A Day in the Life of a Ukraine PCV

The most important thing to remember is service for every volunteer is very different, due to schools, communities, housing; therefore, I can only shed light on my experiences.

On any given school day, my routine can more or less be summed up by the following:

I am pretty lucky since my earliest classes start at eight o’clock and I live only a five minute walk from my school, the Belovodsk Gymnasium. I admit the first thing I do when I wake up is check the e-mails on my cell phone; reading messages from friends and family is the greatest motivation to remember what I am doing and why I am here and provides the motivation I need.

Although cooking is one of my hobbies, breakfast is usually simple, consisting of, in any combination, eggs, bread, pourage, fruit, yogurt, or muesli. I don’t eat lunch at school so I have to make sure I have enough fuel to teach anywhere from two to five lessons on given days.

Showering is a hassle since I do not have a short, rather my bathtub and a large yogurt cup I use rinse. Filling the bathtub would be a very long, expensive, and ultimately wasteful process, so I full out shower about two days a week (a number that would have frightened me in America, but here I don’t mind).

I teach at the Gymnasium in my town, which is the larger of the two public schools. There are almost eight hundred students from grades first through eleventh and over seventy teachers, six of which instruct English.

I teach 5th through 9th grade, though Ukrainians say form. Each class begins with the students standing to welcome the teacher and in the younger form students often sing melodies, such as “Good morning, good morning, good morning to you, good morning, good morning, we are glad to see you.” Teaching English as a foreign language is a challenge, but I try to think what interested me in Russian class and what helps me best to study and absorb new words and grammar, which works sometimes.

As I walk through the hallways, the students always yell, “Good morning, Mr. Alan,” even if it is two o’clock in the afternoon. I use my middle name Alan, because Keith is difficult to pronounce since the Cyrillic alphabet has no “TH” sound – they would say Keet, which in Russian is whale. The students are easily motivated by competition so I often try to think of activities that involve points and teams. They have fifteen seconds to think of a team name, some of the highlights so far have included Manchester United vs. Chelsea, Four Guys and a Girl vs Team Forever, and Team Smile vs Team Sad Face.

On Mondays and Fridays I have Russian tutoring with the school’s veteran Russian teacher who does not know one word of English. Often times I think, “If I understand what she was saying to me during tutoring, I wouldn’t need it.” Learning Russian is very difficult and continuing to study without explanations in English is even more of a challenge but I try!

Often times if I didn’t hear Ukrainian or Russian being spoken in the halls, I would think it to be a hallway in America when I walk past students. Their clothes appear as though they were just ordered out of a Gap or Hot Topic catalog, they play with the cellphones, and the younger students play tag and other games.

I have English club twice a week with the students who are not in my classes, because I want to give them all a chance to practice the language in a free and open way with a native speaker. We have played and sang “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley, done mock interviews, and played Scattergories. UNO is also a very good game to practice with younger students because you can practice numbers, colors, verbs of motion like to go and to go back, and extra things like skip, take, and draw (I say this because it helped me with my Russian when I taught it to my host family with no English used).

My time after school is spent divided doing several things. I often watch one or two programs on the British Travel Channel, play my guitar, study Russian, and then I lesson plan. The text books in Ukraine are often out of date, therefore I make extra resources in hopes to make the content and activities more interesting. Making the materials takes the majority of my time and I draw pictures and write texts on the clean side of inexpensive wall paper quite often. I also have internet access at my school, which is slow and often unreliable, but I am very lucky to be able to research content and lesson ideas to make class more fun and effective.

After school, students participate in a variety of activities that take place at the sport school, music school, house of creativity, and house of culture. Most students can play an instrument or sing and football (soccer) is the most popular sport here (Almost nobody watches American Football). School is over by two o’clock, but students often have three to four extra hours of activities after school in addition to their homework and as you can see they have many responsibilities. After that, there is a computer game club in my town called Victory where students play Medal of Honor and Counterstrike.

After four months total of living with two different Ukrainian families, I now live in my own apartment fit with gas heat, a refrigerator, running water, and an indoor toilet. Compared to Peace Corps in more remote locations like villages in Africa and Southeast Asia, I am living the life!

There are no supermarkets or large stores in my town, only small stores that resemble convenient stores; however, customers have to point and ask for all the things they wish to purchase which are located behind the counter. This makes shopping somewhat difficult and it takes quite some time, so usually I go several times a week to buy only a few things at once.

If you have any questions, comments, or want to know more about a certain topic or theme I discussed, please just ask and I will tell you more!


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The ideas and opinions expressed in this journal belong solely to its writer and do not in any way represent the beliefs of Peace Corps or Peace Corps Ukraine.