spring break can't come fast enough!

It's been a busy, crazy week. I don't really remember Monday, just that I taught and that we had fun at English Club. And read picture books in partners, which is part of my secret plan to increase a love of reading for fun among Ukrainian kids.

Yesterday I taught all day, then went to a poetry reading at the college with my friend Natalia, who was organizing the event. Two women from Balaklia who are published poets came and talked about their work, some secondary school students stumbled through recitations of these women's poems, and some college students read their own work (or in one case, sang!). Afterwards, the kids came up to me and chatted a little...I was the first American they've met, so they wanted to see if we could understand each other. Then Natalia and I went out for tea, and on the way home got into a very cool conversation about how we're both waiting until marriage to have sex based on our religious beliefs (she's Orthodox, and one of the few Orthodox believers I know who a) takes it seriously and b) is under 60).

Twenty minutes or so after I got home (long enough to change into pajamas and start an episode of LOST...I wasn't so impressed with Season 2 at first, but it's growing on me), my doorbell rang. It was Olga, the computer teacher my age at school who almost never says anything to me with a guy about our age. It turns out that his name is Maksym, he knows Nathan, another PCV in Kharkiv, and he's looking for someone to help him with preparing for a test in English (international certificate-type test, not school). I explained that I'm not interested in giving individual lessons on a regular basis, as I don't have time, and his response was, more or less, "I'm sorry if I'm rude, but you only teach at school, you said. How do you not have enough time?"

Has he any idea what it's like to live in a small town in a foreign country? Probably not.

So we're going to meet every two or three weeks, it looks like. It sounds like he's got some incentive and a reason to want to improve his English, which is different than all the parents I meet who want me to tutor their 11-year olds. I did the math...if I was here simply as a native speaker teaching English in private lessons, not as a PCV, and gave 4 hour-long lessons a day, five days a week, and charged 15 hryvnias ($3) per lesson, I'd make more than enough money to live on. Interesting realization.

Today, I taught my lessons plus Olha Ivanivna's, since she was at a conference. After school, I met with the lady poets again at the library, because they wanted to present me with copies of their books. We had a nice chat, and the one invited me to come visit her apartment and see slides of when she lived in the part of Russia over by Alaska. Then I typed up my 7th form test for tomorrow morning (at the library), made copies, and came here. Rita was supposed to come over tonight to practice English, but she canceled due to busyness with work.

Tomorrow I teach and come home and clean my kitchen (or maybe that's tonight) for when Maksym comes over tomorrow for our first English meeting. And he wants to know where my time goes...

Maybe that's the topic for our first conversation!

~*~

Oh, and a belated update on my sleepover at the Y's...lots of fun! We played Uno and did vocab flash cards; I taught Oleh and Vitaly the Initial Game with Bible characters (give the initials and people ask yes/no questions to determine the person); Liza, Snizhanna and I braided each other's hair while sitting on my bed at 7:30 am.