World AIDS Day 2012

Last week, I organized a few events at my school in honor of World AIDS Day 2012. As an active member of the HIV/AIDS Working Group in Peace Corps Ukraine, I do my best to try to organize a lot of HIV awareness events and trainings. World AIDS Day is held on December 1st every year, and this year's international theme is "Working Together for an AIDS-Free  Generation". You can read more about World AIDS Day here - http://aids.gov/news-and-events/awareness-days/world-aids-day/ or check out what I did at my school last year (Raising Awareness on World AIDS Day).

On Wednesday, I held an after-school event with Liliya Nikolaievna to make red ribbons out of red paper. With the help of a few 11th grade girls who had attended the HIV trainings and/or Camp H.E.A.L. with me, we worked with about 25 students from the 5th grade. 5th graders are crazy and energetic all the time, so having the older girls really helped to keep them focused on the red ribbons instead of getting too excited and  running around like they usually do. We used the same origami red ribbon lesson plan that we used at Mini Camp H.E.A.L., except I cut out all the strips of paper ahead of time to save us some work.

Lina demonstrating how to fold the ribbon. 

Liliya working with a few girls from her 5B class. 

Yulia and Lilia explaining what to write on the ribbons. 

The girls are all finished!

Dasha and Vika are finished with their group too!

The goal of these red ribbons was to write messages of hope and solidarity, since we would be giving the ribbons to the Kharkiv branch of the All-Ukrainian Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS. After explaining to the kids what they should write on the ribbons, I learned that not all of the 5th graders knew what HIV or AIDS was (in Russian or Ukrainian), since they have not all been exposed to lessons about it yet. However, some knew exactly what it was, and the older girls also helped explain things to the younger students. This is why it is important to have HIV awareness projects in at the community level, so that everyone in the community can help each other learn about HIV/AIDS and pass on their knowledge.

Our best attempt at making a heart : )

One of the 11th grade girls, Anna, helped me to pin all the red ribbons onto a white lacy curtain and we used it to create a small exhibition on Friday. We had a school-wide poster contest, with the theme "Celebrate Life". We will send our school's winning posters to Kyiv to participate in the national poster contest, which is organized by the HIV/AIDS Working Group. We also pinned red ribbons on everyone to show our support and awareness for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Some 5th graders and I with Larisa Alexandrovna and Alina Vladimirovna. 

Liliya pinning a ribbon. 

with some 9th grade girls. 

8th grade girls. 

After school, I collected all the posters and Liliya and I decided the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners for the older (7th-11th grade)/younger students category. I am proud of my students for helping me out and for creating awesome posters! Its great to end my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer with a positive event : )

Raising Awareness on World AIDS Day!

I worked with my school psychologist to organize a small project at our school to help raise awareness for HIV/AIDS on World AIDS day, which is the first of December. As a member of the Peace Corps Ukraine HIV/AIDS working group, I am very passionate about educating Ukrainian youth about HIV/AIDS and especially trying to reduce stigma and discrimination by teaching accurate information about prevention and transmission. In Russian, World AIDS day is called День Борьбы со СПИДом, which translates to Day of Solidarity. Here is the poster that I drew and the true/false statistics that I prepared for school.

Translation - "Day of Solidarity: Overcoming HIV/AIDS and leading the world!"

True facts are in red and the false facts are in blue. 

Together with the help of some of the 10th form girls, we presented some basic information about HIV/AIDS statistics and passed out the little booklets and flyers in Ukrainian and Russian to the students. The students from the 10th form attended a training several years ago about HIV/AIDS when the previous Peace Corps volunteer was at my school.

with the girls from 10th form. 

Some 9th form girls with the booklets. 

We also held a poster contest and asked each class to draw a poster, we will use some of the winning designs in our AIDS memorial mural (to be painted in the spring as part of my PEPFAR project). There was a surprising number of poster entries from the 5th-7th form classes, I am glad that they already have some knowledge about HIV/AIDS!

The boys from the 5b class and their posters. 

with the girls from the 5a class. 

with the girls from the 5b class. 

Okay, so 5th graders love taking photos.

with 11th form girls.

11th formers with our school psychologist. 

December is shaping up to be a really busy month for me, project wise... my sitemate and I have a weekend leadership camp planned for next weekend and then my best friend from middle school is coming to visit me the week after that! I'm currently in the process of writing a SPA grant for a Journalism club at my school and I'm also writing the partnership grant for Camp HEAL next summer, a camp about HIV/AIDS education, human trafficking, healthy lifestyles and leadership. I'll post the link to the grants once they are finished :)

PEPFAR Conference About HIV/AIDS Awareness and Education

So I know its been a while since my last post, and I promised to upload photos from my travels with Annie... but things have been busy since school started. I had the opportunity to attend the PEPFAR conference with our school psychologist Irina Ivanovna about HIV/AIDS awareness and education. PEPFAR stands for President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and it is an international Peace Corps initiative.

With a few Ukrainian counterparts and Doug Teschner (our PC Country Director).

Ira and I in front of the banners :)

Ira and I with Andriy, the Peace Corps PEPFAR coordinator. 

 Last week, Irina and I joined about 25 Peace Corps Volunteers and their counterparts from their school or organizations in Kalamets-Podilsky for the conference. The sanatorium that we stayed at turned out to be a beautiful resort on a lake... western Ukraine is so green and pretty! We were lucky to have a few days of clear weather, we spent our coffee breaks outside enjoying the scenery and sunshine : )

Alex, Maria, Robin, Patrick and Kym.

Robin, Alex, me, Amanda and Abby.

Just stopping to smell the flowers.

Ira and I by the fountain.

with Abby and Amanda, the other counselors from Camp HEAL and OHALOW :)

No conference is complete without a jumping photo.

We spent a week learning about the biology of HIV/AIDS, methods of transmission, stages of infection, stigma and discrimination, and we also had a few very valuable language lessons on HIV/AIDS terminology in Russian. We also had a few guest speakers who came to tell us their stories as HIV positive individuals, one was an intravenous drug user (IDU) and one was a commercial sex worker. It was really interesting to hear about their firsthand experiences with living with HIV/AIDS in Ukraine and listen to their opinions about how Peace Corps Volunteers can work with our communities to help educate about HIV/AIDS.

PCVs learning about ways of transmission.

An joint session between PCVs and Ukrainian counterparts, working on a stigma/discrimination activity.

Learning about the different stages of HIV in a Russian language class.

I had a great time at the PEPFAR conference, and I think that Ira (my school psychologist) enjoyed it as well. It was great to meet other Ukrainian counterparts and talk to other volunteers about their different experiences working with organizations in their community. I am excited to start organizing a project at my own site, we are planning on doing a small presentation on  December 1st, HIV/AIDS Awareness Day!

Painting Eggs, Chopping Wood, World AIDS Day, Kiev-Atlantic Factory and СНЕГОПОД (SNEGAPOD)!

These past few weeks in Ukraine have been really cold. By really cold, I mean that the temperature has dropped to around minus 10 degrees C and it has been snowing off and on all week! My host mom says that this weather is normal for winter, and soon it will be -30 degrees outside. Snegapod (snow fall) is my new favorite Russian word, though I’m not quite sure if it is a real Russian word... We kind of made it up from the word for snow - снег (pronounced sneg) and pod - под (meaning to fall). Over the week, my town has gotten a few more inches of powdery white snow :)

The view of the playground in front of my apartment building from our kitchen window.

You can tell that winter is setting in because the days are getting shorter – the sun sets around 4pm now, and it still rises around 7am. But no worries, life still goes on during the winter and we’ve had a really busy week in our little town.

Heather and I walked to school in the snow with our umbrellas!

Our Technical Facilitator Ludmyla taught us how to paint eggs with wax by hand, in the traditional Ukrainian style! It was very similar to dyeing Easter eggs, except designs drawn in hot wax with the stylus are usually a lot more intricate than the designs drawn in white crayon on eggs.

These eggs are so beautiful – I can’t believe our teacher painted all of these by hand!

Luda was kind enough to let us each take home one of her painted eggs! We were all so excited to get one of her beautifully painted eggs. Luda is really talented at painting the eggs, I can't believe that she painted all of these in just a few short days! They are so detailed and intricate.

Monica and I got matching teal eggs.

First, our teacher poked holes in the eggs and blew out the whites and the yolks. She let them dry at home and brought them to school for us to paint.

Our teacher preparing all the eggs and dye.

Next, we used a small stylus to draw on the egg shells with hot wax. We stenciled on some traditional designs in pencil first, so our eggs weren’t completely drawn freehandedly (can I turn freehand into an adverb?). The places on the egg covered by hot wax were white after the first round of dye. After the first lines were drawn on with wax, the eggs were dropped into the jars of dye for their first coat of color. Luda explained that each egg usually has only 2 or 3 colors – any more than that and the colors kind of just blend into brown.

The eggs soaking in the jars of dye.

After the first coat of color, hot wax was drawn on the egg again. This time, the places on the egg covered by the second round of wax preserve the first color.

Danielle and Heather working on their 2nd coat of wax.

My egg didn’t turn out so well, because I accidentally rubbed off some of the wax between the first and second coat of color. However, Monica’s egg turned out great!

Monica and her hand-painted egg!

In our little town, it is common to have a dacha. A dacha is a second house, usually a summer house with a garden or a farm house. We all went to Jakob’s host family’s dacha and got to saw and chop wood!

Nathan and I with the saw.

Jakob chopping a little chunk of wood.

Inside the dacha, Jakob’s family had an old wood stove. I thought it was interesting to see what a wood stove looks like, for I may be cooking on one when I get to my permanent site soon!

Making tea on the wood stove.

I think Mama Tanya said that this dacha has been in their family for a few generations. She showed us an old photo album with black and white pictures of her and her family from the early 1900s, which was really interesting. They’ve definitely done some renovations, for the house has electricity inside.

Our group inside the dacha with Jakob’s host  mama, Tanya.

Mama Tanya told us that her dog likes to dance in his spare time… and she wasn’t kidding!

Heather and the dancing dog.

Last weekend, Laura cooked pizza and invited us over to her host family’s house for dinner. It was fun to hang out with another host family and practice my Russian. Our Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) is coming up next week, so I can use all the practice that I can get!

Our group at the dinner table with Laura’s host sister.

World AIDS Awareness Day was December 1st. Since Ukraine currently has one of the worlds fastest growing infection rates of HIV/AIDS, our group dressed in red and presented a short Powerpoint presentation at school to the 8-11th form students.

Yes, the only thing red that I brought to Ukraine is my famous Christmas sweater... I'm a hardcore Yellow Jacket :)

We also toured the “Kiev-Atlantic  Ukraine” factory in our town. Kiev-Atlantic is a grain and feed processing plant, they produce feed for livestock and also export sunflower oil to surrounding countries in Eastern Europe. Disclaimer: this part of my blog post is going to sound pretty nerdy. As an Industrial Engineer, I am naturally curious about a factory’s manufacturing operations, quality control process, distribution system and warehousing facilities.

In front of the factory’s short-storage bins, where grain is stored for up to 2 months.

The factory employs around 300 people from our town and churns out about 15-20 truckloads of oil per week. It was really interesting to see what their operations were like, and we were lucky to have a tour in English since the directors of the factory are American.

Monica tasting some soybeans fresh from the production line.

Since our town is located near one of the bigger railway hubs, Kiev-Atlantic takes advantage of the open rail lines to import raw grain and export their products. The founders of the company actually used the railway to import all the machinery and materials to build the factory from the United States.

Rail containers are loaded directly with grain product from the factory.

Walking into the factory’s warehouse made me smile, since the CAT forklifts all look familiar and a lot of the machines have Russian translations taped onto the control switches. Inside the warehouse, finished bags of feed grain are stacked on pallets and stored on vertical pallet racks.

Mike, the director of the factory, showing us a bag of quail feed.

My host family drinks water from the well in front of our apartment building, and I usually draw water from the well every few days. I asked my mom the other day if the water in the well would freeze during the winter. She laughed and told me that the well is deep enough not to freeze. We keep a silver coin on the bottom of the water bucket, apparently silver is a natural purifier. I just noticed the date on the coin the other day, and was astonished at how old it is!

Cranking the water from the well!

Check it out – the silver coin is a ruble (Russian currency) from 1896!

So my apologies - I meant to post this last week, but didn't have time to upload all of the pictures until today. This is my last post from my Training town... I'm headed to Kyiv tomorrow to find out my permanent site! I am thrilled to see everyone in group 40 again that I haven't seen since Staging (and to meet everyone else that staged a week before me). And then our Swearing-In Ceremony will be on Thursday, after that I will officially be a Peace Corps Volunteer!