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) 

Life Till Now

A lot has been happening in the last few years in the Mayfield family and i am going to give you the 32x fast forward version of things and maybe a little slow motion during the real good parts.
          Kellee and I (Caden) met about 6 years ago in Kennewick Washington while on splits with the missionaries. Kellee and i were both attending CBC, a community college, where Kellee was playing volleyball. Basically, i asked her out a few times afterward and she turned me down, surprisingly. Finally she came to her senses and asked me out to a wizard of oz play, a movie that has given me nightmare since i was a kid. luckily the play was much less frightening and we had a great night. We have been together ever since. We were married in the Boise Idaho Temple on January 26th 2007 and lived in Kennewick untill September when we moved to Cheney Washington to go to Eastern Washington University. Kellee finished a degree in communications and children's studies and a minor in sociology sometime in 2009. After a year stint at BYUI and a change in my major we moved back to Cheney for 2 more years and i have just graduated with a degree in Visual Communication Design (aka graphic design) and a minor in communications.
           Backtracking about a year and a half, i was wondering what i wanted to do after i graduated. I guess wasn't quite ready for the American dream yet, a good job (or a bad one), house and kids. Or maybe i wasn't ready to grow up. Either way i felt a depressing restriction or fear that i was going to be trapped doing something i didn't want to do and also a pull to get out and have an adventure. So i started throwing some ideas around about joining the military but wasn't sure it was for me. Since Kellee and i had been married we had always talked about living and working out of the country, but more as a fantasy than real life. One day i had a conversation with a friend of mine and the peace corps came up. I had heard of it but never really gave it any thought. That night as we lay in bed i pulled the computer out and started researching the Peace Corps.
          After hours of looking and reading i could feel myself getting really pumped up. A map on the site showed all of the places we could go if selected. One of the places was Ukraine which maid me even more excited, I also thought the pacific islands would be pretty sweet. A quick side note, on my mission on Michigan i had a chance to teach a family from Russia who i grew to like. A member who taught them with us had learned Russian which sparked my interest in the language and country. After my mission and during my time at BYUI I took a year of Russian and even made a three week trip there with a short stay in Kiev Ukraine. I loved it over there and have been interested in that area ever since. So when i saw that we could go to Ukraine i knew that that's what i wanted to do. I was so sure that i had to wake Kellee up at 2 in the morning and tell her what we were going to do. she was pretty incoherent but i had to tell someone. As you can imagine she was a little confused and surprised after she woke up later that morning.
          For the next few days i couldn't think about anything else, which was a bit annoying as i had lots of school work to do. Not long after, I got online and filled out all of the paper work and submitted it. In the paper work it asked if you had any preferences for where i wanted to go and of course i put Ukraine. Kellee did hers a little later after she realized that i wasn't playing a joke on her. Kellee usually does a pretty good job letting me do my thing and having my dreams until reality hits me. This time was no different. After doing way to much paper work, and then a little more we started getting emails from the Peace Corps, and maybe a month or two later they wanted us to go to Seattle for an interview. This is when things started getting a little more serious. We had to drive to Seattle and have individual and joint interviews. I think they went fine, and we had a chance to ask any questions that we had. One of the questions i asked was how likely we were to go to the place we requested. She replied by saying basically that there was no chance. In addition, she let us know that it was very hard to place couples seeing as how they had to find a place where they needed a couple and a place where we were both qualified for the work. Well that put a slight damper on my plans but we still had hopes they would place us in a good spot.
           Well a few months went by and they hadn't found a spot for us. Then a few more went by and still nothing. If they haven't found anything after three tries you get dropped from the list and have to reapply. well the third time was coming around and we hadn't heard anything. Well we stared getting a little nervous that we wouldn't get placed to we started making back up plans. I had been doing some research on teaching English elsewhere and filled out some applications.
           One of the places was called Language Link in Russia.Well they were interested and they called and I had an interview over the phone. That same night i got an email telling me I got the job. We were so excited that I got the job and Kellee was just happy that we finally had a solid plan. We would be leaving in August. For the past year basically, everything was so wishy washy and we didn't know where we were going or what was going to happen. By then we had given up on Peace Corps and for that next week i was learning about Russia and more about Language Link.
          Then, out of the blue we got a call from our Peace Corps recruiter. She said there was an emergency opening in.......... the Pacific Islands, the one other place we thought would be really cool to go to, leaving in October. I would be teaching English and Kellee would be working in the health sector. Oh man were we pumped, island paradise. They said we had a day to decide to accept or reject the offer. It was very hard for me because i really wanted to go to Russia but the pacific islands for the peace corps just sounded soooo good. That night we went over all the pros and cons of both, Kellee, understandably so, had an easier time than i picking the Peace Corps. So, we called the peace corps and told them yes. However, there was still a chance we would not get to go or get in to the Peace Corps. Without going into the intricacies of the whole process, just because we we "nominated" doesn't mean we would be "invited". I know, its a very unstable situation, so we decided to continue working with Language Link and the Peace Corps just to keep our options open. Kellee eventually had her interview with Language Link and she also got the job.
         The months following were even more stressful. To give us some more time we emailed Language Link to ask to leave in September rather than August to give us more time and they approved. We now had to do more paper work for both organizations, not knowing which one we would end up with. Passports, visas and grammar modules for Language Link and the dreaded medical packet for Peace Corps. Again i am paraphrasing a long tortures process, but the medical work we needed to get done was going to cost nearly $1,000 each!!! Fortunately, I had a brother who is a physicians Assistant who could do some of the work but he lived a few hours away. But even better Kellee found a air force base near by that would do the work for free! Unfortunately free doesn't mean painless, so for the next few months we were poked and prodded and dealt with tedious paper work. At the same time we were making frequent visits to a cheap dental clinics an hour and a half away to correct years of poor college student lack of dental care.
           This is where it gets more complicated, if it wasn't already enough. I guess you could say at this point we have reached the present time, the end of June. Language Link was making the final preparations for us and we needed to start buying plane tickets if we wanted to get them cheap. Also our lease was ending and I was getting close to being done with summer school. During this period everyone was so confused on where we were going, including us. Every time someone would ask us it would take at least ten minutes to explain it all. Most people didn't see where the confusion was, the answer was easily the pacific islands. Warm sun and sand or ice cold winter? The answer seemed easy to others but to me i still felt a strong pull to Russia for many reasons. A while back we fasted to get some inspiration and i felt a strong pull to Russia and i had been having lots of dreams about Russia. Also, we were running into Russians and Ukrainians all over the place. It seemed to me that we should go to Russia. During, the whole process though, Kellee had a very strong pull to go to the Peace Corps. She said she felt warm when she thought about it. In the end we had to make a decision and that decision was Russia.
              We were virtually done with all of our Peace Corps paper work and they had recently requested an  updated Resume and some other stuff i really didn't want to do. I was just so tired of doing paper work. I was happy to let Peace Corps know that we were no longer interested in perusing it. But..... we were so close to being done. after nearly 14 months of torture we were almost there. By principal alone we must finish this! Kellee kept saying, "we just need to finish it!" Well against all that is good and holy we turned in the rest of the documents and guess what, they sent us another email.
            This time they told us they  had a new location for us...... Eastern Europe leaving in, of course, September, both teaching English. They also wanted to have a phone interview with us. We were pretty happy with Eastern Europe seeing as it was pretty close to the original place we wanted to go to, Ukraine. But, this roller coaster we have been on has made a little desensitized and we were taking this new news with a grain of salt. So, back to square one, where should we go? If you haven't noticed Peace Corps is very vague and Eastern Europe could be any number of countries.  Luckily, I found a website that lists all of the countries that Peace Corps would be sending volunteers to in September. They are Macedonia and Azerbaijan. The research starts Again! Also in my research i find out that usually in the second interview on the phone the Peace Corps tells you if you are being invited, or the final word that you are finally in or not.
          Well, a few weeks later we finally got the call. We answered some routine questions and at the end she says, "I will be putting your official invitation in the mail tomorrow." Holy Cow!!! I cant believe it is finally over! We have made it into the Peace Corps! But, we still didn't know where, Macedonia or Azerbaijan? The Invitation could take anywhere from 3 to 10 days to get here. I couldn't wait any longer and these last days were almost unbearable. By this time we had sold almost everything we had apart from random stuff in the apartment. We were sleeping on an air mattress and had been riding the bus and the bike since we had sold the truck.  I had also finished school and had nothing to keep my mind occupied. Days seemed like months.
           One thing i want to add is some more interesting information i came upon. When i was searching for possible countries we could go in Eastern Europe i noticed that in 2011 the Peace Corps sent volunteers to a little place called Ukraine in September, but i had passed it off because in 2012 the Peace Corps was only sending volunteers in March, or so i thought! In my attempt to pass the time i did a google search, "Ukraine Peace Corps September 2012." What came up made me want to, to quote a song, "shout! Throw my hands up and shout!" I found a blog of a girl who had just been invited to go to Ukraine for the Peace Corps leaving in September! There is no way. There is no way that after all that craziness that we would actually end up in the very place we wanted to go but knew there was no chance we would. But now there was a chance. I almost wish i wouldn't have read that because it made the next couple of days even worse. Now i had my hopes up for Ukraine but still had a chance of not going.
             Finally the day came. Kellee and i had just made lunch and in the blessing of the food i prayed that our package would come in the mail today. we sat down to eat and five minutes later the bell rang. It was the mail man with the package. It was almost like a dream. We got the camera out and recorded the whole thing. I opened up the envelope and pulled out a peace of paper. Before i started reading it my eyes connected with one word.....Ukraine.