Gazebo

My class of 6th and 7th graders is held on the top floor of a "container", or temp building, made of metal with a flat roof and a lot of windows that don't open. It's suffocating. The kids have been clamoring to have class outside. The other day I relented, so we all descended the hazardous ladder-like stairs and headed for the playground. "Some of you go to the picnic table, everybody else to the gazebo," I told them.

Some of the kids thought this was hilarious. "Gazebo! What means gazebo? That is funny!" "That little building, with a roof and no walls--that's the gazebo," I explained.

Yesterday they came into class saying "Ms. Panneton! we like that word! Gazebo! yes! it is so funny!" So I amended the assignment that was already written on the board: "Write original sentences using eight new vocabulary words" "and the word gazebo" I added.

It was a joke, but Emily in grade 6 rose to the challenge, and wrote sentences incorporating all of the new vocabulary along with "gazebo", i.e. "When I feel tension I go in my gazebo and all is better." "It is entertaining to drink tea in gazebo." "My brother irritate me and I close him up in gazebo."

I laughed and laughed. Emily is one of my favorite students. She's from Poland and arrived this year without a word of English. She's just jumped into the language--but she has an advantage in that there are very few Polish speakers at the school.

In my grade 8-9 combo class, six out of nine kids speak Russian as a first language. In grade 5, seven out of eleven do. But in the grade 6-7 class, there are twelve kids, with German, French, Turkish, Polish, and Russian spoken by two kids each, and Danish and Dutch each spoken by one.

So English has to be the common language, and it is--these kids have learned much more English than students in the other classes. ESL classes require conversation. In the other classes, I tell the students that they can talk, but they have to speak English! In grade 6-7, I have to tell them to quit speaking English, and listen to me! Preferable.

More governmental upheaval

But not a word of it reached me until I got emails from a few people asking what's going on there anyway? Armed troops clashing in the streets? The president has taken over the Ukrainian equivalent of the National Guard? I had to talk to Roman, my Ukrainian-Canadian friend, and read a Ukrainian news blog to see what was happening (link, hopefully, at left).

Troops were called in, but the ones I saw were DISarmed and buying water. Yushchenko claims he called in the Interior Troops to maintain calm during the Ukrainian Cup between Donestk and Kyiv (seems likely. This is like the Superbowl but with vodka instead of beer. It took place at Respublikansky Stadium, the metro stop closest to my apartment. Rivals were massing all over the place, wearing their colors)

Concessions have allegedly been made between Yanukovich and Yushchenko. They sat together at this major soccer match to show solidarity, I guess. Roman said that the government is in "its usual state of chaos" but that things have gone too far in the democratic process for them to go backward. That's encouraging.

If the link works, you'll be able to read about the confusing series of events that led up to these concessions, maybe an infant democracy at work, maybe something else.

School performances

School was miserably hot on Friday. Happily, there were two special activities--I took my classes and we just sat and watched and sweated.

In the morning, grade one put on a play, written by the teacher, Gael Harrison, (an author! look for her book "The Moon in the Banyan Tree" about her experiences as a volunteer in Vietnam). The play was called "Seven Dwarfs in Search of a Fairy Tale" and featured the dwarfs blundering into one fairy tale after another, looking for home. It's hilarious to watch little kids act--my favorite was the witch stating "now I'm going to eat you ha ha ha ha" in a completely expressionless voice.

Then in the afternoon, my buddy Steve the band/music teacher had arranged for an a capella group from Yale to perform. They were great--they sang and replicated the sounds of percussion instruments with their voices. So now we know what the grade 5 boys will be doing for the rest of the year. One of the students was from Arlington, so we got to chat about our shared zip code.

Television

Although I'm paying $7/month for cable (imagine that!), I've watched almost no tv since buying a DVD player way back in October. The huge old tv in my apt. can accommodate cable or a DVD player, but not both at the same time, unless I get intensive assistance from people who don't speak English and don't get paid enough to figure out the media access difficulties of a rich American.

So I've been reading a lot and watching DVDs. Every now and then I watch non-cable tv, all in Russian or Ukrainian, usually in Russian with Ukrainian subtitles. The Ukrainian language was suppressed under the soviet system--so there's not much on tv in Ukrainian, on non-cable channels, anyway.

The free channels do have old American sitcoms from the 80's and 90's--Married with Children, Friends, etc. But they're not dubbed and there aren't subtitles. Instead, you can hear hear the original soundtrack in English with someone SHOUTING IN RUSSIAN over the actors.

With subtitles in Russian, or English, people here could be listening to English and learning it. With subtitles in Russian, I could be learning Russian. But, as it is, nobody's learning anything.

Oh well, entertainment. Anyone my age or a few years older or younger might remember early episodes of SNL, w/Garret Morris on Weekly Update doing News for the Hard of Hearing: Jane Curtin intoning "our top story tonight", G. Morris, off in a corner of the tv screen, hollering "OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT!!!" That's what I think of when I see American tv in Kyiv.

Ukrainian sangria

Kvas is a malted low-alcohol beverage served from trucks, like the one on the left, during the summer. It's allegedly made from "old black bread" but that must be the home-brewed version. It sounds kind of scary. It's traditionally served in a tin cup that everyone uses, but now you can pay extra and get your own plastic cup.

Wendy, a Ukrainian-Canadian teacher who has been here for 10 years, was talking about the quirky beliefs of Ukrainians towards health.

On Oct. 1, no matter how hot it is, kids are bundled up in wool hats and winter coats (and it was HOT this year in October). It's dangerous to sit in any draft, the dreaded "squazniak" which will make you sick and possibly cripple you (in the computer lab, an evil local Dennis protested that his computer was near the open window--I wanted to yell "get over it!" but being, sort of, culturally sensitive, remembered that this was serious, so I let him move). Women of child-bearing age shouldn't sit on cold concrete because it will freeze their eggs (my younger friends have been admonished by strangers for taking this risk).

"And then I go to the kvas truck and they give me the same cup everyone else is using!" Wendy chortled. "what's the sense?"

Long-engrained beliefs of safe vs. dangerous.

Now it's summer

It snowed three weeks ago, but last week summer started all of a sudden. The temperature has been 32-34 C, or 90-93 in REAL degrees, as I delight in saying to Europeans and Canadians. (recently I had a slight fever. I bought a thermometer and then had to figure out what normal body temperature is in Celsius. 37 C, in case you're wondering)

The walk to work in the morning has been fine but the walk home is grueling so I've been taking one of the many marshrutkas. They're packed and sweltering. This is the "hottest May in a hundred years" the local staff members keep saying. I feel as if I've been cheated out of a genuine Ukrainian winter. I brought all these winter clothes: long underwear, my mom's fur coat, wool tights--and needed to wear them for only a couple of months, not from October to April as I expected.

The school isn't air-conditioned so it's sweltering as well. By afternoon the kids are subdued, limp, and dragging around, which is nice for me, with my hyper grade 5 kids during period 7. "Oh, please, it so hot, can we something easy? we watch movie? " Me: "It IS so hot, can we DO something easy, CAN we watch A movie---okay! Let's watch "Thumbtanic"! It has a glacier in it! That will make us all feel cool!" No worries about SOLs here.

Field trip to Chornobyl

On Sunday a group of teachers and two Swedish tourists went to Chornobyl (not CHERNOBYL, that's the Russian spelling, gallantly though obviously covered over on the sign to the town).

As might be expected, there was a lot of gallows humor. We were told by the 30-year-old guide not to walk on anything green, especially the moss on the asphalt at the amusement park (bereft-looking never-used Ferris wheel and bumper cars. This park was supposed to open on May Day 1986, five days after the disaster). Moss on soil isn't as bad, but moss on asphalt has absorbed all of the radiation that didn't sink into the ground.

Yuri, our guide, kept putting his handheld docimeter on the road, the soil, the grass, asphalt, moss on asphalt. The counts went up and up. A count of 12-20 is normal radiation here on earth. The counts went up to 1500 on the moss on asphalt.

We all squeamishly stepped over the grass and moss and wondered about the guide. He works for two weeks and has two weeks off. He's from the area. There aren't many job opportunities other than tour guide or tearing apart the reactors, two weeks on, two weeks off. Then they go home and throw away their shoes, where the radiation collects.

I went home, showered, washed my clothes, looked at my watch, and left it out on the balcony. "Yeah, leave it there for 300 years" one of my friends joked.

Snow in May

It's May and it snowed today. Spring was normal up until now. I've never before lived in a place where it snowed in May, although my colleagues had plenty of stories to tell ("in Canada! on July 5th! I couldn't believe it!"). Snowflakes wafting through the blossoming trees were a very pretty sight.

The last couple of days the walk to work has been nice and calm because hardly anyone is out on the street--today is May Day/Soviet Workers' Day. They still have commie holidays here but they've been renamed. This is also called "the May holiday." ("Soviet Army Day" on Feb. 23 is now "Men's Day")

Most people had the option to work on Saturday, so they were able to take yesterday off, and had today off as well.

Then next Wed. is a school and national holiday for "Victory Day" (victory over what? I have to check on that...victory with the Allies over the Nazis in WW2? but then the Allies became enemies of the USSR which no longer exists, you really have to know your history here)

I visited Babyn Yar a couple of weeks ago, a Nazi killing site. About 100,000 Jews, Roma, communists, and other enemies of the regime were shot and dumped into a huge ravine there during the war, 33,000 Jews on Sept. 30, 1941 alone. Some who may be reading this have relatives who died there--I said a prayer for them.

It was odd to see a couple of children frolicking around the Children's Memorial, but then I remembered that in D.C. people frolic around memorials all the time.

Then I remembered that, in D.C., memorials aren't on the actual sites of mass murders.