After 3 wonderful, pleasure filled weeks at home in Portland and LA for Christmas, I returned to Lithuania for a few days before heading on out to Ukraine. I'm finally in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine. I was here once last year but the city schools were in quarantine due to the flu so I was unable to see students (though I talked with a lot of the teachers). I was also supposed to have come in October but the city canceled my trip at the last minute because it was too close to the elections. So, FINALLY I'm here recruiting students and it is extraordinarily successful thus far. This excites me for more than one reason. Yes, LCC will receive some excellent students but they are also from Eastern Ukraine. Currently we only have students from Western Ukraine. The country is extremely divided so I'm ecstatic to see so much interest from Eastern Ukraine. I love this country so I hope having students from Eastern and Western Ukraine at LCC can bring about some understanding. This young man's feeble attempt at trying to unite Ukraine :).
I am working on another angle to this dream of mine though. For the past few summers we have been hosting students from a school in L'viv (Western Ukraine). They come for a week and we give them some English classes and let them sit in on some of LCC's summer courses. My idea is to expand this program and bring together schools from Eastern and Western Ukraine to LCC, have students room with each other and have their teachers come as well. My boss just approved of the idea so tomorrow I will extend an invitation to a school here in Kharkiv. So this will just start off with two schools: one from each extreme in Ukraine. Traveling so often in this country I've come to the conclusion the main problem is just a lack of dialogue and understanding, and that both the East and the West feel the other has a strong distaste for the other (which is not true). The Ukrainian government may not try to bring their people to understand one another, but LCC will give it a try, at a small scale at least :). Hopefully this will work out well and turn out to be something that can grow in the future.
On a personal matter my older brother is in the hospital after falling off a roof during work, so family and friends are all praying for him. He is out of the trauma unit now and starting rehab. I receive daily updates from my dad.
I think I'm getting older. I'm spending more time contemplating on this trip. Getting older or maturing. Either way it is frightening. I guess life has been so fast paced this past year sooner or later I was bound to just slow my mind down and think about matters. Not to say I've come up with anything deep or remotely interesting. But still...