Hello again. We have returned from our three week long English camp marathon. We began here in Izium with our art and music camp (which turned out to have less music and more visual art). We had some great help mostly from volunteers living in western Ukraine. They came and really did a good job implementing our plans and making them interesting for the students. We made pinatas on Monday, landscape collages on Tuesday, found art sculptures on Wednesday, and charcoal portraits on Thursday. On Friday, we had a concert (performed by the students - Shannon and I sang a song too) and then we went outside and busted a couple of pinatas. (We have video on Youtube and pictures on Facebook for your perusing). We got some great work out of the students and they spoke a lot of English and learned and practiced some new vocabulary.
On Saturday, Shannon got a stomach virus and we needed to be in Kharkov by 6pm to board our train to go to Odessa. I was ready to call off the next camp but Shannon somehow made it to the bus station and suffered through a two hour ride on a hot, bumpy, swerving bus to Kharkov so that we could make it to the camp in Yuzhne. She is amazingly tough and one of the strongest people I've ever met. Once on the train she could lay down and by then the worst of the virus was over. So, we took a 14 hour train to Odessa.
We spent three or four hours in Odessa where we met up with Davidson and Megan (who have been traveling around eastern Europe since their service ended) along with Heidi (who came with us from our art camp here in Izium). Odessa is a very old city and there were some very cool sights to see there but I think the city would be best understood with a guide because without some kind of context the buildings are just buildings and you don't know where to go to see cool stuff like in Kiev or Lviv. But we had some fun and then hopped on a bus to Yuzhne.
Yuzhne is about an hour east of Odessa by bus. It's is a very small port city (about 2 sq kilometers) but it's occupied by around 40,000 people most of which live in 10+ story apartment buildings. It has a oil port, refinery, chemical plant, and a couple of other sea-related industries so it is one of the richest cities per capita in all of Ukraine. It has no less than three huge sports complexes with indoor, olympic-sized swimming pools (one of which has waterfalls and and fountains in it), a town square that has a huge fountain, and a convention center/auditorium that's better than the one in Kiev. It also has beautiful beaches right on the Black Sea.
There we had a camp setup by a Ukrainian English teacher. This is extraordinary because, though Ukrainian teachers frequently setup camps on their own, they very rarely reach out to PCVs from other regions to come and help. This particular teacher was colleagues with our language teacher in Kyinka when she was a teacher in Yuzhne so that's how we got hooked up. We lived in the school which provided us with beds as well as all of our meals. There we had classes on food, animals, music, and the United States. On Friday there we made tie-dye shirts and bandanas and for lunch we taught the kids about Mexican culture and Tex-Mex food and we all (kids included) made burritos and non-alcoholic sangria. In addition, we taught the kids to play kickball and baseball (whiffle ball). We planned to teach them ultimate frisbee but they literally chanted "baseball, baseball, baseball" in protest, so we played baseball again.
While we there we had to work from 9am to 2pm and then we were free. However, when we arrived on Sunday it was cool. Then it stormed and some north winds blew in and it became sweater weather on the beach at the Black Sea. Figures. This lasted until Tuesday and then it progressively got warmer and by Thursday you could swim. On Tuesday we tried to swim but the water was so cold that it made your legs burn and then go numb. Wednesday wasn't much better either but the sun was out so I forced myself to submerge and then I raced out of the water as did everyone at the beach that day. Just way too cold. Something cool about Wednesday though was that Shannon and I waded in to our thighs and Shannon said, "Hey, look there's a jellyfish! ...And another! ...And ANOTHER!" Then we looked around us and there we thousands of them. The sea was filled with them. We asked if they would sting us but the locals said no and then we saw little kids running around holding huge globs of jellyfish. There were a few kids building sand castles and adding jellyfish to the tops which gave them a gelatin sheen...bizarre. On Thursday there were waves and so we got to body surf which was a lot of fun and then on Friday we took a dip in the sea one last time and then went back to Odessa to catch an overnight train to Kiev.
We got to Kiev very early in the morning and hung out for a couple of hours while the day caught up to us and then we took a bus to Radomishel to help out at Heidi's camp. Radomishel is a small(ish) town an hour west of Kiev. There we lived in the kindergarten room which is filled with little bunk beds which were lashed together so we each slept sideways on four beds. It was fun though. We taught two lessons a day for five days so I won't bore you with the details of each but we each got our own team of kids and we did do some really funny cheers and skits with our teams. On Friday we tie-dyed t-shirts and Shannon tie-dyed a pair of white Levi's she bought there at a second hand store. Overall, it was a very successful camp.
We then took a bus back to Kiev and another bus to Chernigov where Bagdan and Aliona came and picked us up and took us to Kyinka. We spent three days there eating too much food and speaking only in Russian. Our families were very happy to hang out with us. We went to Shannon's family's house and had dinner and then they came to Bagdan's house for another big dinner the next night. I probably gained 20 pounds there but we leveled up on our Russian so it was worth it. I also got to help Bagdan work on his fence which I helped with all during training. We want to go back on the 12th of August for Bagdan and Aliona's wedding anniversary and Papa Kola's 60th birthday. We had a blast in Kyinka needless to say.
We took an overnight train back to Izium which arrived at 4:30am yesterday and we crashed. When we woke up, our extra loud and Yoda-old refrigerator was filled with ice in the freezer compartment so I started busting up some ice to free some of our food in there. As the ice fell away I began to hear a hissing sound. Yeah...ALL of the freon leaked out of the refrigerator as the ice burst a coil. Shannon's counterpart and I went to a repair place today where the repairman heard about the coil busting and pronounced our fridge dead. It's in our living room now. Luckily, before we left for our camps we made sure that all perishable foods were either eaten or thrown away so we didn't lose any food. Tomorrow, we're going to go look at a used refrigerator which will be fairly inexpensive so the problem should be corrected by tomorrow afternoon.
So, we are back and happy. We got a new volunteer in our town. His name is Ed. We have another about 30 minutes away and his name is Blakely so this weekend we're going to have them over, have a dinner and meet them. We're very lucky for more reasons that this. We have people here that love and support us and even more, like you, in the States.
Thanks for reading our blog this week. I know it was very long but it's been such a long event-filled time that it had to be. Check out our Facebooks for pictures and our Youtube channel for videos. We love you, we miss you and we'll see you soon.
Danny and Shannon
