Spring Cleaning! Doing my housework in Ukraine

It dawned on me the first time I pulled my Soviet-era vacuum cleaner out from the closet and realized the thing actually works: I need to write a blog about housework. Housework is a nearly universal occupation of humanity. All across the world, we are joined by the simple acts of sweeping and scrubbing and tidying up.

Let me first tell you about my home. Like a lot of residents of Ukrainian cities, I live in an apartment rather than a house. Big blocks of apartments are a Soviet legacy (read more here!) They were built mostly from the 1950s to 1970s to resolve the post-WWII housing crisis in Communist countries, and are known as Хрущевки (Khrushchevkas, named for the leader who envisioned the massive pre-fab housing project). My building is relatively small compared to the sprawling apartment networks that can leave one wandering forever in a maze of identical concrete structures.

I love my place. I might be going a little crazy, because I tell my place that I love it, and sometimes I say "Bye, apartment!" when I'm leaving for work, or "Hi apartment!" upon my return. There's a chip in the paint in the entryway that looks uncannily like the face of a bull terrier. I have named it Chip Bull.

Although I grew up with the habit of wearing my shoes in the house, in Ukraine shoes come off at the entryway. In summer it's because my shoes are dusty, and in winter it's because they are covered in mud and snow. Sweeping the entryway is always satisfying; it yields quite the impressive little pile of sand, especially if I shake the rugs out first.

Sweeping is a funny thing in Ukraine. You see, the brooms are tiny. I don't know why. I see old ladies with deeply hunched backs bent over and using tiny brooms to sweep leaves off the sidewalks. Are the people hunched over because the brooms are tiny? Or are the brooms tiny because the people are hunched over? Anyway, the brooms are tiny, but at least they are in good supply. You can always find somebody selling them on the sidewalk outside the bazaar.

As you can see from my photo session with my tiny broom, my apartment is equipped with a washing machine! It's small, but that works for me, because I only have so much room to hang up clothes to dry. A big, American-sized load of laundry would overwhelm my laundry-drying capacities.

The guidebook for my washing machine. Not sure why the cover is handwritten, as the rest of the book is printed. 

It comes with instructions in English! Thank goodness, because there are 20 different wash cycles. The translations can also be quite entertaining.  

In the winter, my laundry simply gets draped all over the heaters to dry. Socks go on the kitchen heater, dresses and hoodies on the hot water pipes in the bathroom, pants and sweaters on the big heaters in the bedroom and living room. On a given winter day my entire apartment may be draped with damp clothing. It's saved me from needing to buy a humidifier. In the milder seasons of the year, however, I dry my laundry on the balcony. It's humid in the summer anyway, so I don't need a humidifier.

As you can see, the balcony also houses my small salad garden. Right now it mostly consists of arugula in self-watering pots. Cut a large water bottle in half, put the top part upside-down into the bottom, insert a rag in the bottleneck to wick water, and then plant a plant in the upturned top part. Pour water into the bottom half, and the rag wicks the water up into the soil so that the soil stays moist. In addition to my arugula, I have somehow ended up growing a willow tree in one of these pots. It was an unplanned willow tree. I'm not sure what to do with it, as most people don't keep willow trees on their kitchen windowsills.

Once part of a bundle of Palm Sunday branches, this thing was determined to grow. You can probably figure out how I ended up with it if you read my Easter blog. 

The discussion of the unplanned willow brings us back to the kitchen, and hence to cooking! I am stupidly proud of the fact that I learned to flip pancakes with the giant wooden spatula thing that came with my apartment. Especially when you make buckwheat pancakes, which break very easily, flipping them with this thing is an art.

Bonus points if you can spot the tiny broom

Shortly after taking these pictures, I finally bought a more standard spatula, and the giant wooden spatula now serves as a stake for the unplanned willow.

I've mentioned pancakes, and as you can see, I have a pretty familiar-looking stove. It's definitely older than me, and I have to light it with a lighter, but it is my trusty companion and has browned many a perfect buckwheat pancake. I have to turn the gas on first - there's a big valve in the pipes leading in to the stove - and then I have to turn on and light the burner. I also have to light the oven if I want to use it, which is terrifying... it takes a while of holding the flame there, and then the thing erupts into flame with an epic whooshing sound. I find that I now chronically have the question in my head: "Did I leave the gas on?" I am not sure how many times I've left the apartment, and then turned around to check the gas.

The crazy lighting in the photo above is a result of my lovely kitchen windows. Almost the entire kitchen wall is windows, and the sill is wide enough that I can use it as my little dinner counter. I sit there and people-watch during my meals. Of course, these windows are old and poorly insulated, so one of my spring cleaning tasks has been to remove all the tape with which they were taped up during the winter to keep some of the draft out. I moved into my apartment in December, so everything was taped up already when I arrived. The first time I opened my kitchen window felt like such a momentous occasion. It meant that winter was really over.

Scarf to make me feel better about all the crud lurking under the tape in these old, flaking window frames. 

Of course a part of spring cleaning is taking out the garbage. I don't have a garbage can, so I just use a bucket and old plastic grocery bags. There is no recycling bin at my building, although the landlady tells me at one time there was. These things have a way of just... disappearing. The containers for plastic bottles usually look like large yellow cages, and for a while I was taking my plastic bottles for a good 20 minute walk to dispose of them in one such yellow cage. However, Ukraine is trying to implement new garbage-sorting laws, and now there is a small plastics bin along the sidewalk in front of my building.

And finally, the inspiration for this blog. It needs no explanation; I just wanted to share a photo of this vacuum cleaner. It is a champ. This thing was born of the domestic industries boom that began in the 1960s Soviet Union, about which you can read a fascinating little article here. Judging from internet searches and ads selling old Soviet vacuum cleaners, I think this one is from the 1970s. I have to be careful when I move it around because the hose will pop off, but heck, the darn thing survived the Cold War and it still works. It has the word "cyclone" written on it in Ukrainian.

Wait.... actually I'm not done. Because you know what works even better than this old vacuum?


Beating rugs with a stick. Paddle. Wand. Thing.

I don't know what it's called, but it came with my apartment and has the sole purpose of beating rugs. On a nice sunny day, I found myself needing both a workout and an excuse to get outside, so I hauled some of the many rugs that cover my apartment down the 6 flights of stairs it takes to get to the little yard, hung them up on the playground, and beat the living daylights out of them. It was very cathartic. If you hit the rug just right, it sounds like a car backfiring.

Anyway, it definitely got the job done. When my landlady came by later that day, she complimented me on how nice the apartment was looking. I still have a few more rugs to clean... but I'm waiting for my arm muscles to recover.

Cheers to the universal art of housekeeping.


(This blog reflects my personal views and experiences only, and is not indicative of the views or policies of Peace Corps or the governments of the US or Ukraine).

Easter in Pictures

Having now spent two Easters in Ukraine, I am pretty convinced that it is my favorite holiday here. The coming of spring, of course, adds to how festive and celebratory this holiday is. Easter season is full of feasts, so here is a feast of photos for you all!

Вербна Неділя (Verbna Nedilya) - Palm Sunday

Easter celebrations start to really kick in the week before Easter, on Palm Sunday. Since there are no palm trees in Ukraine, people instead gather pussy willow branches. Pussy willow grows along the riverbanks, and is the very first thing to bloom in springtime. On Palm Sunday, the sidewalks are dotted with people selling bundles of branches for 5 hryvnia (less than 25 cents USD). People bring their bundles of pussy willow branches to be blessed at the Palm Sunday church service, and then put them in a vase at home. If you are lucky, they will bloom in the week between Palm Sunday and Easter! Mine didn't, but oh well.

Великодні яйця (Velykodni yaitsia) - Easter Eggs 

Easter eggs are a huge tradition in Ukraine, with many different traditional styles. The style closest to American Easter eggs is the крашанка (krashanka): a hard-boiled egg dipped in dye. However, the most famous style of Ukrainian Easter egg is the probably the писанка (pysanka), which is painstakingly made using a process called batik. The egg is hollowed out and dried, and beeswax is used to draw a pattern on the egg. Then the egg is dipped in dye, and the beeswax covers certain areas of the egg from the dye, creating a pattern. The beeswax and dye process can be repeated to make multiple layers of different colors. You can read more about making pysanky here. 

As you can see, it is traditional to hang Easter eggs from trees! In my city, different schools and community groups each decorated their own tree, and the pathway in front of my apartment was lined with them. These eggs weren't all traditional pysanky - some where decorated with stickers, sleeves, or papier-mâché, some were painted, and some were even "eggs" made of recycled materials! 

It is also common for many Ukrainian cities to have a public display of giant Easter eggs, perhaps in front of a church or in a main square. I'm not sure what they are made out of, but they are gorgeous! These ones in my city were made by different universities, museums, and other community institutions.

On this egg, the college that made it cleverly incorporated their school's initials into the design - ЧДБК, written in blue:  

My favorite eggs paid homage to Ukrainian history. The one in the foreground below features ancient Trypillian designs, and the other shows Ukrainian people from three eras: Trypillia, the Cossack Hetmanate, and today. Humanity has a long tradition of visual history and storytelling, and these eggs are a prime example of how we can use art to pass on knowledge. The girl in the picture below was tracing her fingers along the different designs, peering closely at all the different people shown portrayed taking part in their traditional daily activities. 

For those who feel like nerding out on Ukrainian history a little bit: Trypillia was a significant civilization present in Ukraine around 4000 BCE, and a number of its largest settlements were located in what is now my oblast (administrative region) of Ukraine. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview about Trypillian settlements and culture. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and like Trypillia, the Cossack Hetmanate of the 1600s and 1700s also had key centers in Cherkasy region. The famous Cossack leader Bohdan Kmelnytsky is everywhere, with statues, plazas, and parks devoted to him throughout the city. 

Пасхальна служба (Paskhalna sluzhba) - Easter Service 

I unfortunately don't have many pictures from the Easter service that started at 11 PM on Saturday night and carried on until almost 5 AM, but that's because I was singing with the choir! The women's choir had a little nook on the right side of the church, while the men's choir stood in the loft area above the entrance. It was a bit of a challenge coordinating which choir sang when, and the two conductors were often communicating with hand signals. The juxtaposition of the furious and sometimes confused gesturing against the solemn and traditional service was pretty humorous. Toward the beginning of the service, we walked a circle around the church three times while singing. (Хресний хід - translates to something like "sacred walk"). We did this ritual once again at the end of the service, surrounded by people who had come with their glowing, candlelit Easter baskets of bread, eggs, and wine to be blessed.

 Прогулянки та пікніки (Prohulyanky ta pikniky) - Sunday Stroll and Picnics

Those who read my blog from last Easter may recall that in Ukraine picnicking is extremely popular on Easter Sunday. While last year was a bit grey and drizzly, this year Easter Sunday brought with it stunning blue skies and the most perfect warm weather one could dream of. Everybody was out picnicking, fishing, playing sports, and walking their dogs. After a morning nap to recover from the all-night church service, I spent my entire Easter afternoon strolling about, soaking up the sunshine and enjoying people-watching. I think people-watching is at its best when folks are so happy. 

Happy Easter, everybody! I am lucky that the timing of my service is just so, that I will get to spend three Easters here in Ukraine.


(This blog reflects my personal views and experiences only, and is not indicative of the views or policies of Peace Corps or the governments of the US or Ukraine).

So, what do I actually do in Ukraine?

Long time, no blog!

I had been so impressed with myself for consistently blogging once a month, but at the start of 2018 the ideas and the energy dropped off and my blogging streak ended. I think it is because I typically blog when I am traveling, but at this point my time in Ukraine doesn't feel like traveling anymore. I've adjusted to my new status quo, and being in Ukraine is just my normal life now. Hence, it's a little harder to feel inspired to write.

The one-year mark has come and gone unceremoniously. I spent my Ukrainiversary sitting in a health clinic doing hydrogen breath tests to figure out why my gut seems to hate everything, which felt like a suiting way to honor my group's arrival back on the Ides of March, 2017.

Anyhow, the winter doldrums are finally lifting. The daylight persists well into the evening now, the streets are no longer so perilously icy, and it's time to get back to the blog. I figured I'd take this opportunity to answer a pretty basic, yet complicated question:

What do I actually do? 

So, my title is technically "Business Advising Volunteer", but that title has been irrelevant ever since it was assigned to me. NGO Advising Volunteers and Business Advising Volunteers are all grouped together under the umbrella of Community Development, and so that is how we refer to ourselves: Community Development Volunteers, or CD Volunteers for short.

My work has mainly fallen along three lines since I got here:

1. Developing the internal operations of young, growing nonprofit organizations
2. Coming up with various side projects or contributing to other Volunteers' projects, including English clubs, trash cleanups, cultural fairs, and various workshops
3. Being the novelty American who gets invited to things just because of being the novelty American

I won't go into detail about everything I've been up to (that's what the dreaded VRF, or Volunteer Reporting Form, is for), but here's a little sampling so y'all back home can have an idea of what I do when I'm not posting pictures of snow on Instagram.

Summer 2017 Side Project: Dakhnivka Beach Cleanup

My first side project was to coordinate a cleanup day at the beach in the neighborhood where I lived when I first got to site. I did this mostly to force myself to start getting out into the community and interacting with people. I had to figure out basic things like how to locate the beach on a map, where the nearest bus stops were, where to obtain trash bags, etc. It was a great way to start getting acquainted with my city, and it also just so happened to get national media coverage! I'm hoping to help coordinate another one in May, but this time with more of the leadership and coordination handled by the locals.

Fall 2017 Side Project: Sharing Our Wacky, Hybrid American Culture!

Another little side project came about through a fellow volunteer who works at the local Business College. He invited me to come do a cultural workshop on pumpkin carving, so I gave a short presentation about the origins and history of the tradition, and then we had fun getting a little more hands-on with it. I was told (I'm not sure how jokingly or seriously) I should feel honored that the school's reigning beauty queen was there (yes, there is a Miss Business College pageant). She took an active part in carving our two pumpkins. The supplies were less than ideal (no fancy sets of pumpkin-carving tools to be found here) but we made it work!

Winter 2017/2018 Main Project: Capacity Development Training

Side projects are an important part of Peace Corps, but my "main job" is working on organizational capacity development. A major accomplishment so far was encouraging a recently-formed and somewhat struggling regional development agency to apply for a capacity development grant. We first had to do a capacity assessment, including some preliminary training on what constitutes organizational capacity, along with how and why to assess it. I then coached the staff through the grant application and documentation process. We didn't get the grant the the first time around, but with some more more coaching on the art of grant writing, the second application was successful, and with the grant funds they were able to bring in an expert facilitator to work with them for three days on strategic planning and fundraising. Key to this process was some time that the facilitator spent with executive staff and the board of directors to help them align their strategic priorities, and draft a five-year strategic plan for the agency.

Winter 2017/2018 Side Project: Write On Ukraine!

One of the highlights of my service so far has been helping with the international Write On competition, a creative writing competition in English held in about a dozen countries and organized entirely by Peace Corps Volunteers. I both organized a competition in my city, and served as the coordinator and judge for my region. As a judge, I got to read more than 50 stories written mostly by students in middle- and high-school, as well as by some university students and professionals. Reading creative writing is so fun. I had a lot of good laughs while sipping tea and poring over the stories with my Ukrainian co-judge. And of course, it is a lot of fun to be able to announce winners, give out prizes, and tell the participants how darn proud I am of them. I can't wait to run Write On again next year. For more information about Write On, you can check out the international website.

I was worried nobody would show up to an English-language creative writing competition, but these Ukrainian students were more than game! We had to pull out extra tables to accommodate everybody! Ви молодці!!! . . . . . . #peacecorpslife #peacecorpsukraine #HowISeePC #peacecorps #writeonukraine #ukraine #ukrainegroup51

A post shared by Cortney / Кортні (@calikrainian) on Feb 10, 2018 at 7:01am PST

Spring 2018: Helping Out in the Village

One of my fellow volunteers has an amazing project going on in a village in my region, and I was lucky enough to come help out at a week-long training she organized at the village school. She's helping the schoolteachers, staff, students, and even members of the village council to get training in project management, HIV/AIDS prevention, human trafficking prevention, gender equality, leadership, and volunteerism, so that they can then lead sessions on these topics at a big summer camp in June. I led some sessions on the topics of youth engagement, volunteering and leadership opportunities for students, and growth mindset as a way to think about self-esteem and learning. However, the funnest part was just being an extra set of hands for the activities another volunteer organized with the youth leaders.

What's in Store for 2018?

Even though it's already almost April, it feels like 2018 is just getting started. (It's hard to do much of anything when the sun sets by 4:00 PM and the streets are covered in 8 inches of solid ice). One NGO I've been working with just got a major grant, and I look forward to supporting them as they expand from being a part-time side gig to a fully operational organization. Serving in the Peace Corps is turning out to be much of what I had hoped for as far as an opportunity to try my hand at multiple aspects of organizational management and sustainability. I'm also continuing with a couple of English clubs, including the Short Story Club that most of you on Facebook have seen me post about at some point. 

Apart from work, I seem to have stumbled into singing with a local church choir, and we have a bunch of rehearsals for the next couple of weeks until the Orthodox Easter Service. It's quite a challenge, since most of the songs are in Church Slavonic. The choral director and one of my friends teamed up to transliterate the words phonetically into quasi-Ukrainian, since letters in Church Slavonic are pronounced differently. It feels so good to sing again! I'm also fortunate that my city has a couple of good dance studios, so for exercise I go to dance classes a few nights a week and the occasional social dance parties that are held here. I am pretty sure I'm the joke of the classes, since it's all Latin dancing and I am much more comfortable with Lindy or Blues - not to mention the classes are taught entirely in Russian, but hey - at least I'm having fun while serving as comic relief.

Okay, it feels weird to write so much about myself, and I'm starting to get self-conscious. But hey - at least those of you following my journey now have a taste of some of the opportunities I've had so far. As crazy and frustrating as things get sometimes, I am very lucky to be serving in Peace Corps Ukraine.

2017

It's kind of cool that I've been in a different place for the midnight transition from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day three years in a row now (and, in fact, for most of the past six years...)

• Last night: Swing dancing to a live band in a dance studio hidden away in a nondescript apartment building in Kyiv (after getting lost on the way there, when Google Maps decided to take me through a forest and then tried to make me cross a whole bunch of railroad tracks at a place they really aren't supposed to be crossed... I disobeyed Google and climbed my way up a muddy hill back to the road it said I didn't need to be on, and luckily didn't get my stuff too dirty in the process). At midnight we all lit sparklers in the dance studio, because it's Ukraine and you can light things on fire indoors.
• One year ago: Driving a couple of visiting friends through the front pasture on my parents' property because a sudden power outage rendered the driveway gate un-openable and nearly had us trapped. Our rebellious streak continued as we illegally pulled over on an off-ramp spanning the river (like all the other drivers were doing :-p ) to watch the midnight fireworks over my home city of Sacramento.
• Two years ago: Dancing blues and fusion in snowy, snowy Chicago. It was my first winter in the Midwest, and it was gorgeous. My truck doors didn't even freeze shut that night (I had learned how to avoid that rookie error the hard way...)

I don't know if I'll ever top NYE 2011/2012, when I had to sleep in London Stansted airport on my way back home to Dublin, because even though I had booked a hotel, I hadn't anticipated the massive holiday taxi fare hike or the fact that hotel shuttles wouldn't be running on NYE. Upon returning from a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon (yay Shakespeare!) I realized I couldn't afford a ride to my hotel, so I slept in the airport, flew back to Dublin on New Year's Day, and then walked all the way from the airport to my apartment because I had no bus money... even waking up in a hammock in Panama on the first day of 2014 doesn't quite top that (although I'd say it's a close second). 

Anyway, (mis)adventures and celebrations aside, this first day of 2018 seems a good time to try and remember what the heck happened in my life in 2017. It was a very scattered and fragmented year: 2.5 months working something like 4 part-time jobs in Sacramento, followed by 3 months of Peace Corps training in Chernihiv (way up by Belarus), 6 months living in a village-like neighborhood outside of Cherkasy (not by Belarus) and then finally - in the last month of the year - getting my own place and feeling like I have finally arrived. In the past year, I've lived with three different families (including my own), been a resident of two different countries and three different cities, had four different addresses, and gone from being unable to hear the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, to being able to explain in Ukrainian why I don't understand Russian (and then make excuses for why I haven't started studying both). In 2017, I started the year not knowing where I would spend most of it. It feels good to start 2018 with the expectation that I have a whole year ahead of me in this community that I have recently gotten to know.

In the midst of all this shifting and changing, I was also lucky enough to witness major milestones in the lives of some of my best friends back home. I gave a toast as Maid of Honor at my friend's wedding, dropping my handwritten binder-paper notes and spilling champagne on them in the middle of the speech. I held the first child of another one of my best friends, and somehow managed not to inflict some sort of lasting trauma on either of us. I'm usually petrified at the thought of holding babies, but this one was my friend's daughter, so I managed to not run away in terror.

2017 is not a year I can easily sum up, because it has been all over the place. I was learning noun declensions while friends got married and had children, US national politics went haywire, and what seemed like half my state burned down. 2017 brought bursts of spring tulips, the sweet anticipation of hearing a train whistle at the start of a journey, the unmitigated confusion of Ukrainian village council meetings, more middle-school drama than I ever had in middle school, more calls to Congress than I've ever made in any preceding year, and the startling feeling of seeing a familiar face as if for the first time, when for just a moment the fog of a language barrier is punctured by mutual understanding. It brought tragedy and hope as I watched friends back home work to rescue animals in need. It brought humility, because living overseas is fucking hard. 2017 is the year that called for teaching my Ukrainian counterpart how to say phrases like "when the shit hits the fan". 2017 isn't a year with a clear narrative for me; it has no definitive story arc. But 2017 got me to where I am now, and I feel pretty good with starting 2018 from where I ended up.