Alison's World Map Project, Eating Mexican Food and Visiting a Village School

I know its been a few weeks since my last post, I apologize since I was sick for about a week. I traveled to my friend Alison's town to help her with her World Map project two weekends ago. The Peace Corps World Map mural project is a project where volunteers have been painting on walls, floors, walkways, and virtually any flat surface since 1988 when PCV Barbara Jo White launched the idea in the Dominican Republic. As you may know, 2011 is the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps, the 41st anniversary of Earth Day, and the 23rd anniversary of the beginning of this map project. I was proud to be able to help Alison and her students with this project at her school :)

Step 1: The students divided into 4 teams to work on different corners of the map.

Step 2: They outlined the countries in pencil.

Step 3: Draw the outline of the countries in black marker. This is Alison and Brooks working with the kids on drawing North and South America.

Step4: Paint each country's flag on the map. Alison and I are working on America and Canada.

Alison and Ira working on South America.

A group of students working on Australia.

I went to Kharkiv with a few other volunteers from my oblast and we found a nice little Mexican restaurant called La Cucaracha (which means cockroach in Spanish) on Sumskaya Street. I wish I had taken some more pictures inside the restaurant because it actually had the feel of a Mexican restaurant from home. The menu consisted of traditional Mexican food dishes, transliterated from Spanish into Russian and then with the ingredients listed in Russian. Our waitress was super sweet and spoke English very well.

Andy loves his fajita!

I got hard shell tacos... and then ordered a quesadilla because I was still hungry after these 3 tacos haha.

I also went to visit one of the nearby village schools with my friend Oksana. The village is about 30 minutes away from my town by car, and it has about 70 students and 15 teachers. Oksana is the only English teacher at the school and all of her students were really excited to meet me and practice talking with a native speaker. I don't have many photos from my camera, so here are a few for now and I will post some more later when I get Oksana's photos. 

The front of the school building, which was apparently built in 1963.

Oksana's students made me a welcome banner!

The school was having a small Ukrainian festival/market... kind of like a school bake sale with homemade food and some small handicrafts.

The 9th form table was still being setup but they have some traditional Ukrainian embroidered cloths.

7th form prepared some lollipops, cookies and blinchiki (pancakes).

Me with two of the 9th form girls, wearing one of the traditional flower headbands.

This week is spring break at my school... I'm being boring and hanging out at home, then working at my friend Sasha's weekend camp next weekend. I am teaching lessons about the Southern United States so this should be fun :)