The Final Peace Corps Blog

This blog I intend and believe will be my final update of my Peace Corps service. I’ve mapped out the topics which I plan to break down in sections, each of which I promise to write about honestly, reflectively, and as objectively as possibly. However, I will often admit the subjective nature of certain observations and conclusions reached during my service, contrasting what I’ve learned from my American upbringing and my growth in Ukraine. I do not write out of hostility toward Ukrainian culture, or out of veneration of the U.S. This is merely a summation of what it means to be an American in Ukraine.

I mentioned in my last blog that after Peace Corps I can say that I lived in Europe for two years, though it has never felt like that. Perhaps Eastern Ukraine is that different, or my assumption of what it means to be Europe is that incorrect; however, had I lived in Budapest, Prague, or Madrid, I’m sure that I wouldn’t have felt like I lived in real Europe either. I did however get to see real Ukraine and I’m happy to tell you all about.

Coming Home

I’ll be home in two months time and though my course of action is not definite after settling in, I’m thankful for my last two years. I set out in hopes to learn more about myself, earn something on my own, gain independence, travel, and of course, to attempt to help others. How many of these goals were reached and to what extent is still something that will take years to decipher, but I feel stronger, wiser, and more confident. Much like college, Peace Corps is an atmosphere of academia which surrounds you with information, new and old. From the diversity of fellow volunteers with worldly experiences and Ukrainians with unique perspectives, I simply could not have been exposed to as many learning opportunities were I in the States. In addition, I have confidence which I am proud of, if only for the reason that it is new. I remember walking dozens of city blocks in San Francisco out of fear of attempting to brave public transportation. Yet last summer I arrived in a foreign city with no reservations or planned route and successfully navigated my way to an even more foreign place. Life as a volunteer often makes me feel as though nothing in the States could intimidate me again.

Schools in Ukraine

My professional experience in U.S. schools may best be described as an apprenticeship, however, my understanding of it as a student, like most my age, is broad. Working in any school is a challenge, but the task of understanding the idiosyncrasies of a school in a different culture is a battle. The following observations are some of which I think an American, or Westerner, would find interesting.

The ever changing schedule of a Ukrainian school posed one of the main difficulties of teaching here. Concerts, holidays, the lack of running water, and other external forces were constant chisels chipping away at the predictability of American schools I tried and failed to duplicate. To us Westerners, five of twelve students being removed from a lesson so they can take part in a concert rehearsal is an inadequate excuse and gross misevaluation of priorities. However, in the culture of Ukrainian schools, students have an obligation to assist in such events which are seen as helping the entire school.

Cell phones proved to be a constant interruption, whether teaching fifth grade, eleventh grade, or sitting in a teachers’ meeting. It is very easy to impose the manners of our culture in a foreign place, like cell phone etiquette. Perhaps we think we’ll feel less alien if we have some rules which seemingly hold things together and provide some order in an environment which is not yet understood. I’ve seen Ukrainians on cell phones during concerts, student presentations, teachers and students in class, and more. However, why should I expect students to stop using their phones in class if the teachers do not do so? Ultimately, this rudeness is no more irrational than our quickness and fervor to label it as rude. I know volunteers who confiscate students’ phones if they ring and even call their family in America, a few minutes of which would spend all the money on the SIM card. This is just an interesting cross cultural moment on a micro-scale. A few weeks ago, a student’s phone in seventh grade rang and she asked if she could go into the hall. My initial thoughts were “No! This is my lesson. Your parents can call you during the passing period. They need to cut this umbilical cord or you’re never going to be able to make decisions for yourself or face situations on your own.” I let the student into the hall, stating only, “quickly”. Ukraine simply isn’t ready for such tirades and nitpicking. We have bigger fish to fry.

Similarly, I often ask students to make charts and tables for grammar exercises or games in the notebooks. Every time I give the imperative to copy down a chart or graph, students take on the appearance of 15^th Century ocean navigators, equipped with compasses, rulers, and protractors. Two years ago my reaction was “The chart is not important, the information you write inside the lines is what matters! Hurry up!” This sense of perfection in writing and presentation is an integral part of students schooling here. They only use pens, have white out if they make mistakes, and presentation always factors into the grade. I’d be creating an unfamiliar environment for the students if I prevented them from talking to their parents for twenty seconds or by asking them to discard the expectations of neatness established by the teachers who worked with them before I was here and will continue to teach them after I leave. These are short lessons in the comfort of the many over the few.

I’ve also been quick to criticize the form of Ukrainian classroom management or the ostensible lack thereof. Ukrainian methodology is very scientific, most likely a lingering shadow of Soviet influence. Studying to be an educator in America instilled me with a more philosophical and pragmatic approach. Although I see the trend changing over the next few years with the retirement of older teachers, I can’t and perhaps shouldn’t expect to see developments in pedagogy equating Ukraine with America. Practices and beliefs simply vary among places with radically different histories, economies, and governments. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve used these differences as a crutch. For instance, if the majority of my students failed to do an assignment or a particular class was disruptive, I caught myself pinning the fault on being a different culture: “Well, this activity would have worked had I tried it in America”. While I don’t necessarily belief this after closer scrutiny, I do believe there was a cultural gap that complicated the atmosphere. Copying answers, or what we like to label as blatant cheating, is common in Ukraine, whether exam, quiz, or essay. I tried to convey my beliefs of individual work inside and outside the classroom, but to little or no fruition. Students simply could not understand why I turned into such a tyrant on test day. “Mr. Alan, we help each other. It is good for everybody during exams!” My response was “Ok, I’m your doctor. I copied another student’s work on an exam about human anatomy. Now I have to perform a surgery on your mother.” Although my argument was irrefutable, the stigma of plagiarism and academic dishonesty is simply not to be found. Another cross cultural moment than only needs observing and not ridiculing.

Ultimately, I have cherished working in my school. There are days when I feel like there is no other work I could ever do other than teaching, and others when I feel the opposite. This would be the case in a school in Indiana, Lugansk, Taipei, Kigali, or Buenos Aires. I’ve had to adjust to working in an unfamiliar environment, with either a lack of or poor of resources. Teaching is the constant struggle of the bell curve, with a small percent of students excelling, a small percent failing, and the majority in the middle. However teaching a foreign language is more like a spike and there is no curve. Students understand you or they don’t. Catching up with a foreign language is so much more difficult than math, which usually has a moment of epiphany when one finally understand a problem, or history, which can be compensated by additional readings. There is grammar, vocabulary, listening, and speaking/pronunciation. Students are never held back a grade in Ukraine, so I could have a new student recently moved from a village in tenth grade who can’t say a word in English. The task of enticing the advanced students while not losing the struggling ones is a challenge every teacher deals with every day. Additionally, it was a challenge to engage the shy or struggling speakers because they simply don’t understand. The strong students will initiate conversations and I had to work to prevent students from being abandoned.

Perhaps I mentioned this before, but I will again for reiteration. I assumed, during training and the first few months at site, that simply being an American would inspire students to take English lessons seriously, attend English clubs, and be in awe of my presence. While the latter is true to an extent, the former couldn’t be more incorrect. After contemplating this point for quite some time, I ultimately told my brother Chris, “How much would I have cared in seventh grade if some Ukrainian came to teach at my school”? To which he replied, “Well, yeah, good point.”

Telling People How to Live: the Favorite Past Time of All Americans

Several factors contributed to the lack of influence I had in imparting words of wisdom and life lessons to Ukrainians. If the topic was diet, I was the guy from one of the most obese nations in the world telling people how to eat. If the topic was politics, it was my government who had its proverbial thumb in the pies of other nations. If the topic was money, well, you get the picture. All in all, Americans aren’t the easiest people to trust. If the tragedy of nationality wasn’t enough, my physical appearance as a child, my age signifying almost no longer a child, my marital status which negates the possibility of being a man, and my Russian language ability which makes me sound awkward, unrefined, and often hesitant. Some of the following things include some of the observations which can also be described as concerns on behalf of Americans towards Ukrainians and vice versa.

I rarely see Ukrainians drink water. Tea is as much an integral part of Ukrainian culture as it is void from American life. Students drink tea with breakfast, receive it with their lunch at school, and every corner food stand, bus station and train will offer you tea. With that said, I rarely see Ukrainians drink water, the tea of America. I’ve tried to explain that lack of water leads to advanced aging and health problems, but I come from a place where one can safely drink the water from the faucet. Equally, food is a constantly debated topic among Americans and Ukrainians, with mostly finger pointing as to who has the unhealthiest food. Ukrainians, in their inventiveness and refusal to waste anything from an animal, eat strips of lard called salo though they refuse to call it fat. Whatever you call it, salo is cholesterol incarnate. The mythos of Ukrainian food dictates salo and white bread are good for you, though it is often recommended to limit these as much as possible in America. When criticizing salo, Ukrainians will condemn McDonalds, hamburgers, and any other fast food which they believe makes up our diet. An interesting part of globalization is nations newly affected by such things as McDonalds or iPods fail to realize that people in America also are being plagued with such overwhelming simplification of products, especially food.

Similarly, alcohol and smoking are admitted problems in Ukraine, with some of the cheapest cigarette and liquor prices in Europe. It was difficult being an occasional beer drinker in Ukraine where real men imbibe vodka. It is hard comparing the abuse of alcohol in the U.S. and Ukraine, but in Ukraine the problem is certainly more visible with limited or weakly enforced open container and public intoxication laws. I often felt angry by Ukrainians using culture as a defense, and though to an extent that is true. However, more than 90% of all Ukrainians die from just three causes; smoking, drinking, and auto accidents – and all are preventable. Drinking can be cultural, but when a nation’s male life expectancy rate is actually decreasing, culture cannot be an excuse.

Ukrainians always yell at Americans for having the bus windows open, sitting on the cement, having wet hair outside, not eating enough, and not dressing warmly. Much like our concerns about food, drink, and health, this is their way of showing they care about our health, even if we disagree. So it was often a sort of mutual “I have to look after you” relationship with Americans and Ukrainians both in shock at how the others live!

Gender Issues

One of the most clearly visible differences in Ukraine includes the gender relations and what it means to be a man or woman here. It was often an atmosphere I felt which I feel currently unable to express in written form, yet it includes a lack of or completely different expectations for men’s and women’s occupations, abilities, relationships, and even rights. Women in the U.S. still receive less pay than men for equal work, but in Ukraine gender relations are more equitable with America perhaps forty years ago. Again a paradox exists, because the U.S. did not have a female prime minister (or president for that matter) fifty years ago.

Ukrainian women are extremely beautiful and everyone will remind you constantly from the Beatles song “Back in the USSR” to the theory that Lugansk has so many beautiful woman because Catherine the Great banished all attractive women from St. Petersburg and Moscow so they could not overshadow her looks. Women are expected to dress to impress the men and marry young. Men are seldom expected to help at home. A mutual understanding and manipulation of each other’s needs exists. Quoted from the PC Cross Cultural Reader, “Ukrainian women had to become very competitive to get a good man. We know what men like, how they like to be treated. We know all about their fragile egos and how to manipulate them. This includes the way that we dress. Unlike other kinds of animals, the human female should be the one beautifully adorned. And savvy in psychological manipulation in order to catch the good man.” Ultimately, this all makes for quite different gender relations.

Racial issues

Additionally, racism is a peculiar issue in Ukraine. Though Ukraine, much like Poland and other Central/Eastern European countries have ultra-Nationalist neo-Nazi type groups, hardly representatives of the typical citizen, it is hard to judge the perceptions of race on the small, individual scale in Ukraine. Other than hearing students make occasional comments about Jews, Blacks, and Middle Easterners (certainly not unheard of in any school in the States), I never experienced that blunt “those people” mentality often expressed in America once someone feels comfortable with you to share their bigotry. Now part of this lack of indifference may be due to fewer minorities, but I don’t think that would fully explain the situation. Lugansk, Kharkiv and Kyiv have huge international student populations. I’ve met Nigerians, Malaysians, Senegalese, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian and many more in just Lugansk. However, I’m sure their perceptions of racial issues differ greatly from mine, because I fit in if I don’t talk. I’ve heard some volunteers criticize Ukrainians for saying negro, partly because in Russian it sounds like the N-word. However, I’ve defended Ukrainians, assuming they are not using the word in an offensive way, because they haven’t had the cultural revolution related to race and vocabulary which America experienced. Through the 80s it was still acceptable to refer to blacks at Negroes, so the politics of language are simply different here as they lack a population of color. One place you can judge he beliefs of a mass group of people is in the sports arena and I’ve been to many professional football (soccer) matches in Ukraine. Nigerians frequent the Ukrainian club teams and despite the foul taunts and heckling, I never heard one comment relating to race. However, in London, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, well known cities of celebrated high culture, fans often make gorilla sounds or throw bananas on the field when a black player has the ball (read more in Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World).

Fashion and Brad’s Middle School Theory

Fashion mostly proved to be a topic to make volunteers laugh and express friendly disapproval. Some of the outfits I’ve seen Ukrainians wear, men and women, I’m sure I will never see again, whether they include shiny suits or fish net stockings with ivy patterns. Fashion here is an interesting paradox, because it is extremely important for expressing oneself, but many people buy their clothes, Versace, Armani, and Prada rip offs, at the bazaar! My friend Brad explained to me on several occasions his Middle School Theory. Despite Kyiv being older than Moscow, independent Ukraine is still a very young country – I’m seven years older, for example. He explained Ukrainian identity is in a Middle School phase, were you experiment with all the silly, strange, and exotic fashions, because for the first time in your life it seems like you can and want to express yourself through fashion. It is not rare to see something as contradictory as a fifty year old grandmother at the bazaar rocking pink hair and a cellphone on the back of a horse cart. Other than a general Ukrainian observation that American girls dress more or less like boys, I’d like to hear more of their ideas regarding our fashion. The U.S. has its collection of laughable and impractical fashion – furry boots, popped collars, ripped jeans, etc. I’d like to hear a Ukrainian babushka critique a torn jean, muscle shirt guy.

Holidays, Holidays, and More Holidays

It isn’t rare to hear even Ukrainians joke about how many holidays they have. There are days for teachers, students, women, miners, veterans, workers, and then religious holidays which have a new and old date due to the Orthodox Church switching its calendar. Most holidays in my town coincide with a concert at the House of Culture with student performances which are either really talented or extremely awkward. My site mate and I usually dread these events as they are really long, packed with people, and consist of the same performances month after month.

March 8^th marks International Women’s Day which included a concert and then a party at my school. I was glad to see schools participate in a holiday which technically started in New York but has since been discarded. However, I wished for more open discourse about women, their struggles, rights and like there of, and their feelings. The same student performances from graduation were repeated at the Women’s day concert. Wine and vodka were in abundance, yet being an American, I yearned for discussion.

This goes for Teacher’s Day as well. The first Sunday in October marks Teacher’s Day. Our school had shortened lessons, a concert, and a party. Several students gave me flowers, chocolate, and even a planner. My immediate reaction was “If you want to give me a gift, study in my class! Do your homework! Don’t make excuses for misbehavior!” and of course this is not only cynical and ungrateful but unrealistic. I was thankful for many teachers in school but that doesn’t mean I did everything they asked. I loosened up by the end of the day at the concert and tried to remove my cultural blinders and although there was still no real discussion of what it means to be a teacher, I enjoyed the concert.

Things I’ll miss

There are so many things to list.

-Walks home from my host families on Sunday evenings, surrounded by small town Ukraine.

-The ladies at my favorite shop who are always thankful for the food I take for them to try.

-The unpredictability of my students to say something great, funny, or heart warming

-Living around completely self sustaining people. I often feel like Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain. I couldn’t sow or reap a harvest, milk a goat or cow, or survive without a store to buy everything. Ukrainians do EVERYTHING themselves. Make their own oil, wine, honey, beer, kill their own meat, and grow their own fruits and vegetables. It is really inspiring. People have two jobs here, their occupation and their farming chores at home.

-The seasons are so much more distinct here. Life in the States is seamless. I can get tomatoes or pineapples whenever I want, but in Ukraine you know and feel the seasons in your bones.

-My host families consist of some of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve every met.

-My students in general. I have really gotten to see them grow with English in two years. It will be hard to say goodbye to the students.

-My site is amazing. It is green, though now orange, yellow and red, and a wonderful little enclave of agriculture in an industrial region.

-Ukrainian food is really great and creative. I’ll probably realize all the American foods I missed are not how I thought of them.

-It feels challenging and adventurous being here. I know it’ll be hard to go back to the States where the every day difficulties I face here do not exist.

-Speaking Russian. Although I didn’t study as much as I hoped, I still really enjoy speaking Russian and hope to keep up with it as much as possible.

This is already way too long. I hope you enjoyed my observations and gained something if you read this far. Again, I hope you do not interpret any comments or observations as hostile or rude toward Ukraine or its culture.