Perpetual Change

Orientation Retreat in Prolisok

So we have finished our Orientation Retreat and are on our way to our host families. Basically what happened is when we arrived in Kiev (which doesn't have a terribly large airport) we were greeted on the inside of customs and immigration by Ukrainian officials that work for Peace Corps. They shepherded us through and onto a bus, where we headed to Prolisok (which means snowdrop, or the first flowers of spring for all you Floridians like me who didn't know). Prolisok was a Soviet resort on a spur river from the Dniper. I think it would have been beautiful, but it is bit rundown now, and the food is not so good. They rent it to groups such as us. This is were we spent our first two days. Basically, in Chicago they want us to talk about our experiences and cultural adaptation and in Prolisok they talk about our experiences and cultural adaptation and it is all much more specific. Here are some interesting highlights (I am still working on how to get pictures up on the site).

The river is frozen and we could walk out and play frisbee on it, which was very cool. You could see wholes where people had fished. Ukrainians have no problem with being out in the cold. It has been right close to freezing all the time but the buildings are kept very comfortable.

My program (Youth Development) was created to fulfill a request by the Ministry of Economics and the Ministry of Education, who wanted healthy lifestyles and computers and technology to be a better part of curriculum in rural areas. We are here to help design a curriculum that the Ministry of Education could then train and institute in all schools. It is designed to be flexible and real, since they recognize that curricula designed in the capital doesn't work everywhere. Ukraine's education systems are very advanced and some of the oldest in Europe. The literacy rate here is 99 %.

There are three Ministries that have contracts with Peace Corps, but the environmental program is being abandoned by Peace Corps because it has been determined that there is not enough support for environmental stewardship in Ukraine at this point. We have adopted environmental education into the general plan for Youth Development to help create this support.

The Country Director for Peace Corps is a very well respected man. His name is Karl Beck and when asked what his three priorities for the next 5 years were he said: to move all volunteers out of cities to rural and economically depressed areas, to increase to 350 volunteers (which they are at about 300 now), and to work principally on training people, or piloting programs that the Ukrainian Government could use. He also joked about the State Department official that gives him a hard time about “running a marriage service” because so many male volunteers to Ukraine get married. It really is an incredible number.

Some interesting language facts: Ukrainian has only 3 tenses!! (Italian has 10) The Training Manager (who is a lovely person and speaks excellent English) often speaks of something “depending on the situation (but it really sounds like sedation)” and the Language Manager gave a great quote:

Your mind is like a parachute. If it is not open, it's useless.

posted by jjs @ 10:08 AM