Life of a PST

PST stands for Peace Corps Trainee. For the past three months we have living in Chernigov, just about 2 hours north of Kiev and only about 60 miles away from Chernobyl. In fact, last time it rained in Chernigov, our Russian teacher hid under an awning to avoid becoming radioactive. Other than potentially becoming one of the X-Men Chernigov was an awesome city and our Ukrainian host family was amazing. She cooked vegetarian food for us, Ukrainian style. Everything was fried heaven. There was sirniki, blinchiki, tort, borscht, salat, vinaigrette, and of course pizza with mayonnaise. But Kell and I also had a chance to cook for them. We made some Thai food, and kellee made some delicious pumpkin pie around thanksgiving. Also we introduced them to the world of root beer. When marina first had it, all she could say was “interesting.”Then she went and got her bottle of mouthwash, not to get the taste out of her mouth but to show me that the root beer tasted just like her mouthwash. Well eventually her and Urie fell in love with it and we even had some root beer floats.

Aside from home cooked meals, it has been my mission to try every kind of candy, cookie and sweet here in Ukraine. So far it is going well and the results have been positive. We have also been on a mission, maybe unintentionally, to eat at every pizza parlor we see, mostly because we are not sure what else to order anywhere else. It summary, Ukraine is very yummary…..

What else…, learning Russian has been fun and challenging. For the past 3 months we have had Russian class every weekday for about 4 hours. We virtually had about 3 years of schooling crammed into 3 months, and it was awesome. We are in a group aka cluster with 3 other people. Our cluster we pretty amazing. I could go on about each one in our group but suffice it to say that they were pretty dang cool.

Aside from learning we also taught 3 lessons a week and a local school. We taught 6^th 2^nd and 10^th grades. My 6^th grade class, who I taught the most, were good kids. Occasionally I would bring a treat for them, maybe some American candy or cookies or something. In return they started bringing me food and souvenirs, or whatever they had sitting in the bottom of their backpack. At one point I got a dice, bookmark, bracelet, and some delicious homemade rolls. I will miss them, but hope to visit them again sometime.

I did forget to mention that we had a killer cat. Not killer liker “killer boots man” but in the sense that it tried to kill us several times. Every morning when we woke up it would be waiting outside our bedroom door and would try to pounce when we opened it. Urie or marina would have to come save us. Before we knew it was a killer cat it attacked kellee and scratched up her legs pretty bad. If we came home and she was out, we would have to battle her back into another room and shut the door or just race into ours and become her prisoners. I’m gonna miss that cat.

A quick history of Chernigov, it is a very old city approximately 3,000 years old and still remains some very old churches, some 1,000 years old. We did some site seeing while we were there and it was very cool to try and think of how it would have been back in those days. The city has been destroyed by war more than a few times and most recently world war 2. The city still appears pretty battered with decaying buildings and roads, but it is strangely very beautiful. Every day I love to walk to class and experience life in Ukraine. We would see the same stray dogs every day, but they were really just more like community owned dogs. Everybody walks to where they need to go, or cram inside a short bus (aka mashrootka). Even though it was populated by about 300,000 people it still seemed like a small community. I will miss you Chernigov.

Now we are in a new city and our final resting place for the next two years. It is a very nice city by the black sea called…… to be continued!!!  (No that’s not the name of the city)