Participants Blog

Michael in Ukraine - Week Four Complete

Dear Readers,

Week four is now complete, and I can’t believe it! They say that the first month of the Intercordia placement is supposed to be long and hard and not too enjoyable, but I have had such an amazing time so far. The time has just flown by!

So, what went on this week? Monday and Tuesday went pretty much as usual. I got up in the morning, went to the workshop for 10:00am and stayed there until 3:30pm, and came home. Wednesday was a really long day though. After my workshop day ended at 3:30, I came to the university for a Ukrainian language class at 5:00. For the next few weeks, I will have a Ukrainian language class from 5:00 - 6:30 on Wednesdays at UKU. Anyway, I was exhausted all day Wednesday, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was due the lousy weather.

After our language class, we finally went to see Pani Maria and her son Vajdik. Vajdik has no intellectual disabilities, but he has severe physical handicaps so he cannot really speak at all nor can he walk. His mother has had to push him around in a wheelchair for the past 25 years and he is really a full grown man, so she has really bad back problems from all of those years of pushing him and carrying him from bed to the chair to the bathroom…. Nevertheless, they are both so cheerful! Vajdik I am told is one of the most wonderful positive people you’ll ever want to meet, and if he was able to he would become a monk. Vajdik loves going to church and going to different churches, so when we started talking about the different churches in Lviv, he got very excited. His mother too is very cheerful and grateful for Vajdik, and for Faith and Light which have supported them in different ways over the past seventeen years. I was really glad I was able to go see them on Wednesday evening, even though I was exhausted and hungry.

Thursday was also a long day, although not as long. After my workshop Kimberley and I went to the psychiatric hospital again. However, it was a really bad time to go, and after 20 minutes there they had supper so we had to leave. So, after 20 minutes on the marshrutka (sardine conditions of course), and 15 minutes of walking, we were only there for 20 minutes. Then, Kimberly and I got to spend another 40 minutes on a sardine can of a marshrutka and 30 minutes of walking to get home! Thankfully though, I wasn’t nearly as exhausted as I was on Wednesday, so it wasn’t too bad.

Yesterday the washing machine guy came and fixed our washing machine at home. The bathroom (which also serves as the laundry room) floor was covered in clothes to be washed, as the washing machine had been out of service for a week. I am just glad to know that I will have clean clothes to wear on Sunday for church. By the way, this Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, so it is extra special.

That brings us to today, Friday. Like usual, I had a half day at the workshop, so we finished at 1:00. Afterward, I came to UKU for lunch and our weekly check in meeting. For lunch I had green borshch (borshch without beats) , hrechka (buckwheat) with smetana (sour cream), and crepes filled with sweet cheese (I can’t remember the Ukrainian word for crepe). It was duzhe smachno (very tasty).

Speaking of food, my workshop coordinator Iryna asked yesterday asked me if I would like to prepare the meal on Tuesday (we get Monday off—Pentecost Monday). I gladly said yes. Then she asked me to make a salad that I like from Canada to have with the hrechka (buckwheat again…yes we eat a lot of it here) and kovbaca (sausage). I thought that caesar would be good. Of course, caesar salad isn’t in any sense a particularly Canadian salad, but I haven’t seen it here at all, so I thought it would be a good choice. Iryna told me then to bring a list of ingrediants. This morning when I showed her the ingrediants, she either hadn’t heard of them or she said she hadn’t seen them at all, which I took to mean they were out of season (namely, romaine lettuce). The olive oil was way out of the question: too expensive. She suggested then that the salad on Tuesday would be cabbage and cucumber. I am just as glad with that.

Cultural side note: We eat a lot of cabbage here. Quite often at home, we’ll have a cabbage cut into 6 or 8 pieces and everyone will just take one or two pieces and eat it raw. I was delighted when I saw my host sisters and still younger host cousins eat it like that. When I was their age, there was no way I would eat raw cabbage like that. End of cultural side note.

In my host family there is a rotation of who gets to wash the dishes. It is very convenient here because there are seven in the family, and seven days of the week. Still my host father Petro asked that I choose a day, and he suggested to do it on Friday with Hanusia, the 9 year old. I thought that would be a good idea, so tonight I’m washing the dishes with Hanusia.

Thus ends my entry for today.

Michael, University of Toronto