Greetings from Vinnytsia -
We were very saddened this week to hear of the
death of Matt Hartmann. He was a wonderful young man, and a joy
to his parents and family. He will be greatly missed by all who
knew him.
In other news, we have found an apartment! As
you know, we have been living with one host family or another
since we got here the end of March, and we are sort of starting to
feel like teenagers whose time has come to move on. We really
like our current host family, and they take good care of us and
feed us very well, so we are sure that after a couple of months of
being on our own we will wonder why we were so anxious to move,
but in the meantime this is where we are. Peace Corps has an
arrangement with our host business organizations whereby Peace
Corps pays $160 per month of our housing expense (rent, gas,
electricity), and the host organizations split the rest. This
makes finding housing a group operation, and we need to be mindful
of everyone’s budget. Don is working with a business center
(more on that later), and they have a couple of “profit centers”,
including relationships with a couple of local business
universities, so one of his Peace Corps “projects” will be to help
teach business classes (in English) and this will in turn provide
some income to his organization which they in turn can use to help
pay their portion of our rent. Karen’s organization is an NGO
with no profit centers, however, and basically no money. More on
that later too. But this means that they also have no funds to
contribute to our rent…. So Karen has been “hired out” (sold??)
part time to Don’s business organization and will also work with
the business school in teaching a couple of classes. Then somehow
the money will funnel to Don’s organization, and our rent will be
paid. The classes we will teach don’t start until the fall, so we
will have some time to get ourselves organized, but this should be
interesting!
We looked at several apartments. The cost of
living in cities in Vinnytsia is definitely higher than in the
villages, and for that reason Peace Corps is reluctant to put
people into cities. Again, we feel fortunate that this is where
we are. (Several of our group are in villages, hauling water and
living with outdoor toilets.) Most apartments we looked at were
in the $300 to $350 per month range which is higher than a year
ago due to the inflation currently hitting Ukraine. For some
reason they quote apartment rents in dollars (USD). We don’t know
why rent is quoted in USD, but they get around the falling dollar
by saying, “at the 5 to 1 exchange rate,” which is what the
exchange rate was for years (it isn’t now, but we hope they will
eventually get that figured out too…) . Anyway, we found one for
$250 per month plus gas and electricity, which made everyone,
including Peace Corps, happy. It has some very marginal
furniture with it, and as we have NO furniture at all that is good
also. But it does need some (actually a lot of) work and serious
cleaning, and would no doubt fall into the lowest end of the
“fixer-upper” category if it were in Fremont, assuming that it
hadn’t been torn down 10 years ago. (Gary and Ray – any chance we
could hire you for some home improvements???) We do not move
in for ten days, which is good and will give us some time to work
on this. Don’s first priority is going to be the bathroom.
There is enough mold on the walls that it could be mistaken for
some kind of new trendy black paint. Karen gets to attack the
kitchen. She is not quite sure where to begin, but this is the
plan.
The previous tenants left us an old phonebook –
from Soviet times, dated somewhere in the 1980’s – and also a
vodka “tea set”. The “teapot” is in the shape of an upright
brightly colored fish with its mouth open, and it holds the vodka,
and then there are little upright fishes also with their mouths
open for the individual “teacups”. By the time we get done with
this project the “tea set” will no doubt be much needed…
We also want to tell you about our new “jobs”,
but are afraid that we are running out of room so we will continue
this in another e-mail. Thanks. Don and Karen