in Ukraine!

September 22, 2010

I’m finally in Ukraine! My group of TEFL volunteers has about 80 people, and more than 30 of us were held back on Saturday because our visas weren’t quite ready. Most of us were able to leave on Monday and arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday (yesterday). We spent last night at a sanitarium about two hours outside Kyiv and had a mini orientation this morning before we were split up into our training clusters and departed for those.

Today I arrived at my host family’s home in Chernihiv, about an hour or so northeast of Kyiv. So between the bus rides yesterday and today, I’ve gotten a nice flavor of the Ukrainian countryside. Beautiful – lots of cows and horses and chickens roaming freely in fields. The trees are just starting to turn colors so I’m looking forward to a really pretty fall.

Chernihiv is a medium size city, and my host family has some of the modern conveniences of life, like a washing machine, hot water, and Internet! My host mom speaks some English and we only had to use the dictionary a few times during dinner to understand each other. My host dad and brother (who is about 5) don’t speak any English so conversations with them will be quite limited until my Russian improves.

Yes, I’ll be learning Russian instead of Ukrainian. Since I already had some exposure to Russian, PC placed me in a Russian language track. I had no preference one way or the other. Most of the country is bilingual anyway and the two languages are similar enough that even if I speak Russian to someone who speaks Ukrainian, we’ll be able to understand each other. Just not yet!

I start language and cross-cultural training tomorrow, so I’ll be pretty busy from here on out for the rest of training. But that’s good. It’ll keep my mind occupied and hopefully I won’t be so homesick. Time and getting used to things here will also help.