Thursday, November 24, 2005

Greenhouse photo



It seems that winter may be here. We have a few inches of snow on the ground and it has barely made it above freezing for the past few days. The greenhouse may need to stand, as is, for a while. I promised to post a picture today, so here it is.
Dave

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

One Year

As the one-year anniversary of being here passes, Dave keeps reminding me to write some sort of reflection, and I’ve been dragging my feet. I think it’s just because I feel like I don’t have much to say. Or maybe not much that is profound or inspiring. His reflection was a good summary of my experience as well – similar struggles, similar joys. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that the greatest difference between me last year and me now is that I feel comfortable. Not completely, of course, but enough to get by for now. I know my responsibilities at work, I have established relationships, I can communicate (even if at a basic level). I know how to function – where to buy fresh fruit, good meat and band-aids. Where to take guests who visit. How to get across town on public transport. Which students I need to call on in class and which students I need to watch during tests. How to explain passive voice and reported statements. What to wear (and what not to wear) to church. How to organize a month of intensive English classes. There is no place where knowledge is power like a foreign country is to foreigner trying to live on his/her own. Without all this knowledge, I am helpless; dependent on others for everything. And now I am forever grateful to those, who, in the past year have helped get me to this point. With the knowledge I’ve acquired, I can live my life and take care of myself, and in addition, be useful to someone else as well. I guess I feel like I’m finally reaching the “useful” point – the point where I can really get something done for someone else. Yes, I have done something this year, but I feel like it’s been mostly for my own knowledge, for my benefit. From now on, I feel like I can do much more for someone else’s benefit.

Laura

Friday, November 11, 2005

One Year Here

I guess that I am trying to catch up on blogging as I took the last few weeks off. Today is an important day for us as we arrived in the Dnieperpetrovsk airport all sleep-deprived and groggy exactly one year ago. A lot has happened in the past year and I would like to write a bit about it.

I started out my year wondering what exactly it was I was going to be doing the next 3 years. I found myself adequately busy most of the time with teaching, gardening and building the greenhouse. Seeing the produce as we weighed it and gave it to the cafeteria as well as seeing the steel structure standing outside definitely have given me a sense of accomplishment. At the same time, I wonder now what I will be doing for the next 2 years. I am sure I will find something.

Language has been a source of frustrations and joys. I have repeatedly found myself wondering if I would be fluent yet, had we chosen to go to a Spanish-speaking place and I spent as much time there as I have here on language. It never seems to happen fast enough for me; it has been a long process to get even to the point where I would now consider myself almost conversational. Who knows if I will ever approach fluency, but I was quite pleased with myself over the past month as I was the Decherts' primary translator and I didn't have to ask "What does that mean?" too much. I would even venture to say that I did not do too bad of job.

The biggest struggle that I have had over the past year has been with being so far from friends and family. While we tried to prep ourselves by heading to Arizona for a few years, which seemed to be so far away from friends and family, all we did was find new friends and even family to grow close to. While something similar may be starting to happen here, it still feels infinitely more isolated than anywhere I have ever been. I have been fortunate to have some very good e-mail correspondences as well as to have taken a trip home this summer. That was really good for me, yet the readjustment was again very hard. Now we are settled back in and are preparing for people to come here and visit us. We just don't know who will be first.

The biggest joy for me has been getting to know some Ukrainians. While I can't really say that I have made any close friends, I have a lot of acquaintances and have had some really good interactions. I especially enjoy talking to the workers here at DCU, the kids at the orphanage where I coach basketball, and people at our church. In many of these instances we have even moved beyond the traditional "differences between the U.S. and Ukraine" that seemed to dominate conversations when I began to be able to converse. That has been great.

As I look to the next 2 years, I expect many more joys and struggles. As I continue to develop relationships with and work beside some of the nationals, I expect some strong friendships to be built. I hope that these will far outweigh any of the struggles.

-Dave

Greenhouse Progress Report

I thought it would be nice to post some pictures of the project that has been occupying my time for the last month or so. Chuck and Janell Dechert made the trip from Wyoming to DCU to do a variety of things. They did conversation practice with the students, helped with the construction of the greenhouse, and brought funds for the drilling of a well on campus.

After spending some time finding supplies, doing some planning and getting the tractor and blade into working order, we were able to start levelling the spot for the greenhouse on October 24. It took Chuck a little while to get used to our little Russian tractor, but he figured it out and it worked well. This was the location of one of my gardens last summer.


Danic German, the director of public relations here has some greenhouse and agriculture in his background and he was able to take a few days out of the office to help with some of the construction. Chuck, Danic and I were able to get the walls up, and sixteen hoops up in the following week. Along with being the heaviest part of the greenhouse, they were also the most expensive as steel is quite expensive here and the labor involved in having them rolled into nice curves was rather costly.

After we hung the hoops, we hung eight pipes, the full 24 meter length of the structure. Along with providing some structure for the building, these are spaced to be directly above the eight rows of cucumbers and tomatoes we plan to grow in the future. We will hang strings down to each plant and train them to climb. This seems to be the method of choice for growing both types of vegetables here in Ukraine.

Here is a photo of the greenhouse as it stands right now. The Decherts returned to Wyoming on Tuesday, and I am pleased with the progress that was made while they were here. There are still several things that I hope to complete before it gets too cold, but I fear I am too late as it did not get above freezing yesterday. If the weather cooperates, I hope to finish painting it yet, and hopefully cover it with plastic on a nice day in January.

-Dave

Thursday, November 10, 2005

A KGB room and other Soviet lore

One bit of interesting history about the hotel I stayed in in Tallinn. On the flight to Tallinn, I happened to be skimming through the airline magazine when I saw a story entitled “The secret lives of Tallinn Hotels,” with a full-page picture of the Sokos Hotel Viru on the opposite page. This just happened to be the hotel in which the conference was going to take place, so I read on. I learned that in Soviet times the Sokos Hotel was formerly the Intourist Hotel, the infamous state hotel which every sizable city had, and where foreign guests were housed. According to the article, Tallinn’s Intourist Hotel was quite well known – it was the first “skyscraper” in Tallinn (22 floors) and was perhaps one of the “most luxurious” hotels in the USSR. Of course, it came complete with bugged rooms, especially on the 14th floor where important guests stayed, and a room full of KGB personnel to monitor those important people. The KGB room was located out of reach of guests on the 23rd floor. However, when the political tides began to turn in the late ‘80s, the KGB simply deserted their post in the hotel. They left behind their electronic equipment, some clothing and random items, including an overflowing ashtray. Rather than clean out the KGB room, the hotel management decided to leave everything as it was. And so the author of the article paid a visit to the room to glimpse a bit of Soviet history frozen in time, and wrote that any guest could request to see the room and would be escorted there.

So the day after I arrived, several of my fellow conference attendees approached the desk and asked to see the KGB room. The receptionist called someone on the phone, and unfortunately, the answer was no. Her English didn’t seem to be good enough to explain why, either. So we went looking for the room on our own. The elevator only took us as far as the 22nd floor, so we wandered around until we found a maid and she directed us to an unlocked door and a flight of stairs. Two walls on the 23rd floor were mostly made of windows, and the other two walls each had two doors. We tried the handles on each one, and they were all locked. And that’s pretty much the anti-climactic ending to my story. Behind one of those doors was the KGB room, full of Soviet paraphernalia, but we never saw it. We considered pestering the front desk staff further, but in the end never got around to it. So however mistaken the airline magazine writer was about guests visiting the KGB room, it was still interesting to learn the history behind the modern, well-decorated building we were staying in. From its current looks, I never would’ve guessed it had been a legendary Soviet hotel.


Laura

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Tallinn


Here is part two of my trip. After spending the first half of the week in Klaipeda, Lithuania, I spent the morning wandering the streets of Vilnius, then flew to Tallinn, Estonia. The conference was sponsored by the organization “Women of the Harvest,” which exists solely to support North American women serving overseas through Christian ministries. Part of their work is to host conferences all over the world and invite women to get together, network with others in their area, and relax a bit. All 50 women stayed together in a hotel in the center of Tallinn – mornings and evenings were sessions and afternoons were free. Seven women including me attended from Donetsk, and we had a good time exploring Old Town Tallinn and meeting others from throughout Eastern Europe. One highlight was feasting at a medieval restaurant lit only by candles and complete with musicians in traditional garb. Even though the weather was pretty chilly, Old Town was full of tourists, and it was fun to blend in with the foreigners and not stick out so much, for once.

Although we didn’t venture much out of the center of the city, I was impressed by the Western-European feel of Tallinn. The hotel we stayed at was overflowing with other guests and conferences, and the buildings were very well maintained and restored. Everywhere you went people spoke English – my better-traveled colleagues said they encountered more non-native English speakers in Tallinn than they remember when visiting places like Italy or France. In Lithuania the experience was similar. As soon as I stepped off the plane, I could tell a difference in economic stability as compared with Ukraine. Cars, streets, buildings and buses were modern and well-maintained. I saw the familiar Soviet-style high rise apartment buildings, but they seemed to be tidier and holding together much better than their equivalents in Ukraine. All of the Baltic states are now part of the European Union, and it showed me how far Ukraine has yet to go to reach that level of economic improvement.


Laura