been my right) that they will send me to the end of the line for cutting.

I was walking through a muddy area the other day, talking on my phone. A big German Shepeard started to charge me, barking rabidly, from 100 yards off. My first thought was NOT, “oh, no” or “where did he come from,” but, I thought “what a bad PLACE for this to happen” as I prepared to beat him off with my umbrella. Here I am standing in a filthy empty parking lot, in a suit, with my umbrella like a baseball bat in one hand, and I tell the person on the phone to hang on a minute, not thinking anything unusual at all, when a man from somewhere I couldn’t see, called off the dog. Only hours later when someone mentioned a run-in they had with a dog, did I recall the incident.

I have a Stool of death. Have you ever seen one of those old outhouse shaped wood piggy banks? They were built on mouse traps, so that when set up, and you dropped a penny in the slot on top, the whole outhouse would explode. That is what my stool does. I am not really sure how. I keep putting it back together (my first mistake, but it makes a good writing table), and now hide it when people come over, because even if I warned them, or even if they had seen it happen to someone else, someone would surely sit on it.

I gave my last business card out the other day. I gave it to the owner of the firm who made them.

Labels: random thoughts

posted by jjs @ 7:01 AM