3 october

The past few days have included several minor victories, including traveling on public transportation alone to uncertain stops, successfully buying various items at stores and restaurants without assistance, and just generally keeping it together.

Our language lessons are pretty thorough, but our teacher, Oksana, is excellent and patient. We’ve just started to find out more about our technical assignments—job stuff—which for my whole cluster is either university teacher or teacher trainer. Education is the part I feel good about—more than any extensive past international experiences or Ukrainian language study, we’ll say—but it still looks to be fairly hard to figure out at this point, and I think lots of flexibility will be required. Still, that’s what I’m here to do! It seems possible from this angle that I might be teaching both English and pedagogy, will probably work at a university or a teacher-training institute, and may even live in a dorm.

Tomorrow, Saturday, is a half-day of working, so hopefully we’ll get a chance to relax a little and take in a little more of the sights and sounds of Chernihiv. Most of our cluster has just gotten phones, and most volunteers and trainees seem to have the same service, which allows us to call each other for free. This will be a helpful backup if we get lost… although it’s also pretty likely that we can’t offer too much support beyond the distant moral support. If you tell me what road you’re on and what you can see… and I can tell you how to tell someone nearby, “I’m lost!” --- я заблукала!