One of the things I am most often asked is “what does a typical day look like for you?”
While one of the joys of Peace Corps is that no two days are ever the same — your service is what you make of it and most volunteers have a lot of unstructured free time — my days during the school year have a sense of routine now.
Just as a full disclaimer: While not all of these photos were taken on this EXACT day — some were taken earlier and some were taken later — I included them all to better illustrate what an average day looks like for me.
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7 a.m.: I’m awaaaake. Ish. I hit snooze and lay in bed for a little bit longer. Then, I check my phone (thanks to the time difference, I often wake up to a toooon of messages/ notifications from friends and family members back home) and get ready for school. I make coffee (I have a moka pot, as do most Ukrainians — drip coffee is not a thing here), do my makeup, brush my teeth, get dressed and look at my calendar for the day. I’ve stopped eating breakfast because the lunch hour at my school is pretty early and food here is incredibly calorie-dense, so I simply don’t need breakfast.
8:10 a.m.: I’m out the door on my way to school. Wednesdays are my busy teaching days, so I have five (out of six) classes today — and my free hour is for lesson planning. First hour starts at 8:30, and my school is a 15-minute walk from my apartment. Because this is Peace Corps, of course, the walk is entirely uphill. And the hill is steep. I arrive to school super sweaty, as always.
8:30 a.m.: First hour starts. It’s a sixth grade English lesson. We’re learning the past progressive/ continuous today, and I’ve prepared a lesson in advance with my counterpart, Oksana. However, I realize I don’t have the cable to connect my MacBook to the HDMI projector… and Oksana doesn’t have her laptop ready. (Honestly, it’s for the best — I’m here to work sustainably, and reliance on my technology isn’t very sustainable.) I try to get the video to load on Oksana’s computer, but no luck. The WiFi isn’t cooperating today. Oksana ends up just guiding students through book exercises for the rest of the 45 minutes of class.
9:25 a.m.: OK, second hour! I have this class with Iryna, and it’s an eighth grade class. Today’s assignment is to write a letter of complaint. I start class with a fun exercise where students write down their complaints on paper, and put them into a hat. Then, students draw the slips of paper and read out loud the complaints of their fellow classmates. They laugh when they realize that all their complaints — “The weather is bad.” “We have too many lessons today.” “My homework is too hard.” — are all very similar. Iryna teaches students formal vs. informal letter language, and then I guide them through the letter writing process for the rest of the 45-minute class.
10:30 a.m.: I have another eighth grade class, this time with a different teacher named Iryna. Have you noticed that I have co-teachers for all my classes? Peace Corps aims to build capacity in the countries it works in, so I am never alone with students. I co-teach, because 1. If I teach alone, then I’m taking a job away from a perfectly capable Ukrainian who could hold that position, and 2. Co-teaching allows my colleagues to watch me work and learn new methods, and vice-versa. Today, we’re learning about prepositions of space. We go through several related activities.
11:15 a.m.: Lunch time. I’m super fortunate that I get to eat at my school’s cafeteria for free. Lunch breaks — and breaks in general — work a bit differently here. Students have 20-minute breaks between every class, so lunch break is fit into one of those breaks. Today’s lunch is salt-and-peppered eggs, buckwheat, potato and rice soup, and bread. We usually have tea or Uzvar to drink — and luckily it’s a tea day. I really can’t bring myself to like Uzvar. I’ve tried!
11:35 a.m.: I usually have a lesson with my counterpart, Tania. However, Tania and I didn’t have time to plan the lesson together, so she teaches it on her own. I spend the 45 minutes in the teachers’ lounge working on other things (and catching up on the various group chats that serve as EVERY PCV’s lifeline). Today, I’m promoting “Write On!” — an international creative writing competition held at our oblast library’s Window on America center. I find an interpreter and coordinate a TV interview for the following morning and share information on social media. (Ukrainians LOVE social media, and apps like Viber, Facebook and Instagram are usually the best ways to share information.) Oksana also has a free hour, so she joins me in the teachers’ room. She tells me I need to stop working, and instead, join her in coffee and “having a rest.” (Coffee breaks are culturally VERY important here, and I hear the phrase “have a rest” at least 10 times a day, no joke!) Oksana makes me coffee and asks me to explain American idioms and slang to her — one of her favorite things to learn about. Today, we learn the phrases “join the club” and “middle of nowhere,” among others.
12:35 p.m.: Now I have my lesson planning with Tania. We manage to plan for our following two lessons of the week in 10 minutes. Tania usually likes my activity ideas and she’s really great at changing them to suit the grade levels for her students. We spend the rest of the planning hour “having a rest” with the other English teachers in the teachers’ room, which means talking about the weather, talking about food, talking about our families and talking about the English language. One of the Irynas also gifts me a plastic bag FULL of potatoes. Because I’m a single 30-year-old woman living alone — far from the norm here — the teachers and students at my school often worry about me and my eating habits.
1:30 p.m.: I have my last class of the day: Oksana’s same sixth grade class I started with. We try once again to get the video working (no such luck) and end up moving on to two different activities so students can continue practicing the past progressive / continuous tense.
2:25 p.m.: It’s the seventh hour, which is the hour I host my English club. I have two different clubs a week, and this is the one for the fifth through eighth grades. Today, we’re learning how to make cootie catchers and play MASH. A HUGE part of Peace Corps is sharing American culture with our host countries, and my students love to know what kinds of things I did when I was their age. So, MASH and cootie catchers — in English! — it is.
3:15 p.m.: School is done for the day, so it’s time for errands. I don’t have potable water in my community, so my first stop is at a water machine near my school so I can fill the two 1.5 liter plastic bottles I brought to school with me today. My apartment is located in a super industrial part of town, so I buy a LOT of water since I use it for both drinking and cooking. Carrying several liters of water around with me is pretty common. After I refill my water bottles, I head to the local grocery store, Silpo, to shop for some food items. I had dinner at my host family’s house the night before so I have leftovers waiting back at my apartment, but I pick up some snacks and other random things I needed: pumpkin seeds, vegetable juice, sushki (a popular Ukrainian snack), Russian Brie-like cheese, crackers, quinoa (what a find! It was on sale, too!), chocolate granola and sour cream. An odd assortment of things, yes, but I have a “buy it while you can carry it” mentality. Between my backpack full of food, plastic bag full of potatoes and canvas tote full of potable water… I’ve got a lot on my hands. Literally.
5 p.m.: I’m home! I unload my bags, have a quick snack of pumpkin seeds and vegetable juice (I can’t afford produce that isn’t in-season, so vegetable juice is often my only serving of vegetables I’ll get in a day) and sit down at my desk to work. I’m hosting a community English club Friday night at Window on America, so I prepare a Google Slides presentation (this week’s theme is Mardi Gras) and start planning some activities.
7 p.m.: After about two hours of work, I have dinner. My host family had had me over for dinner the previous day, and they sent me home with leftover deruni and nalysnyky… so that’s dinner.
7:30 p.m.: Ukrainian tutoring time. My language facilitator from Peace Corps Pre-Service Training FaceTimes me once a week to tutor me in Ukrainian. I really want to learn the language but it’s pretty hard sometimes because my exposure is limited — I only speak English at school and with my coworkers. So, my weekly tutoring sessions help. We spend 90 minutes on my Ukrainian lesson.
9 p.m.: Ukrainian is done! Today’s been longer than I would have liked, and I have to get to sleep early to prepare for a 6 a.m. wakeup call the next morning for that TV interview. I tidy up my apartment, practice yoga in my living room and take a shower. I make it a point to read every night, too, so my phone goes on silent about an hour before I go to sleep, and I dedicate some time to my Kindle. Right now I’m reading “Inside a U.S. Embassy: Diplomacy at Work” because I’m trying to decide if a career in foreign service is for me.
11 p.m.: Lights out!
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So, that’s what “a day in the life” looks like, as of right now. There’s actually a fair bit of variety to my routine. While I’m usually at the school during school days, I do get to spend weekends traveling to conferences, hosting other volunteers or exploring the city of Khmelnytskyi. I also squeeze some various other activities into my work weeks: manicure appointments, activities at Window on America, get-togethers with Ukrainian friends, dinners with my (former) host family, etc.
I’m looking forward to seeing how my schedule changes come spring and summer. I haven’t really experienced summer break since, well, I was a student, so I’m excited to see how I’ll work summer camps and other activities (*cough*, using my annual leave to travel around Europe, *cough*) into my schedule.
This post was originally published Dec. 28, 2020. Its timestamp has been updated to better reflect the timeline of my Peace Corps service.
Very funny, I laughed) Work – a prostitute)
My Ukrainian counterparts all had incredible senses of humor!