20 -24 April
On Sunday, we finished our conference and by lunchtime were whisked away to do our site visit. Site visit is the time when we visit the organization where we’ll work for 3 days. There are 5 other people in my group that will work with CEUME’s regional offices (Lviv, Donestk, Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk), so all of the PCT’s and our counterparts went to the central CEUME office in Kyiv via taxi. I was a little tired and dehydrated from going out the prior night to a very cool club called “44” that is sort of a jazz club and had a good mixture of Americans, Europeans and Ukrainians. Being there was the first time I’ve felt “off-duty” or somehow relaxed in a way I used to think was normal.

Anyway, I’m in the taxi w/ Nancy (fellow PCT going to Lviv), her coordinator, and Bogdana is sitting up front. I am dizzy, we are driving fast through the city and suddenly we’re downtown, right across from the “Sports Palace” where major sporting events are held, like the recent Ukraine/Spain football match. Kyiv is a pretty city with many fancy old and new buildings, which how I am able to describe the architecture. It is so big city and I was feeling so country mouse. Or maybe tired mouse.

I wasn’t entirely in my body and we were just about to meet our director and then I was going to go to my apartment for the next few days. It was just so much and I wished that I’d invested in sleep the evening before and not socializing. Socializing is important also I’m just too old anymore to get away properly on little sleep.

We enter the building and go up to the office. It’s modern and western style and we all sit down in a sunny, large conference room. We meet Oleksander, Sasha, who is the director of the organization. He introduces himself and talks about the organization, then asks the PCT’s to go around and talk about our experience and what we hope to bring to the organization. I’m a little panicked at this impromptu public speaking event, but decide to talk about the web development, of course, and about my new interest in event planning. Everyone goes around and does their spiel and it’s very interesting to learn about what my fellow PCT’s have done.

We then walk a couple of blocks to a very nice restaurant, Pervek, that serves traditional Ukrainian food. The wait staff wears costumes that I might associate w/ some sort of Bovarian festival and cleavage abounds, at least among the female staff. I ate salo for the first time! This is perhaps the national food of Ukraine, or at least tied w/ borscht. Salo is basically pork fat, but it’s really so much more. I ate some that was liberally mixed with garlic and I was shocked how great it is. I made the faux pas of mentioning how much I liked the “garlic butter.” I knew about salo, but I thought it was different or looked different. (For a full treatise on salo, read the FAQ sheet I have on this site, under PC Ukraine, of course.)

Anyway, it was more “stranger in a strange land” time - we ate at this most posh restaurant and I’m trying to make conversation with all these new people and trying to not appear as overwhelmed by all this niceness. I think maybe one day I will finally accept that things will be so different than I expected, but I haven’t yet.

I actually had a conversation about this with another PCT that will work in Kyiv. We admitted to being sort of disappointed that we aren’t suffering in this experience. I mean, I knew that I’d be in a city and I knew that by virtue of being in Europe, albeit Eastern Europe, that things would be relatively nice, at least compared to doing work in rural Mongolia, for example. But I still expected to work somewhere that might not have a computer, that was really grassroots, where people wouldn’t speak English better than me.

I want to be clear that I’m not complaining. CEUME is doing important work and it is a tremendous opportunity for me to work with there. I think I will learn a great deal and that I will be able to find areas to work that will be satisfying and that I might feel like I’m helping somehow. I’m just prattling on about how this experience is difficult for me, and how the difficulties are so unexpected.

One thing that is interesting in keeping this journal is the public nature of it. Some friends have written how they think it’s either interesting or brave of me to be so relatively frank here and write about feelings, etc. I also think that it is interesting b/c I’m realizing that I need to be careful about who and what I write. I have tried to only write about my experiences on purpose, as other’s stories are theirs to tell. It will be interesting to see if I ever get in trouble w/ this public space and my words.

Back to our original subject, after lunch, Bogdana showed me to where I’d stay for the duration of the site visit. I know that this concept must be tiring to read already, but yes, I was a little surprised that the apartment was a large, renovated, Western-style flat, complete with modern washing machine. My favorite part of the apartment is the fancy paint job, with sparkles mixed in. At night I kept feeling like I was dizzy and seeing stars as the glitter would sparkle in the light.

I spent the next couple of days at CEUME. Sasha kindly took time to orient me, I met many people who work there and got to go to a very interesting press conference and tour at a hospital for children victims of Chernobyl. Apparently there are many cases of children of cleanup workers and of people who remained in the area getting quite ill, and there were many young children at this hospital.

In terms of my actual job, I am unsure exactly what I’ll be doing, but it seems that in addition to some website work that they need help with, I could be working on event planning, conducting seminars for staff and/or the public about IT issues and/or doing whatever they need.

At the apartment, I watched “Emma” dubbed in Russian. I hate dubbing, but at least it was good practice for language. I also got to eat Chinese food and I was shocked how delicious it taste!!! I guess I have missed eating non-Ukrainian food a little bit, although I really have no complaints about it.

On Thursday, after talking to my PC Regional Coordinator about the site visit, I returned to Brovary. I had bought a chocolate Easter bunny at a cute bakery in Kyiv and thus armed, knocked on Ira and Helena’s door. It felt so good to come “home” and see them! We had a great dinner and I felt so happy that someone knows me and was happy to see me. Slowly things become more familiar and slowly I feel more settled. Of course this process takes time, but the meantime while it is taking its time can be rather lonely.