Week Two

We’ve reached the end of the second week of training, and it feels like the sixth week. I feel like I’ve been here forever, but not, because I can’t speak the language. And I certainly don’t feel part of my Ukrainian community (save for my host family, who are wonderful, but I still can’t do my own laundry).

Mulling over the strangeness of my situation, I realize it’s not so very strange at all. Many have been in and will continue to be in my position, and hopefully they, too, will wonder why they’ve been given 4 apples for lunch and forced to bring a coat in 70˚ weather. The peculiarities that accompany the process of transitioning into this (or any) culture are, as I’ve mentioned to other volunteers, peculiar because they have the power to reduce a grown woman to the state of a child. Below I will provide a list of reasons for my, shall I say, rebirth. My “Renaissance”:

• I am able to communicate little other than “Good day, how are you?/I am good, fine, bad/I like to eat/great!/yes/no/ goodbye!,I don't understand/and more recently—Cool” with anyone. Now I understand why children are always crying.
• I’m corrected all.the.time. By my Ukrainian teacher, my host family, the host cat (seriously). I am always doing something wrong. Alongside mispronouncing everything, here are some examples: Don’t hang your towel here, hang it there, You stacked the dishes in the wrong order, You didn’t buy an umbrella yet! Why are you not wearing a coat? You need to eat more. You need to eat more sugar. Why don’t you want more cookies and candy? Are you on a diet? You’re not feeling well? It’s probably because you’re eating fruit. Why do you shower in the morning? Also—I totally accidentally locked my host father out of the apartment. Not a highlight of my week. 
•  My time and space are not my own. Someone must know where I am at all times. This is especially challenging for one who thrives on independence.

I walk everywhere. I love this because it allows me time to be in my own head. No one bothers me (most of the time). I think a lot about being here and why, why, why. Why am I here? It was all too perfect. I wanted to learn Russian but they put me in a Ukrainian language group, but like most things, I’m sure this will have some unexpected benefit. But as I walk down the street tired and smiling only on the inside, I’m still asking “why am I here?” When I go home in 27 months, what will I bring back? A volunteer in Indonesia recently wrote, “Sometimes I think that the main lesson of Peace Corps is futility.” As seemingly unoptimistic as that may sound, it’s not. It resonated with me because I’m realizing slowly but surely that this is a grieving process. I have willingly walked away from my American self and am daily (and I mean daily) struggling to reconstruct, as would a child, a new identity. I cannot be the same person.

Recently I read The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s memoir on studying (and loving) Russian books (thank you, Christi, and I promise you’ll get it back in 2014). It’s terrific. And Batuman, I’m convinced, wrote this especially for me. After studying Uzbek language and poetry in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, she reflects, “I began to understand why it had been so difficult to write about my summer in Samarkand which, despite all the appurtenances of a new beginning, an exotic adventure, had actually been the end of something. It had been the kind of strange appendix the doesn’t make sense until later, out of order—as the surviving fragments of the “Journey” appear in Eugene Onegin only as a footnote following the final chapter” (248). When I left Detroit on September 17th, something inside me shifted. I was emptied of myself, my ideas, my habits, my culture, my language, and my center.

Time hasn’t seemed real lately, and perhaps because I think of it so often: Four hours of Ukrainian lessons, only 30 minutes for lunch, must be home by 6, 30 minutes to walk home, 11 weeks of training, how good can my Ukrainian get by December, 12 kopeks a minute to call home, 6 months of winter, 27 months of service, etc. etc. But, in some comical symbolism, I see my future-self staring back at my present-self, muttering under her breath the few phrases she can remember before going home to perform them at dinner. And I know that she is stronger, wiser, and has a more proficient understanding of what I’m really doing. And maybe she knows Russian too.