In two weeks, we all leave for our site interviews. That’s crazy. I can’t believe time is passing so quickly. In two more days, Week Four will be at an end. I’ve taught four classes so far. It’s getting a little easier to plan lessons, which is good.

The trip to Kiev last weekend was a lot of fun. I think everyone in the cluster was ready to see a city. Our TCF and LCF ate at a Ukrainian fast food place. We all went and looked. While some of the food looked pretty good, we ended up at McDonald’s. Should I feel bad about that?

Language lessons continue at a brisk pace. It looks more and more like I have trouble learning words that start with “p.” I wonder what’s up with that.

I have new motivation to do learn more Russian faster. My host mom’s husband is ill. It makes me sad I don’t have enough language to ask her about him. I think my heart broke a little when I got in from class and asked how she was doing. She said, in Russian, good and bad. She was good but her husband wasn’t doing well.

I need to find something to do to help.

Kievstar has EDGE speeds where I am, so I have speedy internet when I need it, unfortunately it costs by the megabyte. It’s better than dialup, though, so I consider it a triumph.

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I honestly can’t believe how much Russian I have learned in the last two weeks or so! It isn’t that I am a master or anything, but to think that on October 1, I knew nothing and now can kind of, sort of halfway communicate with my host mom is pretty amazing.

My host mom is pretty impressive, too. Especially in how she *wants* to communicate with me. We have had some halfway normal conversations with the use of my Russian/English dictionary because she is perfectly willing to stop what she is doing, grab her glasses and look up the word she wants me to understand.

My cluster has a great dynamic, too. One of the few concerns I had about Peace Corps was how I would fit in with a group of people who would most likely be a decade or so younger than me. Likely a good mix of everyone’s maturity and my own lack of having grown up, we all get along well and know we can lean on each other when things get tough.

I can’t say training is a breeze, though. The language is tough, although I knew it would be. Especially when I spent the month prior to leaving studying Ukrainian. One of the small battles has been switching from Ukrainian pronunciation of numbers to Russian.

I start team teaching this week and teach a group of 10th graders on my own next week. Things are moving pretty fast.

Things are good, though. It’s obviously fall, leaning to winter, but I feel safe and secure in my decision to do this.