Sweating to the Oldies: Ukraine Style

The good news is I have been bad about up-dating the blog because I have been so busy! Though I still managed to find time to become addicted to yet ANOTHER tv show. I somehow worked through the first two seasons of “24” in about a week. It’s just so good.

The beginning of the month was slow. We were closed for a number of Ukrainian and International holidays. But as soon as the prazniki were over, mission season began. What is a mission? It is far less religious than it sounds. In the JDC world, a mission is a person, or couple, or group of people, usually from the US, usually Jewish, who are donors or potential donors or people who will get the word out about our work to attract donors, who come for a day or a few days to visit the JDC programming they are either funding or may potentially fund, and meet with representatives of the organizations/programs. My role in receiving missions ranges from giving tours of Hesed, to meeting groups for dinner, to providing information and giving interviews about the Jewish Service Corps, to playing tour-guide and interpreter all over Kyiv covering all the Jewish sites of interest. In May I helped to host 7 missions. That’s a whole lot of translating. I have met a lot of very interesting and influential people in the past few weeks! Maybe one of them will help me find a job...

To test my translating skills further, Natasha and I have been hard at work creating a Hesed website, for which I was responsible for all the English content. Hopefully it will all be done and up and running by the time I leave. Things move slowly here...

Also, summer come early! Starting in mid-May, the weather has been consistently hot and sunny. It has been 80-90 degrees and sweltering for almost a month now. I have no a/c. I do have a large fan...but my babushky have cautioned me against sitting directly in front of it lest I get a lung infection from the draft.

In addition to all the missions, I had more visitors! My dad was in Ukraine for 3 weeks, first on a
short-term Fulbright in Mykolaev, then working on his on-going project in Dnepropetrovsk, then on a quick trip to Kyiv. If you are looking for the source of my bizarre FSU obsession and desire to live/work/play here, my dad is partially to blame/thank. A few days after my dad arrived, I took the sweatiest overnight train imaginable down to Mykolaev. We promptly hopped on a marshrutka (mini-bus) to Odessa where we spent 24 hours strolling, eating, checking out local culture and sharing stories about experiences and interactions in this strange country. If you are looking for Ukraine’s other number one fan, I think my dad is it! Back to Mykolaev the next day to check out dad’s temporary home. Turns out Mykolaev is a very pretty, very green, very walkable, lovely small Ukrainian city! Also turns out we have family from Mykolaev (they left late 1800s)! A cousin of ours gave us the address, so we stopped by. Dad forgot the keys though, so we couldn’t get in. (xaxa it is joke.)

A less-sweaty train ride back to Kyiv and 2 days of packing cookies for the Warm Homes later, Evan arrived in Kyiv! A first trip to Ukraine is shell-shocking. I made sure to keep Evan at the highest level of shell-shocked-ness for the duration of his 11 days here. How did I do this? While we traveled all over the country (and to Moldova for a few hours, then through Transnisteria-- Europe’s Newest Country) I made sure Evan had as many “typical” Soviet, I mean Ukrainian, expereinces as possible— We took multiple forms of loooooooong hot-as-hell overnight transportation next to crying babies, stayed in an un-renovated Soviet in-tourist hotel, rode marshrutkas until we had sweat through our clothes and were on the verge of passing out, were force fed sweets by old ladies (who were ecstatic to meet my “fiance” as they insist on calling him), haggled over differences of a few cents at markets, were interrogated by border guards (you’ll have to e-mail me for the full story on this one...), and dodged drunk men and ill-fitting man-hole covers. Whew. While the rest of this country is beautiful and interesting, and Lviv and Odessa are both strikingly European looking, though a little bit crumbly, we were both relieved to get back to “clean”, modern, cosmopolitan Kyiv! Can you imagine?...

Evan is a champ. He learned to read Cyrillic on his first day, and absorbed almost everything I showed and explained to him in true “see how it grows?” fashion (sorry, that’s a little Wertlieb fa-mi-ly joke). The only time he stopped talking to me was for a few hours after a 5 hour Chisinau (capitol of Moldova which I had a burning desire to visit) to Odessa marshrutka that included several border interrogations, transit through Transnisteria (a horrifying and unbelievable fake country, see above in text links), a mandatory bribe, a bag search, and again, gallons and liters of sweat. When we arrived at the hotel after what we now refer to as “that great character building experience we shared,” there was a sign at the desk saying “we regret to inform you that we have no hot water.” When I asked when there would be hot water the lady replied with a chuckle, “I don’t know, maybe October.” Luckily, I had reserved a more expensive room (about $4 more than a standard room) with its own hot water heater, so we did have hot water, and Evan did resume speaking to me after having a nice shower.

Pictures from all of these travels are in the Photo Album link.

Now its back to work until my grandmother and aunt arrive next week. We are planning a little trip to Chernobyl. Not joking. After that its really time to wrap things up (I head home August 2^nd!) and then train my replacement! You may remember Sarah, she was the crazy maniac who came to Kyiv on the Kyiv/Chicago Hillel Spring Break trip and stayed a few extra days with me? Well, she’s signed up for more! Guess that makes her Ukraine’s third number one fan...