You look like a cucumber today.

I've been here for only a little over two weeks now, but staging feels like ages ago. I'm having difficulty phrasing this post in part because so much has happened that I now consider routine, and because my ability to express myself in English has in many ways returned to a rudimentary level.

Starting I guess at the beginning, I'm living in a rather large town not far from Kyiv. I'm in a cluster (of five women) that is learning Russian (instead of Ukrainian); therefore we'll most likely end up in the eastern part of the country after training. I'm living with an ethnically Russian family composed of four generations of women. I'm still trying to figure out their story because there areso many layers. Prababushka (great-grandma) was born outside of Moscow and eventually moved out to Siberia. When my host-mom was 13 or so, they moved to Ukraine for health reasons. Sorry if this is overexposure, I find it really intriguing. The youngest woman is Paulina, who is ten. We're having a great time together, though I think she's rather frustrated that I can't sit still through Russian family sitcoms. I'm getting better though, I live in a flat with all of the modern amenities, including unlimited hot water. Don't worry, Peace Corps will give me something much more hardcore for my placement. It's quite incredible the difference between cities/towns and the countryside here. Some clusters from my training group
are living in such conditions. To tell the truth, I'm quite jealous.

As far as Russian language, I'm very thankful that I have built up a vocabulary in school. The past two weeks I've been digging out words from god knows where in my head, and am starting to learn how to arrange them into grammatically correct phrases more quickly. I get a lot of practice with my family, my counterparts at the school, and at my daily language lessons. I think I hit a major milestone over the weekend when in the middle of the night I realized I was dreaming in Russian.

So, Peace Corps training is composed of a lot of elements including language, cross-cultural and technical. The requirements from each sector are rather manageable, but when put together it's quite overwhelming. My group has learned to live life day by day, achieving as much as possible, and to not assume anything is permanent. Peace Corps is all about flexibility. I won't know about my placement until mid-December.

My school is amazing. It's a primary and secondary school that specializes in languages with over a thousand students. The building is rather new and has a lot of supplies. Currently, I'm assessing the needs of the school with my group and observin/co-teaching my counterpart's class. We're starting an afer-school club this week and are drafting a community project as well. One fun fact is that it's kind of odd that all public institutions are conducted in Ukrainian. However, I'm supposed to only be speaking Russian. I'll see how that tunrs out. Apparently in the east, certain regions are allowed to conduct all their business in Russian. Otherwise, I'm going to e one of those funny ones that speaks surzhyk, a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian.

Off to plan some lessons!