doing better, thanks for the prayers!

First off, the obligatory health update:

Yesterday, my stomach hurt off and on, but I felt fine most of the day. By mid-afternoon, I could feel that I'd exhausted myself and I had a slight fever in the evening, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Today, I haven't had a fever all day and am finally feeling more or less back to normal, although I'm still taking it slow so as not to relapse (skipped out on the chance to go to a Kyiv/Donetsk soccer game tonight, even though it would have gained me major Cool Points with my older boys this fall).

Yesterday we had orientation. It started off at 9 am with an hour-long Russian language lesson, all of which I knew, but I didn't mind sitting there and I was able to help out the people around me. The teacher started them off with "hello", which is pronounced "zdrastvuitye", more or less. It's one of the more challenging words to pronounce (Peace Corps never even taught it to us...we learned "hi", "good morning", and "good afternoon" instead, all of which are a lot simpler!), so I've been helping people review it ever since.

Then we had an overview of our curriculum. I swear I'm on resource overload! (Yes, Tif, that's an in-joke for you!) They have so many books and resources here--good books, that are put out by British and American companies. We have a schedule of the classes we're teaching and the times when we teach them; we go to the schedule, find the topic, then go to the sheet for the course level, and there's a list of possible activities and lessons to choose from. I'm overwhelmed by how little there is for me to do as far as coming up with ideas! Don't get me wrong--there'll still be lesson prep, and we can tweak things to add our own spin on it. But for the last almost two years, all my lessons, while based off of a textbook, have basically been done from scratch and whatever resources/ideas I could scrounge. When I worked at camp last summer, I was told, "Hey, you'll need to do two lessons on culture, one on crafts, two on writing, etc..." It's a little weird to have so much of the work pre-done, although it makes sense, since there are people here from all over and not everyone has an ESL background. Mom says I should look at it as a vacation!

The other people working at the program are very nice. The ones I've hung out with the most are a group of Menonnites from Virginia (not the conservative Mennonites with the little prayer caps like we tend to see in mid-Michigan, but more along the lines of evangelical Christians with a strong emphasis on pacifism, social justice, and simplicity...Emmalea, I know you at least know what I'm talking about!). One of the women from the group has a daughter and son-in-law who are PCVs in Mauritania (Africa), there's a retired pastor and his wife who will be my co-teachers for our sessions (three native speaker teachers in one classroom!), and a couple other people more their age than mine, plus Stephanie and Lana, who are good friends and a couple years older than me. Stephanie works for the Rosetta Stone software company and Lana is a children's librarian at an elementary school. They're teaching the children's curriculum at the English program, and yesterday, Stephanie said, "You know, we could teach them, 'My God is so great...'" and Lana and I chimed in, with hand motions, "'So strong and so mighty / There's nothing my God cannot do!'" So then we sang camp songs for a bit. :) We had a rousing game of Apples to Apples last night.

There are also some other older people here as well as a missions team from Minnesota and two college-age girls from Moody and Calvin, but I haven't gotten to know them well yet, as I spent
a lot of time in my room recovering.

And reading! I've re/read A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Catherine Marshall's Christy, and part of Bodie Thoene's Warsaw Requiem (which isn't is good as I remember...or maybe my tastes have just changed). Currently I'm reading Soviet Evangelicals since WWII (published around 1980), which is pretty much what the title says. A horrendous amount of the book deals with church politics and splits and unions and is rather tedious, but there's some interesting information about the church services and the difference between registered and unregistered churches during the Soviet period, and when I think about it in terms of Nadia and Viktor's lives, it becomes more interesting (and gives me a whole bunch of questions I want to ask them when I go home!). On deck are Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot's biography of her husband Jim, and a novel about Russian Mennonites in the early part of the 20th century. Basically I'm scrounging books from everyone who will lend them to me!

Today I went to church at Tserkva Nadezhda (Hope Church), a church in the center of town that's pastored by a man who's a friend of friends of the Virginia group. The songs were in Russian and one sermon was in Russian and one in English with Russian translation (which the VA people appreciated!). As it was my first English sermon since sometime this past winter, I was looking forward to it; it ended up being part of a series on the Ten Commandments, specifically "You shall not kill." It was a fine sermon, just an odd topic for my introduction back to church in English!

After church, all of us plus the pastor went to a very nice restaurant for lunch. I had ribs barbecued with honey-mustard sauce, a baked potato, and vegetables. The latter items were okay, but the ribs were great! And I didn't spill anything on my blouse, either! The pastor was telling us a lot about Christianity in Ukraine during lunch, which was really interesting.

And now I think I'm off to lay down, read a bit, and eventually take a shower. Ahh, hot water...the luxury never grows old!