Serendipity

It's been a wonderful, satisfying, lively, but somehow peaceful end to this year. School was over last Friday but I had to go in several times this week to pack boxes and download my personal files from the school server. This morning I walked along with two Ukrainian staff members, the accountant and an administrator.

"School's out, why are you here?" they asked. "I've got to finish up a few things. It's easier to work when the kids aren't here." "It's easier to work when the TEACHERS aren't here," they said, and we all laughed. Complaining, picky, critical ex-pat teachers (as some of us are) must be an annoyance for these local staff members. They're paid a pittance compared to what we get (between $200-$400/month); there must be resentment, but since I don't know the language I don't hear about it.

All this week I kept running into people who dragged me off to tell me stories. (you could say "gossip" but I prefer "stories.") Some of these encounters seemed more than coincidental, more like providential. For example, Pat and Roman were flying to Lviv on either Monday or Tuesday, I wasn't sure which. They were my first and have been among my best friends this year; I really wanted to see them before they left. I tried calling them on Sunday, no answer, dang.

On Monday, I visited Michael and Masha and their new baby Andrew, or "Androoshka" or "Andrivska" these loving Russian diminutives. When I left their apartment, Michael walked out with me to direct me to the metro. Along came Pat and Roman, WAY out of their usual "tunnel" between school and their home. They'd tried to call me all day Sunday, but we missed each other. Now here we were. We all turned around and went back to Michael's and Masha's.

Serendipity or providence? "was MORE than wonderful" as Father Guido Sarducci used to say on Saturday Night Live.

Many different English

Graham, the librarian, is from Norfolk UK. He has this fascinating, mostly incomprehensible, accent, but I usually understand him because I hang out in the library and hear him all the time.

One of my grade 5 students, finally showing some verbal English skills, asked me "Ms. Panneton, English in US, different English in England? different language, England, US?" "No," I told him, "it's the same language, some different words, different accents, it's all English."

Taras was puzzled. "But Mr. Graham in library, he speak English, but I no understand him!"

I told Graham about this, was momentarily worried that he'd be offended, but he laughed.

He and his wife Sue taught in the Canary Islands for several years. They're fluent in Spanish. I've been trying to get Graham to speak Spanish in a Norfolk accent. He refused until the end-of-year picnic and a few beers.

Photo at left is Graham with Manuel, the Spanish teacher from Guatemala, and me, listening to Graham speaking Norfolk Spanish.

Housing and dysentery

My school here in Kyiv arranges housing for the ex-pat teachers, which is typical of international schools. Departing teachers usually "will" their apartments to teachers who are staying. For example, next year Trevor is moving into Larissa's place, Heather is moving into Paul's place, and Patty is moving into Charaine's place.

This is the first year that Igor my landlord has rented to a teacher from the school. It's a good connection for a landlord---reliable income in U.S. dollars, tenants who (usually) don't trash the place, and you never have to find a tenant again; the school does it for you.

I've been very lucky this year both in my apartment and my landlord. Everyone has heard about Igor. My friend Victoria has been to my place several times and decided she'd like to move in after I leave.

This was good for everyone: me, because I could leave stuff behind that future generations of teachers could use; Igor, to have another reliable tenant; the school, to have Victoria's old apartment available for a new teacher; and Victoria, because Igor said he would raise the rent only $50/month. Also, she could move stuff into my place before she goes back to the U.S. for the summer.

So Victoria hauled suitcases and boxes to my apartment last Sunday. On Tuesday, Igor told the school that he was raising the rent by $600/month.

My wonderful landlord changed his stripes! I was so upset and disillusioned (when I called to protest, he told me "no signed contract! this is not illegal!") that even though I haven't been able to flush my toilet for a week (gotta pour buckets of H2O down it instead), I haven't called him to ask for repairs.

Not very smart considering that dysentery has been going around the school because a sewage pipe broke and leaked all over the carpet in the music room where little children were sitting. And I'm a delicate flower when it comes to raw sewage and digestive systems.

Infrastucture in this country is a weak point. "I have high-speed internet access but can't flush my toilet" I've been telling people.

Guess I'll have to call Igor. He did find another apartment for Victoria, at the original agreed-upon rent, and she says she likes it more than mine. Good.

Last days of school

It's the end of the year and everyone wants a break, both kids and teachers. I've been showing my grade 6/7 group the movie "Babe". They watched it for two class periods, so saw only about half of the movie. I really wanted them to watch the scene where taciturn Farmer Hoggett sings to Babe and clog-dances.

The class ended at 1:30 so I kept looking over at the clock---that scene's coming up! in how many minutes?

Farmer Hoggett sang and danced at 1:26 and the kids shrieked with laughter. I turned off the DVD and announced "Today is our last class together. I want to tell you that you have been my FAVORITE class!" The kids all yelled and applauded. "You have worked SO hard and learned SO much and it's been wonderful teaching you!" I wasn't teary-eyed then, but I am now as I write this.

All the girls came up and hugged me, saying "I will miss you, Ms. Panneton!" and the boys looked embarrassed so I stuck out my hand for them to shake. It was just terrific.

Then today I was thrilled that 8 (out of 19) of my ESL kids in secondary received "honours" (because this is a Brit school) at the awards assembly. Their grades were overall the equivalent of B+ US. Two of them got "high honours" or A in US grades. Of course I can't take all of the credit but I'll take a little. I teared up some more whenever I talked about it at the teacher picnic today.

It was a great way to end this year of teaching dangerously, as I've sometimes thought of it. I'll be back in the US at the end of July but will have more stories between then and now.

Religion

I've been going to chuch semi-regularly here. I figure, hey, the practice of religion was suppressed for 70 years, take advantage of being able to go. There were a lot of underground churches here during Soviet times--literally, people worshipping in caves.

The only Mass held in English is near Maidan, a walk and a subway ride, then a walk up a very steep hill, which was an adventure in winter, with the ice. It's also at 8:30 a.m. But right around the corner from me is one of the few Roman Catholic churches in Kyiv. No Mass in English--Mass in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.

The Mass in Ukrainian is at 10 a.m., and there's no need for public transportation, it's a 5-minute walk. And though in Ukrainian, the ritual is the same. I went to Mass in Latin until I was 7.

I like church because it's a chance to see Ukrainians shedding their public faces, those grim dour stony visages. In church they smile and soften up. A mental image I'll carry with me forever is that of a tiny gold-toothed babushka, during the Sign of Peace, turning around and nodding to everyone, her hands over her heart, with a huge joyful grin.

I've become friends with an American family from Massachussets due to the convoluted circumstance of my mother in Bowie MD being very good friends with the husband's aunt. Their three kids all go to my school. Their oldest daughter, Mary Kate, asked me to be her Confirmation sponsor. Of course I was honored and delighted.

The Confirmation class was only 5 kids. At the ceremony, Mary Kate was the first candidate called forward by the bishop. I wasn't sure what to do, but, being first, what I did was what all the other sponsors copied. I don't think I screwed up too much.

Elton John in Ukraine

Everyone has been buzzing about Elton John. He was scheduled to give a free concert in the city center last night, a benefit for AIDS research. (How can a concert be free and also a benefit? The government paid millions.)

I thought it would be cool to see Elton John--here I am in Kyiv, here he is in Kyiv. I grew up with his music. The lyrics to "Philadelphia Freedom" and "Benny and the Jets" are forever in my long-term memory, although not much else is getting in there. But my friend Steve was having a party last night---I couldn't diss him.

I was curious about preparations for the concert so I wandered around Kreshatyk and Maidan yesterday afternoon. Cops everywhere, barricades, entries to the metro blocked off, giant TV screens with Elton John's face. A bus was unloading young volunteers in red AIDS awareness T-shirts.

As I walked back to my apartment, I ran into Larissa and Charaine, fellow teachers on their way to the concert. "Come with us!" "Gotta go to Steve's," I said. More teachers came along, Ronnie and John. "Going to see Elton John?" "Going to Steve's," I said morosely.

By then I REALLY wanted to be part of this giant Elton John Kyiv street festival. But I went to Steve's.

Steve's new girlfriend was there. Steve didn't seem to mind that a couple of hours into the party, everybody jumped up and ran off to go see Elton John.

It was wonderful to watch Ukrainians singing along with Elton John's music from my youth. There were wild bursts of applause to the opening chords of some songs, not those I expected. Maybe only certain albums were sold as bootlegs in the USSR.

I didn't get to bed until dawn, or 3:30 a.m. Life in a northern latitude!

Bloody footprints

Yesterday on my way to work I was taken aback to see a trail of blood on the sidewalk. It looked as if someone had been walking along, dripping blood at regular intervals, or perhaps walking with a bleeding foot. It went on for a few hundred yards. The other teachers who walk that route were all talking and speculating about the bloodstains.

No blood this morning--the rain last night washed it away.

This city has a reputation for violence, though I've been fortunate to see it only second-hand. The violence is associated with drinking. On national holidays, it's apparently a tradition for some men to start drinking the preceding afternoon, drink all day long on the holiday, and then beat each other up. On every morning that follows a holiday, as I walk to work, I see men with black eyes, bruises, or dried blood on their faces.

My friend Michael, who is married to a Ukrainian woman, said "and have you noticed how many men have scars on their faces? either from falling down drunk or getting into fights drunk." Another friend had to wear a band-aid on her lip for a couple of days. 'Now I could pass for a local, I've got that "life is hard" look,' she said.

Food isn't that cheap here, but alcohol and cigarettes cost pennies.

The Cup

Internet access at home has been restored thanks to my landlord Igor and his tech geek friend Nikolai. So I can stop reading about Hitler and Stalin (a mild obsession this year, no wonder) and write about my last few days at the school.

As the ESL teacher, I'm required to give (by whom? not sure. nothing is sure here in the FSU) an end-of-year test from the US that's full of culture-bound vocabulary, along with bubble-in answers to multiple choice questions. It's very NCLB and a style of assessment never seen before by these international school kids brought up w/PYP and MYP assessments. (this year I've learned a lot of new jargon. PYP, MYP, IB, not FCPS and NCLB)

It was a pain for everyone. The kids sat there quietly and filled in bubbles. I kept waiting for an explosion from someone "Why are we DOING this?" but none came. They're probably not confident enough in their English.

Today, as a reward for the grade 8/9 group, I scrounged around for a TV/DVD player, wrote up some background information, and showed them the first 20 minutes of "The Cup," a film set in Bhutan. It's based on a true story about young Buddhist monks who were determined to see the 1998 World Cup in their remote monastery.

It's in Hindi, with English subtitles, so I figured that was the educational part--listen to Hindi, read English. They seemed to understand and get into it, as my nieces and nephews did when I showed it to them when they were all about 6 years old.

The movie is 2 hours long. There are four days left of school. That covers it.

Book signing

The weekly English-language rag "What's On Kyiv" had a blurb about a book-signing at a cafe not far from me. The book is called The Steel Barons. It was written by a Ukrainian-American lawyer who has lived in Kyiv since 1991, pre-independence. The book is a fictionalized account of his own experiences in the criminal world and the black market of Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.

I thought it would be interesting to hear this author, so I invited a couple of other staff members to meet me at the cafe. I got there first and was disconcerted to find myself the only person there except for the author and his press agent, also that the stacks of books were all in Russian and that the author was going to speak in Russian.

But the author, Alex, and his press agent were very friendly. The agent gave me a free copy of his book (in English) and Alex chatted about his life in Kyiv, wanted to know what brought me to the city, what were my impressions of Ukraine, and so on.

It turned out to be a real treat to be the first arrival. As the cafe filled up, he kept bringing his cronies over to our table so they could meet "these interesting people" (no doubt, it helped that I was with the director of the school and his wife). Because of us, he gave his speech in Russian, then in English.

The fictional characters in the book are based on real people, some of whom were at the book-signing. These are men who are enormously rich now, due to the privatization of former Soviet-run industries (ie steel mills, mines, oil). They acquired shares at very low prices, taking advantage of the lawlessness of the post-USSR world.

One of the characters is based on the father of a girl at my school. The girl and her father were both at the cafe. "Now you know how my dad made his money," she said to us on the way out.

Odessa

At the beginning of May, we had a four-day weekend (to make up for having had two in-service days on Saturdays). I took advantage of it to go visit Odessa on the Black Sea. Odessa is even more heavily influenced by Russia than Kyiv is. A few times I asked for directions in Ukrainian and got startled responses "you're speaking Ukrainian!" yeah, forty words.

A silent movie from the 1920's was filmed in Odessa about the mutiny of sailors on the Battleship Potemkin in 1905. Sailors were told to eat "maggoty meat" (nice close-up of the meat) and revolted. Citizens of Odessa supported the sailors, and soldiers of the Czarist regime fired on them.

One of the most famous scenes in cinematography (not that I ever heard of it before this year) is a slow-motion take of a baby buggy bouncing down the Odessa Steps. I climbed the steps and saw a couple with a baby carriage at the top. "Don't do it!" I thought.