Happy Holidays!

Dear Friends and Family,

Happy Holidays!! Since I last wrote you following the Fall Holiday, life has been quite busy here in Velyka Lepetykha and I wanted to pass along some updates on the things I’ve been up to!

To start, my 11th grade girls have finished their Anti-Smoking Campaign and I think it was a hit! The girls printed information about the dangers of smoking and we took to the streets to pass out the information and candies (sweets are a great replacement for smoking!) The girls told the citizens of Velyka Lepetykha to avoid or stop smoking due to the dangers and to share this information with their friends and loved ones. The second portion of the project took place in our school where the girls presented to the 11th grade a power point on the dangers of smoking and passed out the same informational slips of papers to the 5th-11th grades. They had a lot of fun getting to share the information they had learned with fellow classmates and being able to design and implement their own project! I have attached a few pictures of Olena, Inna and Alina and the different parts of their project. I am so proud of their work and I hope that the information helps to deter my students from smoking.

The weekend of Thanksgiving was a special one for me not only due to the holiday, but also because ABCamp organized and ran its very first Weekender Camp. I traveled on Thanksgiving Day to Kharkiv, up in the northeast of Ukraine where my cluster mate Whitney lives, to spend Thanksgiving evening with her. Together we traveled to a city called Kupiyansk located 2 hours further northeast towards Russia. Tiago, a fellow PCV, organized all the secondary schools in his town to send the best English speakers for a 2-day English immersion camp discussing the topic of Human Rights. I partnered with a very bright and bubbly Ukrainian named Elena to teach the Freedom of Speech. Our class included discussion of the right to freedom of speech and the illegality of censorship and we had the kids “express” their speech through hand drawn blog pages. The kids then swapped their blogs and “commented” on the themes and what they hoped the author would add in future “posts.” The kids had a lot of fun with the lesson and many wrote their blogs about how much they liked ABCamp and why. Both days we had team time like a regular ABCamp, and I once again adorned purple to lead the “Purple Parrots.” Our team completed a video scavenger hunt, filming such crazy scenes as monkeys hanging in a tree eating bananas to proposing to a stranger. The kids were so excited as this was nothing like anything they had done before! Each clip had to include a human right being violated and the correction of that violation. The purple team expressed the freedom of speech by trying to order McDonalds at a kiosk and saying it was their right to ask for McDonalds! We had a great time and it was so exciting to work with such enthusiastic and intelligent students! I have attached pictures of our hand written blogs, my purple team and the camp group shot.

Though the camp did take up the whole weekend and most of our free time, we did, however, have a chance to properly celebrate Whitney’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. On Saturday night amidst creating lesson plan materials and organizing the following day’s schedule, we were able to make dinner. A neighbor of Tiago’s, Iryna, had been instructed in the span of about 5 minutes how to make Stove Top stuffing and how to properly cook a Thanksgiving turkey. (Though I’ve only done this once before, somehow I was put in charge of this instruction!) Iryna called throughout the day in panic that it would not turn out well but when we arrived home Saturday evening, I was greeted with the most beautiful Thanksgiving turkey I have ever seen in my life – it was delicious beyond belief!! Whitney made mashed potatoes and deviled eggs. Two Ukrainians brought crab salads and I helped my lesson partner Elena, make corn pudding (a traditional dish in Whitney’s family). Tiago’s family had sent 2 cans of jellied cranberry sauce (my all time favorite!) and there was an entire table of desserts brought by the other Ukrainians including crepes filled with caramel and bananas and Samantha’s pumpkin chocolate chip pie/bread. As we dug into the delicious meal Whitney had us go around the room and say what we were thankful for this year. With 7 Ukrainians and 6 Americans come together to celebrate, I was thankful for the opportunity to share our American culture and food with such amazing Ukrainians!! Peace Corps has provided me so many amazing opportunities throughout this year but these moments when you hear the gratitude in the voices of Ukrainians, our friends, you really realize how amazing it is to be here and to be sharing of ourselves and our cultures with these individuals. It was a wonderful evening – and luckily there was plenty of turkey and fixings left for a Trout family traditional turkey sandwich the next day!

When I returned to Velyka Lepetykha following Thanksgiving, there was another “holiday” upon me – World AIDS Day. December 1st is a day to remember all those we have lost in the struggle against HIV/AIDS and to support all those living with the disease still today. My counterpart for my HIV/AIDS project helped me organize a few events to commemorate the day. First we announced that the students wear red and had them stand together in the auditorium for a picture. The students are standing in the shape of the red ribbon of HIV awareness but this is a little difficult to see in the picture below. In the afternoon, we held two showings of the film “A Closer Walk.” The film discusses the problem with HIV all over the world, including Ukraine, and the need for us to come together and help stop HIV/AIDS. My students did a pretty good job of paying attention and watching the film, but I’m hoping the lessons in the winter semester will be more informative and will really spark the interest to make a difference within my students. One exciting note is that the picture of the students wearing red has been accepted by the magazine “The Cure,” which is published once quarterly by the HIV/AIDS Working Group and distributed throughout Peace Corps and a number of Ukrainian partner organizations. I cannot wait to present the magazine to our director!

Lastly, I want to tell you about a very exciting week I recently spent in Kiev – Swearing In! If you can believe it (I can’t) I have now been a sworn in Peace Corps Volunteer for a whole year! On December 16th the most recent set of TEFL volunteers swore in and I was luckily able to attend the conference. I went with my good friend Meaghan and presented the working groups I have been involved in this last year, Environmental Working Group and Safety and Security. It felt quite strange to stand in front of the 90 trainees and know that I was the “expert” in the room! One of the individuals swearing in, Shannon, found out on Monday December 13th that her site is a little town down in the Khersonska Oblast known as Velyka Lepetykha – I have a site mate! Shannon is a graduate of Wellesley and she will be working at VL Secondary School #2 for the next 2 years. I welcomed Shannon the weekend of December 18th with a walk around our town and my host mother made baked duck for our family to eat with Shannon on Sunday. I am so excited to have another PCV here in my town and the timing is wonderful for my HIV/AIDS project as she will head the School #2 involvement in the project! Another new PCV I met was a fellow ’09 graduate of Northwestern, Ashley. I have attached a picture of Ashley standing with Meaghan and me at the swearing in ceremony.

As the Christmas Holiday comes upon us, Velyka Lepetykha has been preparing well with a New Year’s Tree and decorations in the cafeteria, a Saint Nicholas Concert and lots of control work (tests) to finish off the semester. The Saint Nicholas Concert was held on December 17th despite a snowstorm outside. The audience was primarily elementary students but I went to see my 11th and 10th grade students perform. The storyline had Saint Nicholas and his granddaughter kidnapped by father frost. Two children then seek the help of an angel who guides them to speak to the Winter Queen who forces father frost to return Saint Nicholas and his granddaughter in time for Saint Nicholas day (December 19th.) I loved the performance as Inna, of the Anti-Smoking Project, was father frost and one of my best 10th grade students, Jenya, played Saint Nicholas. After the concert I got a picture with the stars of the show, which I have attached below!

I am very much looking forward to the holiday and a chance to take a break from all my work! I will be spending Christmas weekend in Crimea and then heading to Lviv for a few days before I fly with 7 other PCVs to Egypt for a week! We are headed to Sharm El Sheikh (unfortunately where all the recent shark attacks have occurred) and will be there for a week! I will be sure to pass along photos and stories when I return assuming a shark doesn’t eat me!

I would like to wish you all a very wonderful holiday season! Please stay safe and warm!

Love, Megan

P.S. I am attaching a very exciting letter I received this month from Senator Al Franken, which I wanted to share with you all!


Photos include:
Khersonska Oblast PCVs of groups 36, 37 and 38 (not the most recent arrivals)
My host sister, Nadya and her birthday cake
Anti Smoking Campaign with Alina, Olena and Inna
Thanksgiving at Tiago’s site and ABC mini camp
World AIDS Day
Swearing In Conference with Ashley and Meaghan and Kiev New Year’s Tree
Velyka Lepetykha Christmas Concert

Fall in Ukraine with side trips to Moldova and Slovakia!

Dear Friends and Family,

Happy belated Halloween! The school semester is now in full force and I have successfully survived 2 months of classes (enough to get us to fall break which I will tell you about shortly!) My schedule, though confusing and ever changing at first, has now been settled and I am teaching 6th-10th grades. I have set it up with my fellow English teachers that I teach one full lesson a week with each grade rather than 2 or 3 sets of 15 minute increments and this has been going great so far! The freedom I’ve been given has allowed me to teach some fun lessons and share more American culture with my kids. Examples include playing “Green Light, Red Light” with the 6th graders and discussing popular teenage abbreviations used for texting with the 9th graders. I’m still working on my Russian which I feel is put to the test daily and I am starting more complicated Bandura songs (if you have Facebook I’ve put a video of myself playing the bandura online!) but I feel that life is going well here in Velyka Lepetykha and I’m continuing to adapt more and more to the flow of things in Ukraine.

As for an update on projects, my 3 11th grade girls settled on the topic of “Anti-Smoking” for their small after MASCOT camp project. The Anti-Smoking Campaign will include lessons taught to the students about the dangers and consequences of smoking and the alternatives to spending your money, free time etc. I am very excited about their hard work so far and I hope that this project makes an impact on the students’ views on smoking. Especially when I know that there are already students as young as 5th grade who are smoking here at my school which just breaks my heart!

For my own project on HIV/AIDS Awareness – I have recently received word that my grant will be funded! The project will include a training of teachers and students who will then teach students in both schools #1 and #2 about HIV/AIDS as well as develop material to be distributed throughout our town. The students will be asked to prepare posters either of artwork or informational text to be placed on display during an HIV/AIDS Awareness Concert, which will take place in March. I am very excited about this project and cannot wait to get our grant money and begin preparing! I will be sure to keep you all informed on its progress in the upcoming blogs!

On the topic of traveling, of course always my favorite topic to discuss, I was able to make it to Moldova in the end of September. I was invited to join 5 other Peace Corps Volunteers who were celebrating their first opportunity to leave Ukraine (when you first arrive in country you are not allowed to travel outside Ukraine for a period of 6 months, the Spring arrivals came in March and thus were finally able to travel out of country in September). I took an overnight bus from Kherson (the capital of my oblast/state/province) and arrived in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau early the following morning. Moldova speaks a language, which is called Moldovan, but is essentially Romanian with a few exceptional words. I assumed this would be a problem but the truth is that most of Moldova still speaks Russian from the past influence of the Soviet Union and today many speak English in the capital city! So with my Russian and my newly exchanged Moldovan Lei currency, I was able to find our hostel located right behind a newly built shopping center known as “Mall”dova – pun intended. Moldova is a small country especially in comparison to its bordering neighbor, Ukraine and the capital of Chisinau has only about 670,000 people, a little over half the size of Kiev. A fun fact is that Moldova has the Peace Corps fame for being the highest density country of Peace Corps Volunteers with 120 volunteers scattered throughout the small country. A Moldovan PCV, I was lucky enough to meet staying in the same hostel, told me that there does not exist a town or village in Moldova which has not experienced the influence of PC either directly or indirectly from a volunteer! She also explained how no volunteer in Moldova ever has to travel more than 4 hours to get to the capital! I replied with the fact that my journey to Kiev takes roughly 18-20 hours at best and I’m not even the farthest one out!

My three days in Moldova were very relaxing as the capital doesn’t provide a lot of sites or entertainment, but mostly a lot of space to roam and stroll including parks, large city streets and a once filled lake, now drained to become the location of a soon to be built casino! (Sadly the construction ran out of money while draining the lake and so the building of the casino has been put on hold and the hole in the ground has become a tourist attraction). On my first day, before the other 5 ladies arrived, I traveled with 2 Russian tourists to a town outside Chisinau known for its caves where monks once lived and prayed. The monastery sits on top a curved hillside overlooking a river, which runs alongside the monastery towards the little town. We walked through the caves and the dug out monastery (one room has rock wall separated spots where the monks slept on the cold rock ground – only slightly more uncomfortable I assume than my couch bed in Velyka Lepetykha). My new friend Jenya, was able to bargain us a homemade lunch from a bed and breakfast type place and we were soon eating delicious Moldovan food. A traditional dish is mamaliga, a corn meal type mash, which resembles Mexican polenta. This was delicious, check out the picture below. Moldova also loves its goat cheese, which accompanied the mamaliga, and no Moldovan meal is without homemade wine, which of course we had! It was a beautiful day and a very nice cultural experience.

On my second day in Chisinau, the ladies and I took a tour of the largest wine collection/vineyard in the world, Milestii Mici. Located just outside Chisinau, the Soviet Union opened this wine storage in the 1950s in what remained of a limestone quarry due to its perfect temperatures and humidity for storing wine. Today, over 1.5 million bottles of wine are stored in the caves and some go for over $3000 a bottle! Japan currently is attempting to buy out the wine collections’ entire supply of one specific wine that Queen Victoria used to favor. We were driven through the tunnels passing endless rows of large barrels where the wine is first stored before bottling with our last stop being a very enjoyable wine tasting! We were able to sample some of the different wines before they dropped us off conveniently in front of the wine store. Though this was delicious wine, the average price of a bottle converted to about $3-4! I bought 4 bottles, which I have given as gifts already back in Ukraine.

Though Moldova had a lot of similarities to Ukraine, it was very nice to have some travel time and to see another one of Ukraine’s neighboring countries. The people were very friendly and the high frequency of English speakers was surprising compared to the lack of English in Kiev! (And Moldova is not a very touristy place!) However with the influence of Peace Corps on the lives of so many Moldavians, I can see how their English has developed so well and how the PC Moldova TEFL Volunteers are succeeding! If you have a chance to visit Moldova, I would recommend it – and definitely try the wine!

Moving back to the topic of school, I want to share a little bit about my Halloween lessons I taught the week before Halloween. Halloween is not a holiday here in Ukraine, though due to the high frequency of American culture and media reaching this country, it is a holiday many adolescents know about. I was able to get permission from the teachers to do a lesson with each grade on Halloween. The lessons included fun vocab like ghost, monster, witch, vampire, bat etc and lots of pictures of these Halloween symbols including carved pumpkins, costumes and decorated houses. I luckily had come across the movie “Hocus Pocus” and was able to show the scene when Bette Midler sings “I Put a Spell on You” so the kids could see some typical Halloween costumes. My students loved how involved a whole neighborhood gets in celebrating Halloween and the movie showed some good clips of decorated houses, kids trick or treating, carved pumpkins (as well as a scene when some “hooligans” smash pumpkins). The best part of the lesson was when I taught the kids about bobbing for apples! I had brought a plastic tub about 2 feet deep and 3 feet across to school and had the kids fill it with water. I then proceeded to drop 10 apples into the bucket and explained the concept of bobbing for apples and they jumped out of their seats to be the first volunteers! I had both groups 1 and 2 of 10A as well as 9A and 9B bob for apples and it was EPIC! I couldn’t believe the enthusiasm as kids went up and submerged their entire heads under the water to get the apples. Some of the girls with the most makeup on were the first to jump forward (luckily I had brought a few towels for such cases of running mascara!) I have a attached a few pictures of my kids both bobbing and after enjoying their hard earned apples – it was a blast!

Lastly I want to tell you about my Fall Break, a break in which I found myself on all ends of Ukraine from south to north then west to east and back to west again. I spent 90 hours on trains traveling around and managed to leave the country for 2 days as well!

My fall break started with a trip to Kiev where I spent a day showing the capital to a small group of the newest arrivals to PC Ukraine. As I have now been in country for over a year, in September the newest batch of PC trainees arrived and I am the happy peer advisor to one of them. My clustermate Kelsey and I met with my peer advisee and her cluster in Kiev and spent the day taking them to all our favorite sites, stores and restaurant (of course pointing out the most important store where you can buy peanut butter!) It was their first time in Kiev and they were so excited to be there! It brought back some good memories of my first time in Kiev as well as my first fears for all that lay ahead. The 5 new trainees swarmed Kelsey and me with questions about the Peace Corps experience and we had a lot of fun sharing with them our stories and advice.

After the weekend in Kiev, Kelsey and I took our first long train out to the farthest southwestern corner of Ukraine, to the city of Uzgorod. This is the same city in which I reentered Ukraine from Budapest this last July. Uzgorod is a beautiful city but our original reasoning for coming was to climb the highest point in Ukraine, Mt. Hoverla in the Carpathian Mountains (Mt. Hoverla is no Mt. Everest so don’t think me too cool! The climb takes only about 4 hours to get to the summit.) However, last minute my friend Andy wasn’t able to get back into Ukraine from Slovakia in time to make the bus to Hoverla for the climb so instead Kelsey and I decided to hop across the border and join him instead in Slovakia, which brings me to my last minute quick exist of Ukraine to Slovakia!

The city of Kosice is the second largest city in Slovakia after Bratislava. Though I traveled by train through Slovakia and Bratislava when I went from Prague to Budapest, I had never actually stepped foot in Slovakia and was quite exited to see this beautiful European country! Slovakia only last year joined the Euro and was my first opportunity to spend euros since leaving Spain back in the spring of 2008. Kosice has a population of only about 240,000 but is very picturesque with the long town square playing host to many cafes, the beautiful Cathedral of St. Elizabeth on one end and the large State Theatre on the other. We spent the day wandering the streets and drinking delicious, non-instant, coffee in cafes and finished the evening off with pizza (Kosice has a Pizza Hut but we decided against the American chain for a local café). While I think of the euro as a very expensive currency, the truth is that Slovakia is incredibly cheap! Our 6 bed private apartment was 70 euros total for the evening, pizzas were about 4 euros a piece and a massive bag of peanuts at the store cost only 1 euro (the same bag would be close to $8 in Ukraine!) One PCV’s distant cousin, who is from Kosice and speaks English, luckily showed us around the city a bit. This was a lot of fun and we were able to learn a bit about the city and Slovakian customs from her over a lunch of what appeared to be Chicken Kiev but had a Slovakian twist with goat cheese filling, quite good! Our group only spent one night in Slovakia as Kelsey and I had train tickets to get to the other side of Ukraine the following evening but it was a wonderful 24 hours spent in Slovakia with gorgeous weather and a beautiful city to roam. Check out the pictures below – especially my favorite from the top of the Cathedral’s bell tower looking down on the State Theater and Old Town Square!

The second half of Fall Break was spent on the other side of Ukraine in the top northeastern corner in the city of Kharkiv where ABCamp took place. This is the location of the yearly Peace Corps Volunteer Halloween Party. The train Kelsey and I were on took 25 hours to travel across the country but we were met with a little cluster reunion of the ladies of Boguslav, Whitney, Rudy, and the two of us! It was a great chance to see some of my fellow PCVs who I have not seen since Swearing In! Kelsey dressed as a stray cat and I went as a mouse with a nametag, which read “Kelsey’s Dinner” – we were a great pair! There were a lot of creative costumes despite the lack of easy access to Halloween costume materials in Ukraine and many had to do with fun Peace Corps related themes. All in all a good evening celebrating a very fun American holiday!

I am now back at site working with my girls on their Anti-Smoking Campaign which should take place over the upcoming 2-3 weeks and then I will begin preparing for the HIV/AIDS Awareness Project which will go into full force following the winter break. I am very excited to report that while in Kiev I booked a 7-day trip to Egypt for Christmas break along with a number of Peace Corps friends and I cannot wait for this trip!

I hope that all is well in the US and I wish you all a wonderful rest of the fall season!

Love, Megan



Photos include:
Folk concert in Velyka Lepetykha with traditional Ukrainian Bread presentation
Moldova including the cave monastery and town, vineyard and pictures around Chisinau
Teacher’s day celebration at school
Bobbing for apples
Kosice, Slovakia with friends Alex, Andy, Gary, Michelle and Kelsey
Halloween in Kharkiv
Fall pics from Velyka Lepetykha