This has been a long day! It started off well, with the owner of the hotel giving us a ride to school because I was bringing all of my video equipment and we were about to take a taxi. We arrived at school in plenty of time and I began to set up, when I realized to my horror that I'd left my small bag of all the connecting cords back in my room. With no taxi available, Lyudmila persuaded a colleague to take me back and pick them up. However, he misunderstood and thought we were waiting for her to come with us, so I was standing around as he threw out the ball to his gym class. Finally, he went to get her and she told him where to go (apparently, very few people even know there is a hotel in town, let alone where it is). I was able to return in time to do the lesson, but I had missed the lesson the other English teacher had prepared for me to observe, and this made her very upset. The students were disappointed as well. This was not start I wanted!How embarrassing! After that rocky start, I taught the 5th formers "Home on the Range". The lesson went very well and the students worked hard.
Next, I visited a Ukrainian language class, with 2nd or 3rd formers. Many of the girls were very nicely dressed with fancy white ribbons in their hair. Later I had lunch in the cafeteria with borsh soup and mashed potatoes and chicken, tea as well. The children clean up after themselves and are very orderly. The cafeteria in the basement is small but still light and airy, and the cooks wear tall hats of white linen.
When I needed to use the bathroom at lunch time, Lyudmila seemed quite embarrassed to tell me the regular ones were outside (outhouses). I used the only inside one off of the kitchen, which I still did not sit down on it and it only used gravity and a scoop of water from the calcified scoop and tub of water from the room next to the WC. What we don't bother to appreciate at home!!!
After lunch we went to a short teachers' meeting where they spent 20 minutes in intense debate over which style of uniform to adopt for the school children. We met in the computer lab (the only one in the building, with 12 computers) in order to see the choices on the internet. Lyudmila tells me the internet is very slow. I don't think anything was settled.
That afternoon, the school prepared for a folk performance in my honor. They have no central auditorium, so the main corridor in the upstairs was cleared out and Lyuda displayed the girls' embroidery work. After core classes, the girls go to the equivalent of Home Ec, and the boys to "labor training" classes. I saw no evidence of many of our elective style classes-- art or music, etc. They have some opportunity for these in after school volunteer programs. The students presented their hour long show with several skits and songs, the youngest performed about the coming of spring; older students acted out tales of a young woman who turns into a poplar tree as she yearns for her lover, and another story about a girl who is promised to marry the csar. The acting style was very theatrical and demonstrative, and it was evident that they had worked very hard.
At the end of the day, we left the school and were driven outside of the city-- the director of the region, whom I had visited yesterday, had arranged for a car and driver to take us around. Lyuda, like most of the women, does not drive, and her husband was cone to Kirovograd for certification classes each day for these two weeks, so the arrangement was really helpful. First the driver took us to see a new hotel being built on the edge of town; they call it "green tourism" when referring to country/recreational trips. The new building is a nice brick 2 story place with large garden areas and a fountain which will overlook the river. The river area is very pretty, but much of Novoukrainka is terribly littered with garbage. Lyudmila says that while there is a garbage collection service, no one has the money to pay for it, so they just toss it everywhere. The banks of the river, the parks and the city streets are strewn with piles of garbage.
From there we drove out to a village where Lyuda met with a former director of the region, now a wealthy farmer with 5,000 hectares. His office was in a very non-descript building (very few businesses have obvious signs, so it is difficult to tell if there is anything inside and there are no large window fronts on the buildings). Serge drove us himself, in his "very nice car" (his Lexus, with a GPS tuned to somewhere in Florida-- it seemed to be only a conversation piece), to his ostrich farm. Serge had spent 6 months learning American farming in Indiana and toured 21 states. He spoke some English, and Lyuda said the was a very good "master"-- not just as a businessman, but as a philanthropist who donated money. At the ostrich farm we met his father, and got close up to his 20o ostriches. I boldly asked him for ostrich feathers and received one black and one white. From there, he proposed we head to an adjacent forested area (mostly birches), where we sat at a picnic table amongst the blooming violets and drank Crimean cognac and at hazelnut chocolates. What a lovely way to spend the afternoon! Afterwards we returned to his office and met up with the first driver who took us further out to the "sanitorium", where we walked round the building along the river and among the lovely oak trees.
Finally, at the end of the day, we stopped by the market (about the size of Otto's produce) for a few things as I had not ordered dinner back at the hotel.
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