Happy Holidays 2003
Hi all,
Sorry for the group email but it gets the job done. Hope you all are having
a great holiday season!
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Happy Holidays from white and snow covered Odesa! The week started out nice and warm and on Monday we were walking around without coats (at least I was). But Tuesday afternoon found it getting colder and windier. When we awoke on xmas eve day the town had turned white and winter was here. It was the perfect xmas gift for us!
It is a little strange being in a country that doesn’t celebrate xmas on the same date we do. It is celebrated on January 6 & 7th and just this week the stores started with their xmas decorations. We had heard that xmas wasn’t a big holiday here so we weren_t expecting much but were pleasantly surprised when the town started getting that xmas look and feel about it. Then the snow just made everything perfect.
We had friends over for xmas eve dinner and we went to other friends for xmas day and dinner. They are Australian and their parents had just come into town to visit. They had never seen snow before so they were enjoying the treat of seeing the snow. It was nice to be able to talk normally since English is their native language. Usually we need to talk slower and use less complex words and sentences with our Russian friends. It was also good to get another perspective on world news, as Ukrainians are not overly political. The years have taught them that if you have an opinion and voice it can get you in trouble!
We’re taking a couple of days off and hopefully catching up on things. We need to add several chapters to the web site as we have a lot of pictures and stories to tell. But work has been keeping us hopping and when we get home in the evening we just aren’t fired up to do web work. We’ve also fallen behind on correspondence and need to update the resumes and get the job hunt started again. We only have 3 months left here and given the lead-time needed to find international jobs we gotta start cracking. We have asked for an extension for this project but we don’t know if it will be approved or if we really want it to be.
Our project is really taking off and there is a lot of work to be done between the New Year and June when the academic year ends. The people we’re working with spun off a second organization that got a social contract from the city to assess and begin to address the youth social problems in the school system in Odesa.
This is no small project and trying to set up the infrastructure for the organization not to mention all the trainings that will need to take place in additional to writing grants to try and fund the whole thing is keeping us, the staff and volunteers hopping. The project hopes to get administrators, teachers and youth talking about the social problems, their causes and how they can work together to formulate solutions. There is no tradition of student clubs and organizations or student governments. So this “simple” project of forming student groups to work on issues of youth concerns has gotten lots of attention.
This first phase consists of giving presentations in late January and February to the school directors, assistant directors, selected teachers and youth leaders to get them talking with each other. Then we’ll set up student associations with teachers as advisors where they will organize projects to work on their chosen issues like HIV, alcohol, drugs, homelessness, the environment etc. Our organization received this social contract, the first ever, from the city, which is directing the school system: administration and students to work on this project. (Top-down? Well? In this case there seems to be more progressive thinkers in the city council than school administrations. People are telling us that it has to happen this way. They say, even if the schools wanted to allow student associations, they would have to have the permission from the top anyway.)
Our organization has been doing this type of work for the past year in a few schools with success but expanding it and getting the social contract has raised the stakes considerably. Last Monday we held a press conference announcing the social contract and the new partnership between the city, schools and our NGO. Anyone see us on the news??? ;-) it was only local tv! So things are hopping and we’re excited as this project has great potential.
Well that’s it from here for now. Hope you all are having a nice happy and safe holiday season! We think of you often.
Peace and love in the New Year,
Fuji & Jim