More about faces

Waiting in an interminable line at the post office at Maidan, I watched fascinated as a clerk used a sewing machine, right there behind the counter, to run up a cloth bag to enclose something for mailing. When have you ever seen a sewing machine in use at a post office? Never.

Obviously the lines are going to be slow if they’re sewing customized mailing bags.

My friends Pat and Roman are teachers at the school. They’re from Alberta, have Ukrainian ancestry and know all about the history of the area and the “breaking of the Slavic people” under the Soviet system. They're always helping me to put the difficulties of living here into perspective.

Last week I rode the trolley with Roman and Pat. Trolleys have this system where you buy a ticket and stick it into a little machine to punch a hole in it. It takes two hands--one to hold the ticket and one to push down the lever.

No one on a trolley has two free hands. Almost no one has one free hand. You’re holding a bag, you’re holding onto the bar for stability because the trolley is reeling back and forth and there are no seats.

I mentioned this to Roman. He told me that this is a remnant of the Soviet era, when everything on the “ground level of living” was difficult, and calculatedly so, to prevent people from having the energy to think about ideology. “You have to hold the ticket AND punch the ticket while grabbing onto your potatoes after waiting in line for three hours to buy them. And you‘re told that you‘re living in a Soviet paradise.”

So...no extra energy to grin at a stranger.

Kyiv Faces

I'm in Germany for the holiday break visiting Patty and her family. Such a happy cheerful smiling country! This may not be your impression of Germany. Well, compared to Ukraine, that's what it is. As soon as I got off the plane in Frankfurt I was struck by the difference. People make eye contact with you! They nod and smile! They even say "Guten Tag!"

I'm delighted to be in Kyiv but, to fit in, I can't show it. On the street, I've adopted a "Kyiv face." This is the face of everyone in the city: dour, unsmiling, flat affect, grim, staring straight ahead, never acknowledging the presence of another person. I walk to and from work every day (I LOVE walking to work!) and recognize fellow pedestrians. Never do they indicate that they recognize me. But they do: a friend who has worked here for four years said "oh, yeah, they know you. They even know you're an American, and they watch everything you do." I told him that by the summer I want someone to smile at me on the way to work. "Fat chance, " he said.

Sometimes my face hurts at the end of the day from the effort to keep my face Kyivian. Now and then I get on a bus, turn to the window, and grin widely, stretching those smiling muscles that haven't been used for hours. I probably look like a gargoyle to the people outside.

Shopping

It's hard to find some stuff here that, to an American, is pretty basic--stuff like index cards and rubber bands. (thanks to everyone who has sent/brought me these necessities from the US or Germany!) They're not sold in office supply stores. Where do you find them? It's a mystery.

Yesterday I spent three hours tracking down envelopes for Christmas cards (which are sold without them). The only reliable place to find envelopes is the post office, where there are ten windows. Five had visible clerks. There were about twenty workers behind the scenes. Two windows had lines. One window had a bunch of people brandishing passports. The other line had people filling out endless forms. These people were not just buying envelopes.

One window (without a line) had a rack of envelopes behind the clerk. I approached her, pointed to the envelopes, and said "Mozhna?" (translated as "will you help me? I need help. hey!")

The clerk waved me away. I went back to the line with people who were filling out forms. After about twenty minutes, that clerk finished her task, waved me over, and was wonderfully helpful, asked me which envelopes I wanted, did I want a mixture, bolshoi (big) malinky (little), ran back and forth showing me the envelopes.

I like the post office, it's not that different from my local P.O. in Arlington.

Night Life on a Tuesday

I just got back from a $3 night at the National Opera House--this gorgeous "belle epoque" building dates from 1901. Somehow Stalin and Hitler didn't get around to bombing it. The last tsar of Russia, Nicholas (of Nicholas and Alexandra) had a prime minister who was assassinated here. (Yesterday I went to a restaurant where an alleged Ukrainian mafia hit took place.)

The opera house is ridiculously cheap for anyone who's not earning a local salary. I went at least once a week the first month I was here, before reality set in: I'm working hard, exhausted at the end of the day, it's usually not fun to go out at night during the week!

But this is the last week before the holiday break. Tonight was ballet, "Giselle." Friday it's opera, "Madame Butterfly." Tonight I went with the wife of the director (principal) of the school, her friend from France, and her daughter from Damascus. On Friday I'll go with American, British, and Colombian friends. A good mix.

Teacher Jargon

One of the best things about teaching at an international school is the freedom from federal requirements and the constant emphasis on standardized testing. What a relief! I can teach whatever I want as long as it's "related to the curriculum" and includes some grammar and vocabulary.

Well, EVERYTHING includes grammar and vocabulary, and pretty much anything can be related to the curriculum. So my fifth-graders are writing about Flat Stanley and exchanging him with kids all over the place, my sixth- and seventh-graders are practicing for a 5-minute version of Hamlet, and my grade 8 and 9 students have read Ionesco (inspired by my friend Regan, the drama teacher, and her grade 11-12 students' performance of his play "Tales for People under 3 Years of Age." It was hilarious!)

It's a lot of work but, interestingly, the harder I work, the easier it gets.

Ukrainian Mystery Date

I've always dreamed about teaching overseas. Since about 1997, my goal was to do it before hitting 50, which back then seemed very far away. A couple of years ago, I realized that my target age was creeping up, and I'd better get moving.

Well, I got in just under the wire, and here I am, half a century! Whether here or in the U.S., I'd have turned 50 anyway, and I'm happy to be here, experiencing a new culture and learning new things, like the alphabet.

Patty visited from Germany for the weekend, which was wonderful. She came to school with me on Thursday and students immediately began calling her "Ms. Panneton #2." She noticed aspects of the city that I've already begun to take for granted, like the mix of architectural styles in Kyiv: Soviet-bloc buildings, baroque, contemporary, junky vacant lots, art nouveau.

Friends came over and I received a bunch of joke gifts good for someone turning 50 in Kyiv, ie the tiara pictured at left and a Ukrainian version of the old "Mystery Date" board game. Most Americans born circa 1956 recognized this game and could even sing the jingle ("Mystery date! behind the door, a dreamboat or a dud?") but it puzzled a young Ukrainian teacher.

"We did not have such games when I was a child," she said. (her childhood was spent behind the Iron Curtain and was free from corrupt western influences like Mystery Date. Read After the Wall by Jana Hensel to get an idea of what it was like to grow up in the USSR).

I think I'll play Ukrainian Mystery Date with my fifth-graders.

Famine Stories

The weather was mild yesterday and, wanting to take advantage of the weather before the onslaught of -20 degrees, I wandered around the neighborhood of Podil. I ended up at St. Mikhayil's Monastery of the Golden Domes, a beautiful Orthodox church that was blown up by Stalin and just reconstructed in 2001.

As I approached the plaza, I saw hundreds of flickering lights---candles in glass holders, lining the square, arranged in the shape of crosses or circles, some with sheaves of wheat before them. Crowds of people were walking around, carefully stepping over the candles. Everyone was quiet. There were families, teenagers, old people.

The memorial to victims of the 1932-1933 famine is at St. Mikayil's. This is a famine I'd never heard of before I got the job in Ukraine and started reading up on Ukrainian history. Ukraine was known as the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union" but in the early 30's, Stalin forced farmers all over the country to give their grain to the Communist government. At least 6 million people died of starvation.

The candles and sheaves of wheat were in honor of the victims--yesterday was the 2nd official commemoration of the famine. Today at school, when I talked about seeing the memorials, every Ukrainian teacher had a story to tell. Olga said that her grandfather had worked in the city and was able to get food. He took it to his parents in a village, they ate too much (after being starved) and died from the shock. Natasha told me that her grandmother had had a baby and was unable to nurse him. She fed him whatever food she had been able to hoard. Children in the village scrambled around to eat the baby's "poop"--there was nutrition in it. The grandmother and the baby both died. And on and on...

Ukrainian Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was an ordinary workday, although a couple of American parents brought in pumpkin pie and talked about "things to be thankful for" to the uncomprehending sons and daughters of local millionaires and rich ex-pats. "If you have food, shelter, and clean water, you have more than 75% of the rest of the world! If you have all that and a few kopeks in your pocket, you're in the top 8% of the world's population!"

Any local kid who goes to the school is from the stratosphere of the Ukrainian economy---the average income here is $4,000/year, while tuition is $15,000. I've never taught rich kids before, let alone rich kids who live in a poor country, and who are possibly the children of the Ukrainian "mafia" (as the gossip goes).

Very early I identified the phenomenon of the "evil local Dennis"---three of the Ukrainian/Russian kids in my ESL classes are behavior problems, and they're all named Dennis. The ESL classes are full of kids who speak Russian. Most of them want to learn English, but the Dennisses seem to know they're already set for life. Why bother learning English? So they spend all of their time trying to distract their classmates by talking Russian to them. I anticipated a lot of problems, but not this one!

Ukrainian vs. Russian

I've been trying to learn some Ukrainian but have inadvertently learned some Russian. Ukrainian is the official language but Russian is still the "language of the marketplace," at least here in Kyiv. The first week I was here, I thanked somebody in Ukrainian, saying "dyakuyu." The clerk corrected me: "spaseeba!"

That trained me to always say "spaseeba!" And now I'm stuck with it---I was saying "spaseeba!" in Germany over the fall break, despite years of saying "danke!"

I can understand and say numbers in Ukrainian, but when I ask "skeelky" (Ukrainian for "how much"), the response is in Russian. Numbers in Russian sound something like numbers in Ukrainian, but are different enough that by the time I process it, the clerk has given up and punched out the price on a calculator and shown it to me, the poor dumb monolingual westerner.

And then I pay the equivalent of sixty cents for two pounds of carrots at the rEEOOHnok (can't even try to reproduce the sound of that Cyrillic letter, a backwards N), the giant covered market, five minutes from my apartment, with dozens of stalls where local merchants sell fresh fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian's paradise.

A rainy Monday

After living in Kyiv for almost three months, I find myself unable to keep up with emails (internet access is sketchy at home and there's very little, ie NO time at school). I'm taking the plunge into the advanced technology (for me, anyway) of creating a blog. So...live from Kyiv, here I am!

Winter's on its way but not here yet. The temperature drops to freezing and it snows, then it gets warm again and I open the windows and mosquitos buzz around, even here on the seventh floor in November in Kyiv. (flypaper strips are still hanging all over the place) The first freezing spell was the week of October 15. Coincidentally, October 15 is the date that city workers begin to turn on the heat in apartment buildings all over the city. However, it's turned on over a period of two weeks, neighborhood by neighborhood. All of the ex-pat teachers were asking each other "did you get heat yet?"

I hadn't, and by Wednesday I felt colder in my apartment than out of it. I finally gave up and went to Mega Mart (the local version of Wal-Mart) to buy a little electric heater. Usually I carry a Ukrainian/English phrasebook, but in my rush to get out of my arctic living space and into a heated store, I forgot it. Then I couldn't figure out which appliances were heaters and which were fans or dehumidifiers or whatever...juicers, for all I knew. Luckily, one of the clerks spoke enough English to help me out. Basics like "hot" and "cold" are really words I should have known by then! I know them now (haryachyy and kholodnyy).