Photo above: Some of my students at a springtime celebration after finishing the ninth form. (Olya isn’t in the picture.)
In Dniprorudne, if you visited America, you were something of a celebrity. Being a Peace Corps volunteer from America myself and being the tallest person most of these people had seen in their lives, I was the most visible of these celebrities. But there were others. A teacher of English in my school, Olexandra Ivanovna, had a son who had won the Future Leaders Exchange scholarship, a program to study for a year in a high school in New Hampshire. While he was gone, Olya, a 14-year-old girl studying at a school across town found out she had won the scholarship for the next year. Her family contacted Olexandra Ivanovna to ask what it was like in America, and she connected them to me.
We set up a meeting for us at an outdoor café on Lenin Street (since renamed ‘Central’) on a beautiful spring day. I, Olya, and her mother, Elena, sat down to talk about life in America. I brought a paper with me on which I’d written dozens of words that meant nothing, but I thought they would be helpful to Olya.
The cafe was really just a kiosk. It was a tiny sheet metal building with windows that sat on the asphalt sidewalk. It was painted bright blue and had obviously been welded together at minimal cost. Near the kiosk was a half-finished grocery store building with uneven brick walls and sand sitting inside of the building. Someone had told me that the grocery store had been started four years ago, but the investors had run out of money.
The FLEX program was administered by the American Councils, a non-profit that puts on programs related to the United States in developing countries. Bringing these children from their home countries to the United States was mostly paid for by the U.S. government.
In Ukraine, all 14- and 15-year-olds with a functional knowledge of English were invited to apply for this program, and they had to go through three tests that focused on their English skills and their abilities and interests in learning a new culture. Our region of Ukraine could only send eight pupils to this program, and out of the hundreds of students who had applied, Olya was one of them. She was getting an international passport for the first time and preparing to go.
I greeted them and we bought small ice cream treats that the kiosk owner had in his cooler. These were called Lakomkas, made by the Musketeer company. They were the size of a small burrito, had an outside of chocolate ice cream that was slightly firmer than the vanilla on the inside, and a little bit of raspberry syrup at the center. They were delicious and cost 1.40 greevna, which at that time was a little under 30 cents.
“You must be very excited!” I said to Olya.
“It’s so far,” she said in mildly accented English.
“It’s too far,” her mother said in heavily accented English.
Elena had learned English when she was in school herself, so she could construct basic sentences, but we decided to have Olya be the translator. My Russian at that point was still quite rudimentary, so I figured it would be simpler and good practice for Olga if she translated for her mother. I spent most of the time talking with Olya, but the conversation went slowly as Olya translated for her mother so she could keep up.
“Do you know what city you’re going to?” I asked.
“Dos Palos, California,” Olya said.
“Where?”
“You don’t know it,” she said and looked sad. “I’m going to be far from everything.”
“I’m sure it’s very nice. I only lived in California for a year when I was 7, so I don’t know all the cities. California’s really big – it has 40 million people.”
“Ogo,” Olya said, which is the Russian equivalent of “Wow.” Ukraine itself had 48 million people and was shrinking each year due to the low birth rate. “I’m worried because I don’t know any Portuguese.”
“Portuguese?” I asked. “Your English is really good.”
“My host family is Portuguese.”
“Most immigrants in the United States speak good English. I think you’ll be fine.”
“But my English isn’t that good,” she said. “I’m worried.”
“I prepared a guide to California English for you,” I said, and gave her a piece of paper. “There are an assortment of words that people in California use that don’t really mean anything. ‘Like’ means nothing 90 percent of the time you hear it. Also, ‘so’ doesn’t mean anything either. ‘Totally,’ means the same thing as ‘very,’ but it’s not really necessary.”
She looked over my list, and asked, “Why are you telling me words that don’t mean anything?”
“So that you’ll know to ignore them when you hear them. It’ll make it easier to hear the real words.”
She continued through the guide, which covered “hot,” “awesome,” and “tubular.” I didn’t need to include “cool,” as the word had gotten into Russian, with all of its meaning attached.
“Read the sentence at the bottom,” I said.
“I, like, saw this guy who was, like, so totally hot, that I wanted to, like, marry him right there.”
“Perfect!” I said. Elena, who seemed to have gotten the gist of it, cast a disapproving eye.
“What are American high schools like?” Olya asked.
“They’re good places, but they’re busy,” I said. “They’re not like Ukrainian secondary schools, where you stay with the same group of 25 students for 10 years. Six times a day, you get a new group of students and a new teacher.”
“Is the work hard?”
“I think you’ll find the writing assignments harder, and the mathematics and physics work easier than in Ukraine.” I knew this to be true because the Ukrainian schools rarely challenged the students to do critical thinking exercises or social studies comparisons, which made it difficult for me to assign the children the types of assignments I was used to. But, most of them knew calculus by the time they left school in 11th form. Olga was finishing her 9th form. She was to attend 10th grade in California, and then come back to Ukraine to take her final year of studies back at School No. 2 in Dniprorudne.
“Is it easy to make friends?”
“I think you’ll make friends quickly. Lots of people will want to ask you about where you came from. And, I think the boys will like you very much.” Olya did not translate that to her mother, although Elena obviously understood enough of it to look very uncomfortable.
I said to Olya, “Ask your mother what she’s concerned about.” Olya translated.
“Terrorists, drug gangs, guns, earthquakes, hurricanes, and children having sex,” Elena said in Russian, and I was able to get it. “Is America really like it is on television?”
I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes, not because I was annoyed with Elena, but because the American programming that shows up in Ukraine is our absolute worst stuff — violent, sexy, or both. I’d become convinced that the United States was the only country in the world that could insult itself more than the world’s haters could insult it.
“No,” I said. “Elena, there’s a lot of misunderstanding here. When I left for Ukraine, my mother thought four awful things would happen to me. First, she thought I would be kidnapped or killed by the mafia. Second, she was afraid that I would be caught by a bad Ukrainian girl wanting to marry to emigrate. Third, she thought I would drink bad water and die, and fourth, she thought I would freeze to death.” Elena and Olya laughed.
We talked for a while about my experiences in America — that I’d lived through two hurricanes and one major earthquake and they weren’t that bad, and that I’d never had a run-in with a drug gang or a terrorist. We promised to keep in touch, and Olya kept the sheet of paper with the California phrases.
* * *
Fall and winter came, and with it came the frustration of trying to get things done in a post-Soviet school and in dealing with the bureaucracy of the Peace Corps, a medium-sized federal agency. One night, I was stewing over whether I’d come up with anything that could be helpful to the town when a knock came at the door. It was Elena, Olya’s mother. I opened it and she came in, agitated over something. In hurried Russian, she started asking me about the morals of Catholic boys. The question didn’t make the best of sense, so I hesitated.
Then, she pointed at my couch, and shouted in English, “NO LOVE IN THE BED!”
“Oh,” I said. Olya had written back to her mother to say that she was making friends with the boys in Dos Palos, and this disturbed Elena, and she wanted to know if Catholic boys (the community was mostly Hispanic and Catholic) were well behaved. There was a dance coming up and Olya had a date.
I wasn’t sure what to say. There wasn’t much point in worrying her about things she could not control. So, I said in my best Russian, which had improved a little over the months since Olya had left, “In the Catholic Church, they say you cannot do this before you are married. But, they are boys and they have hormones. They don’t always listen. Sometimes they do this and the girls have babies. I think Olya should be careful around these boys. For example, she shouldn’t be in a house alone with one of them.”
Elena told me about another shock she’d received about two months after Olya had left when the test date for the next year’s exchange program had been announced. At School No. 3, I encouraged students to apply, and at school No. 2 (where Olya had attended) the English teachers there did the same and told them about the benefits. The director of School No. 1, Valentina Dmitrovna, on the other hand, told the parents of her students that they should not apply for the American Councils FLEX program because it was really a prostitution ring. This bizarre lie spread quickly through the town. Elena didn’t believe it when she heard it because of the cheerful e-mails she was receiving from Olya, but being a conscientious mother, she rushed to the telephone, asking, “Olya, have you got a pistol at your head?”
In addition to being a school director, Valentina Dmitrovna was the owner of the apartment I was living in. Elena and I got to talking about her and she asked me how much I was paying for rent. I told her, she gasped and said that it was 50 percent above the market rate. This was the same apartment in which I’d been forbidden to clean the mildew and almost sent out of town over the argument. I never found out for sure, but I thought maybe my administrators had set up some kind of profit-sharing agreement. My own school director would have made a good mobster if he weren’t so stupid.
But I didn’t talk too much about this with Elena — I just finished by telling her that Olya seemed like a very responsible girl, and if she took good precautions, she should be all right.
* * *
Summer came and school let out. One afternoon, I was walking around my neighborhood and found a dozen girls gathered by the entrance to an apartment building. They looked like they were about 15. They held a large sign that said, “Welcome to Home” in English. They weren’t my students, but I did recognize a couple of them from visits I’d made to School No. 2. One of them asked, “Eric, is this sign correct?”
“You don’t need to have ‘to’ in the sign, but it’s close enough,” I said. “What is it for?”
“Olya is coming back today!” She had flown in the previous night to Kyiv and was now on her way from Zaporizhia, the regional capital.
I decided to wait with them. It took Olya considerably longer to show up than her friends had expected, so we had a while to chat. One talkative and beautiful girl with dyed red hair, Katia, sat on a bench near the entrance. She wore a bright yellow-orange tank-top with spaghetti straps. It was tight, thin, and low cut. I kept reminding myself that even though necklines were lower here than they were back home, you can’t go judging a whole country’s morals by that, just like you can’t make a blanket statement about the morals of all the Catholic boys in Dos Palos, Calif.
Still, it was distracting. I was standing up, and Katia leaned forward, looking at me as I paced and talked with the other girls. As I moved around the sidewalk, she leaned forward as she sat, swiveling her body to follow me. Her friends smiled brightly and giggled as she did.
They asked me about my life in America and about what Olya might tell us about her time there.
“What city are you from in America?” one girl asked.
“I’m from…” eyes left, eyes right, I thought as I spoke, “…a suburb near Seattle in the Western part of America…” look at building, look at tree, don’t look at Katia “…It’s called Maple Valley.”
“What’s your profession?”
“I’m a journalist…” look at the building, the tree, pavement, sky.
“Do you have a big family?” another asked.
“Yes, I’ve got my mother and father…” building, tree, pavement, sky “and two brothers and a sister…” building, tree, pavement, sky, boobs. Damn! I clamped my eyes shut for a moment, and looked at my shoes while I heard a twitter of laughter go through the girls. I looked up to see them smiling and nodding at each other with looks of accomplishment that seemed to say, “We got him!”
“I don’t think you girls have enough to do. Why don’t you take up normal sports?” I muttered in English too quickly to be understood easily.
“What?” one asked.
“Never mind,” I said. “Two brothers, a sister.”
“How old are they?”
“My sister is 26, one brother is 16, the other is 13.”
“Ooooh!” they exclaimed. “Nada znakomitsia!” Katia said brightly. (We need to get acquainted.)
I shook my fist at Katia in a comical manner and said, “My brother is very important to me!”
“Is joke, Eric…”
“Do people dress differently in America?”
“Over there, people dress more closed,” I said, using the word zakriteniye, which literally meant closed, but had the additional meaning of “conservative.”
“Over here, it is more open!” Ira declared using the word otkriteniye, her arms high in the air, triumphant. She was wearing a shirt with a higher neckline than Katia’s but it didn’t have a back — just adjustable strings back there holding it together.
“Yes, over there, underwear is not supposed to be seen. The clothes have to completely cover the underwear. And the underwear is supposed to cover all the — places underwear covers.”
Ira looked disappointed and said, “America sounds very boring,” and her friends laughed.
Thankfully, Olya’s car eventually did show up, rescuing me from providing more entertainment. After several screams and a couple of group hugs, Olya moved away from the crowd of girls long enough for me to talk to her for a moment. She wore a green shirt with a picture of a beach and a surfboard that said, “BYOB – bring your own boyfriend.”
She said, “Eric, you were like so totally right on about those words!”
“Which country is better to live in, Ukraine or America?” I asked.
“I am so totally not gonna go there.”
“What did you think of the American boys?”
“What can I say? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.”
* * *
A month later, I found Olya walking around the apartment building several times and took each opportunity to talk her ear off as she could speak English quickly and understood more American colloquialisms than anyone else in town. The novelty of my being the first American she’d ever met had worn off a long time ago, so we could just talk. She never flirted with me the way her friends did. A year and a half at the site had left me starved for conversation.
I asked her to tell me how she’d gotten along with her host family. “I loved my host mother! She talked to me like all the time and cooked good food. I helped her clean up around the house. But, my host-brother was 12, and after I cleaned up the living room, he came in and put his feet on the sofa with his shoes on!” She spoke the last few words with sharp moral indignation – Ukrainians take their shoes off at the door of their home and put on slippers. What her host brother had done would be an invitation for a slap upside the head from a Ukrainian mother. Olya then smiled and said with pride, “I fought with him and made him scream. He, like, made fun of me because I was skinny so I made him scream some more.”
I mentioned that her mother had come and asked me something about Catholic boys. “What was that about?”
Her face darkened. “You did not need to tell her that, Eric.” I guessed that I’d been quoted several times in some kind of intense lecture delivered over e-mail. We didn’t go into that more.
“Did you have any problems in California?” I asked.
“Yes! We were required to do community service hours in our towns, so I went to the library, and I asked the librarian for work. Usually, she didn’t have any work, so I just sat there. After a few times, the librarian just said, ‘here, I’ll sign the paper and say you did it anyway, and you don’t have to come.’ So I went home. I was like, I can sit and do nothing at home better than at the library. My coordinator found out that the librarian was signing me off for nothing, and they were going to send me home. I was three days totally crying. I would be shame of all Ukraine!”
“Do girls dress more openly in America than here?”
“Girls didn’t seem to care about their appearance that much. I saw girls wearing pajama pants at school. Like, you can’t do that!”
“Did anybody say anything bad about Ukraine?”
“I was at this dinner when a bunch of older men were talking about how Ukrainians make such great housewives and clean and cook well. They said, ‘Olya, is your mother single?’ I was like, ‘Don’t mess with my mama!'”
I felt embarrassed. Having endured 18 months of hearing boys hurl “fack you” at me in the street, I felt awful that people in America would do something similarly insensitive to a guest. “Olya, I am very sorry for my countrymen. They should not say that to a guest,” I said, something that adults in Dniprorudne frequently said to me when I complained about bad behavior in the street.
“It’s totally not your fault,” she said. I was about to ask her another question, before she smiled and said, “Eric, I’m sorry, it’s been like 45 minutes, and I have some work to do.” I sheepishly thanked her and walked away. Was I really so lonely I was making a 15-year-old pry herself loose from conversation? Yes, I was. I was getting homesick, too.
