One Full Year of Bliss

Apparently, getting a landlady who lived on the other side of the country was key to my happiness.  For one full year, I lived completely unmolested in my lovely little apartment with both heat AND hot water.  I even had internet and splurged on a cordless phone, relegating the rotary phone made by the Soviets in 1980 (the year I was born) to the closet.  I never even heard from Myroslava, the landlady, with the exception of a vague promise she made to my coordinator to come by sometime during the summer to check on the apartment.

Given my history with crazy Luba, I didn't particularly want Myroslava in the apartment.  Luba had had a problem with the most ridiculous things, like leaving a chair in the middle of the room, that really weren't any of her business, and I just didn't want to deal with all of that again, especially since my service was coming to an end in November.  I was hoping I'd be out of town when she was around, but just in case, I didn't answer any local calls (the ring is different for long distance, indicating people I actually wanted to talk to) when I was home.

She outsmarted me, though.  One afternoon, shortly after a weekend visit from a bunch of volunteers from other villages, there was a knock on my door.  "Маргарет, это вашa сусідka," (Margaret, it's your neighbor, in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian).  I looked through the peephole, and true enough, there was my neighbor, so I opened the door.  It wasn't just my neighbor.  My landlady was hiding around the corner, and she barreled her way to the door, which I unsuccessfully tried to shut before she got there.  I tried to explain that the place was a mess, and I was embarrassed (both true) and that, if she came back in a few hours I would have it clean.  She, literally, pushed her way into the apartment.

Then she started her barrage of complaints.  Why was I using the sheets she left there?  Why was I using the pan she left there?  Because you didn't leave them in spot we decided on in the spring.  The spot where you would leave anything you didn't want me to use.  Why did I move the couch from the bedroom to the living room?  Why was the table in the bedroom?  Why did you rearrange the kitchen?  Why did you put up a shower curtain?  Why did you put pictures on the walls?  Because I live about 6,000 miles away from home and I wanted to make this place mine.  I will fix it all.  Americans have this thing called a security deposit, where you pay your landlord ahead of time to ensure no damage is done.  I will leave the apartment exactly as I found it when I moved it.

After griping a bit more (Why did you put a hammock on the balcony?  Because the one time I tried to read in the park a drunk man asked me to touch his snake, and I'd like to read outside without that bother, thank you very much), she finally left.  I locked the door, on which the locks had been changed, and vowed never to open the door for the neighbors again.

Life is all rainbows and butterflies when your landlady lives an eighteen hour train ride away.

Doing Laundry in the Lap of Luxury

1.  Make sure the water is on.  You will not have enough reserve water to do laundry.  If you are on a water schedule (6:00 AM to 11:00 AM and 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM during the week and 6:00 AM 10 11:00 PM on the weekends), be sure to start and finish your laundry during the designated hours.  If the water turns off while the clothes are soaking, you will just have to leave them there until the water turns back on.

2.  If you do not have a hot water heater, or a kulunka, you will have to boil water to do your laundry.  Fill the largest pot you have and put it on the stove for around 30 minutes.  If you are lucky enough to have hot water, you will only need to light the kulunka or make sure your electric hot water heater is working before proceeding on to step 3.

3.  Take a laundry bucket and place it in the bathtub.  For large loads, you'll want to use a big, plastic laundry tub that takes up half of the bathtub.  For smaller loads, just use a large, metal bowl.

4.  Put detergent in the bottom of your tub of choice.  Add hot water (either from the faucet or the stove).

5.  Add clothes and swish around a bit.

6.  Leave the clothes to soak for at least an hour.

7.  Remove the clothes, rinsing them with clean water as you go.  If you have hot water, you may do this with any temperature water that comes out of your faucet.  If you do not have hot water, be warned -- the rinsing water gets numbingly cold very quickly, but it is not economical to heat up the rinsing water.  It takes too long to heat up too little water.  You may want to take breaks if you can't feel your hands anymore.  Be sure to ring out the excess water.

 

8.  Hang the clothes on the line on the balcony, rain or shine.  For special winter laundering instructions, please see number 10.

9.  Remove the clothes when dry.

 

10.  SPECIAL WINTER INSTRUCTIONS:  If you have an apartment heated by radiators, you will want to use them to your full advantage.  Drape as many wet clothes as you can across the radiators in a single layer.  Hang the remaining clothes outside.  Periodically check on the inside clothes, rotating their positions as some parts dry.  Remove each item when completely dry and replace with outdoor clothes, which will most likely, at this point, be frozen solid.  Continue the rotation until all of your clothes have thawed and dried.

It's a stickup!

 

 They're standing on their own!

Tour of the новий будинок (ukr for new digs)

 Welcome to Dudnichenka Street, my new home.

Come around the corner of the building to enter through the back, as is customary in Soviet-era apartment blocks.

Make yourself at home and head on in the left-side door.  No need for a buzzer system in the village.

Walk up to the third floor.  Be careful while climbing the stairs!  Each step up is a slightly different height.  Fine communist craftsmanship at work.

 

I'll just let you in to apartment 8.

Take your shoes off in the entryway.  It's important to keep the dirt from the unpaved roads out of the apartment.  Don't worry, I've got spare тапочки (slippers) for you so you don't catch a cold from walking around barefooted.

   

First let's head to the living room.  Have a seat on one of the omnipresent Ukrainian couch-beds.  Plan on staying a little longer?  Don't worry, they're great for sleeping too!

The floor's not too bad either!

Check out the snazzy Шафа.  You can store your clothes, assorted knickknacks, and books all in one place!  And if your landlady inexplicably locks them and you have nowhere to hang up your clothes, they are easy to break into using brute force.

 

They also double as a quiet place to make a phone call during a party.

 

I suppose you might want some tea and cookies.  будеш чай?  чай будеш? What a terrible hostess I am.  Lets walk to the kitchen.

Sorry about the mess, but the water isn't on during the day, so I can't always wash my dishes in a timely manner.

  

We also have coffee, blended drinks, and distilled water.

Let's have a seat at the table on the stoolchyks.

Would you like to check your e-mail?  We can do it in the bedroom.  Don't worry, it's only 6 kopecks/minute during the day.  We don't need to wait for evening prices (3 kopecks/minute).  Let's just hope the phone line is working.

This is the office side . . . 

. . . and the sleeping side . . . 

. . . and the entertainment/ironing side.

Oh!  You need to use the restroom?  Too much tea, I suppose.  Right this way.

This is the toilet room.  See that little door to the right?  Open it up and turn the red handle clockwise in order to fill the toilet-tank with water.  What?  It didn't work?  Oh yeah, the water's off until 6:00 PM.  There's a bucket of water for flushing behind the door.

 

Head across the hall to the shower room to wash your hands.  The sink sure looks pretty, but remember you'll have to use water from the bucket below the sink to wash your hands right now since the water's off.  At least when the water's on it's hot!

See you next time!  Hopefully you'll come back after I put the hammock up on the balcony where the clotheslines are on the left.  What a nice, private place to relax!  Thanks for coming!  Goodbye!

Herding Goats and Living in Yurts

 

O.K., so maybe I wasn't really living a nomadic life, but I was moving around a lot, with no fixed address, and living out of my backpack.  There were also a lot of goats wandering around . . . although the only person I ever saw tending them was a drunk old man drinking samahon at 10:00 in the morning.

My first stop on this leg of my journey was the Peace Corps office in Kyiv.  My train, the one that took 10 hours to go 450 km (which is about 260 miles, or the distance between New York City and Washington, DC, which the Bolt Bus does in 4 hours), also got in at 5:30 am.  About the only thing I found that managed to keep me awake until the rest of the world woke up was to go running.  It was pretty amazing, actually, running through the completely deserted streets of the city, down the main drag, Khreshatyk, with almost no one awake and very few cars on the road.  It always calmed me down and focused me, and by the time I got back other volunteers on other overnight trains had arrived and life was beginning to return to the office.  I'd take a quick shower (they had showers installed specifically for the purpose of volunteers using them after getting in on overnight trains), and then run over to MacDonalds as soon as it opened at 8:00 to grab a morning Big Mac (the Ukrainians are not so keen on breakfast food, so even MacDonalds doesn't have a breakfast menu).

Khreshatyk in the winter

 

So, this July morning that I arrived at the office, I went for run, had a hamburger, and then headed to Oleg's office to figure out the rest of my life.  He basically told me to hang tight and wait until they got some more information to see whether it was really in my best interest to pull me from my site.  Meanwhile, I e-mailed a few friends to see if I could stay with them for a while, rather than lurk about in Kyiv making my situation more obvious.  Luckily, my closest volunteer (the friend who hosted my birthday party) offered to let me stay with her, although she wasn't there at the moment, and was leaving within a week.  She was headed to Kyiv in a couple of days for a meeting and then we could head back down together.

Excellent.  Small piece of the plan in place.  Next, Oleg realized that the Country Director would be in my region visiting volunteers around Final Moving Date.  Somehow he finagled a ride to my apartment in the official Peace Corps vehicle, with the Country Director, to make sure I could get in.  This part of the plan, which made me more nervous than hanging out at a friend's place for two weeks, also involved a contingency plan for my apartment not being empty -- we would load all of my stuff into the White Chariot and I would be gone from my site for good.

So then I spent a couple of weeks in Kamianets-Podilsky in my friend's apartment.  She was there for the first week, and then I hung out by myself the second.  On August 21st, 2003, I went to another nearby city, Chernivsti, for dinner with the Country Director and some other volunteers and spent the night with another friend in her village.  The next morning, the White Chariot swung by and we began our trip back to Khotyn to my hopefully vacated apartment.

 

  The Country Director took this picture outside my building because he thought it was funny that I called our ride the White Chariot

In a fully functioning vehicle, the trip took about half the time it normally did.  When we got to the building, I was pretty nervous, and all three of us trooped up the stairs to apartment 8.  When I opened the door it was empty!  It was all mine!  We all looked around a bit, and even the Country Director was impressed with how nice it was.  He snapped this picture of me in my kitchen because he thought the sunflowers were nice and cheery, and worth the wait:

Life as a Nomad

I left my friend's village for the four hour bus-trolleybus-minibus trek back to Khotyn determined to make the best of living with Myroslava.  It was a gorgeous mid-July day, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies -- the kind of day that makes it almost impossible to believe that it gets to -30 in the winter, the kind of day that gives you hope that everything will work out.

When I got back to my apartment, all the laundry I'd done and hung up outside a couple of days before was in my room, still wet, drying on the couches.The bags and suitcases I'd started unpacking were all re-packed and pushed off to the sides of the room.  Everything of mine that had been in the kitchen and bathroom was missing -- I couldn't even find my shampoo.  Myroslava's stuff was still in the bathroom, but mine had mysteriously disappeared.  I was annoyed.  Myroslava had assured me that she would never come into my room without knocking unless she absolutely had to.  She'd even planned ahead for when she would need to pack up the living room and asked me if it was OK.

I ran some errands in an attempt to calm down before confronting her.  It also gave me a chance to formulate what I'd say to her in Ukrainian.  My language was getting pretty good, but subtly isn't easy in a foreign language, and I don't do well with confrontation in general, in any language.  So when I saw Myroslava later I asked her why she'd been in my room, moving around my things.  Her reply:  "Until I move, this is my room," and then she called Irina, my coordinator.  Apparently she'd been cleaning because she was having a bunch of guests come later in the day (Friday) and was having her wedding Tuesday and Wednesday!  She never said that I couldn't stay, but clearly it wasn't an option.

I called Oleg with an update and he told me to get on the next train to Kyiv.  Peace Corps would put me up in a hotel while we tried to figure out what to do.  I re-packed the backpack I'd been living out of for the past three weeks.  I stopped by the post-office on my way out of town and found that my pre-ordered copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had arrived!  The ladies behind the counter were staring in awe at the pre-printed amazon.com label and debating what to do with it.  When they saw me walk in the door, they said "This must belong to you," and just handed it over.  That was the only time in Ukraine that I wasn't required to get a package-slip in my post-office box, sign said package-slip in blue or black ballpoint pen only, sign a log of packages in the exact same manner as the package-slip, in the witness of an Ukrposhta manager, and provide a photo-ID before getting my package.

 T

The Khotyn Post Office

Obviously this picture was not taking in July

I hopped on a mini-bus with my Harry Potter book, happy that I had something to take my mind off the fact that I might be leaving my town for good . . . my cute little town with the funny ladies in the post-office who get confused when a package isn't wrapped in brown paper and held together by rubber cement.  To add insult to injury, when I arrived at the train station, I could only get a seat in Platzcart, or third class.  It's basically one car full of about forty sleeper-seats in one room.  Usually the windows are sealed shut and it's packed with people, belongings, sometimes chickens.  With Harry Potter to keep my company I really didn't notice most of what was going on in the periphery, and I headed off to Kyiv in hopes that my housing problems might be resolved someday soon.

A Snapshot of Platzcart

On this trip, the next winter, my friends and I were mesmerized by the woman selling three-foot tall stuffed animals to people who paid four dollars to save a little money and sleep on beds barely big enough for themselves, with almost no storage space for their belongings.

Moving Day Surprise!

On July 23rd, 2003, I finally moved.  It was six months in the making, but I finally got out of Luba's apartment.  Irina, my coordinator, arranged for a car to come and drive my things and I the five blocks or so to my new place.  Irina, well meaning but not always thinking, hired a man with the smallest Lada I'd ever seen, with an entire trunk full of God knows what, to cart what amounted to most of my worldly possessions.  About half of it fit, forcing me to call a taxi to take the rest of it and to reevaluate my American consumerism and need for things.

When I got to the new building I made about six trips up to the third floor apartment with my things as Irina and my new landlady, Myroslava, were having tea.  As I came in with the last of it all, Irina said, "Oh, do you need help with that?"  Um, yeah, maybe six trips ago, but now I think I'm all set, thanks.  Because I was leaving to work at a friend's summer camp in another city, and then meeting up with my dad and my brother in Bratislava, I actually was missing my official moving day of July 1st.  Myroslava offered to let me move my stuff in and pile it in a corner so I could get out of Luba's place ASAP.  She also gave me a copy of the keys so I could just let myself in when I returned on July 7th, after she'd moved all the way to Donnetsk on the other side of the country.  All went as planned on moving day.  I got my stuff situated under a sheet, got my keys, and hopped on a bus to catch the overnight train to my friend's city.

A few weeks later, after taking two overnight trains and a bus, I arrived at my long awaited apartment.  I let myself in the door and things looked a little odd -- there were dishes in the sink, and clothes laid out on the bed.  I called Irina to figure out what was going on.  She didn't know.  I called Oleg, the king of regional managers, and he hadn't heard anything either.  All three of us tried to get to the bottom of the situation.  Eventually it came to pass that Myroslava couldn't get a train ticket to Donnetsk so she was staying until July 22nd.

Fan-freakin'-tastic.  Another landlady who doesn't quite understand what it means to rent out an apartment to a tenant.  Peace Corps had already paid my rent for the summer to ensure my domestic tranquility, so they were none too pleased with the situation either and offered to give me a new site immediately.  While $60/month sounds like nothing now that I pay twenty times that in Brooklyn, teachers in Ukraine make roughly that in a month, so it was actually quite pricey.  Negotiations ensued, and Myroslava said that she would stay with her daughter (one of my seventh form students, mind you) in the bedroom, and I could stay in the living room.  It would be like I had my own apartment, she assured me.

I couldn't really process the implications of the situation at that exact moment.  I'd been traveling for 36 hours, sleeping on trains and smashed into buses where no one would open any windows for fear of the "draft," despite it being mid-July, and mostly I needed a shower and to do some laundry.  This new apartment, complete with landlady and pre-teen, also came with an electric hot-water heater.  It was heavenly.

I called one of my very close friends, "sticks and twigs" who was also the owner of my cat, and decided to head to her place for a few days to decompress and get used to the idea of spending some quality time with Myroslava and little Anya.  I loved Khotyn, my town.  It was cute, had a 1,000 year old fortress that was an immense source of pride for the community.  I was settled in my school, and I really just didn't want to start over . . . and honestly, I couldn't stomach the idea of giving up after suffering through all the trials and tribulations with Luba.  I like to think that my stubborn grittiness to tough things out is one of my strengths, but sometimes I definitely don't know when to let go, and when to recognize that something that isn't successful isn't exactly a failure either.  This may or may not have been one of those times.  Anyway, off I went to a friend's village, hoping to return in a few days when I'd gotten everything figured out.

Reasons to stay in Khotyn:

The fortress is awesome, no matter the weather.

There are many forms of transportation available.

I would miss my favorite lady at the bazaarchyk.

My students are the best . . . and clearly my school has a lot of resources.

Most of all, I love teaching them and would miss them if I had to leave.

May -- Kicking Ass and Taking Names

At the beginning of May it somehow made it up through the ranks of the administrative folks at Peace Corps in Kyiv that Luba, my regional manager, wasn't doing her job terribly well.  The director of Peace Corps Ukraine asked anyone who had had difficulties at their site as a result to e-mail him with all the details.  I did, as did one of my "sticks and twigs" friends (kids were actually throwing things into the windows of her first floor apartment).  It came to pass (in combination with other factors, I'm sure), that Luba was fired.  She wasn't terribly pleased and actually CALLED me to tell me that I ruined her life.  I don't even remember what I responded.  I just remember being flabbergasted at her lack of professionalism.

While Peace Corps was recruiting a suitable replacement regional manager, Oleg, the king of regional managers and one of the only people whose real name I'll use on this blog, came to clean up her mess.  I vividly remember the lovely May afternoon he arrived at my apartment to talk about exactly what had happened and what his plans were.  It was a gorgeous day, warm enough that I was wearing a little sundress I'd worn to school and it just felt as if, literally and figuratively, the long, cold winter was finally over.

the view from my apartment in May of 2003

The next day Oleg headed over to my school and laid down the law  -- if I had any more problems with my housing he would send a Peace Corps car down to pick me up and change my site immediately, without asking my school or me for permission.  I would move on July 1st as planned.  He would personally speak with the landlady later that day to let her know the rules, and who she'd have to deal with if she didn't abide by them.

We then swept right over to the new place, owned by the mother of one of my students.  She seemed perfectly nice and understanding.  She was getting remarried and moving to the other side of the country, a full 18-hour train ride away and would never, ever, be around to bother me.  I had a planned camp and trip for the end of June and beginning of July, so she would let me store all of my stuff at her place before I left and give me a key so that I could let myself into the empty apartment when I returned.  The apartment was newly renovated, with both heat and hot water.  It all seemed so perfect, I could hardly wait . . .

sunset view from my apartment May 2003