general update 05.17.08

i think it just hit me this week that the time has been flying by around here, and i know i have not had a chance to respond to many questions over email, so here’s a general update for the moment…

overall, things have been going very well, and i have been much busier than i anticipated. on the language side of things, i have really enjoyed the pace of the classes, and i definitely feel like i will be able to survive after training is over and i am at my site without the support of the other trainees around. we have had a lot of work to do outside of class, usually an hour or two of Russian homework each night, but it has been a great mix of useful vocabulary and example dialogues along with the more traditional grammar sections. between having Ukrainian teachers who know what we should expect when we reach our sites and then coming home and having to communicate around the house or the neighborhood, it’s much different than studying a language back in the US. minus some vocab, i feel like i will be at the same level in Russian as i was with Spanish after college.

on the work side of things, we have finalized our small community development project idea for training and begun to have meetings with our partner organizations to work out the details. in general, our group of 5 trainees is hoping to help the organizations in the city with the professionalism of their websites and the message they want to send to the rest of the community (including current donors to the org, members of their orgs, and potential funders who visit their site). as we have done site visits to various places over the last month and a half, almost all of them said that they were interested in “help with their websites”. since that is a pretty general work description, our smaller group has been conducting a basic survey of the organizations (in Russian and Ukrainian) to find out exactly what help they need most. in addition, we have done some research into existing sites on our own and will be putting together a resource cd to give to the organizations when we leave with high level information about how to use the web as an effective marketing tool. many of our own group of volunteers have expressed hesitancy around their knowledge of this material also, so we’re hoping this will be a resource that everyone can take to their sites.

the other fun piece of this, to make it more sustainable, is that we are pulling in some help from the local technical university. we just met the other day with a small group of 2^nd year students who are interested in helping us translate the materials on the cd into both languages, working with us to learn some of these skills (as their curriculum seems to be geared more towards the specific technologies than the organizational side of their work), and then offering their web development services to these organizations who may have little funding to work with a professional web development firm.

it’s hard to believe that we only have one month left here in chernihiv! we had our site placement interviews this past week, and the next big date is May 27 (only a week and a half away) when we will all find out where we will be going for two years. after that, it’s a couple more weeks to finish up projects, hang out with our host families, and then off to our sites. supposedly, life will slow down after that, but I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath on that one.

I hope everyone is doing well, and i’ll be bugging you over email as well!