My blog is always last on my internet 'to do' list

That combined with far less free time this semester accounts for how rare my posts have become.

This saturday I helped clean the river banks in Velyki Mosty with 35 students, 3 teachers, Curtis and the Mayor. This cleanup was organized by the students I took to camp this summer and was generally a success. While we have not yet completed the evaluation, we cleaned up 8 cubic meters of trash and recycled over 200 beer bottles (no other type of glass is recyclable, yet). It was cool to see how the director of the factory gave us money for trash bags, gloves and cookies, the mayor gave us more bags, gloves and a truck, and the school allowed us to recruit students for labor and make no littering signs with the woodworking teacher. Overall a solid small grassroots project. Our next action is already planned for April, and will include tree planting with the cleanup.

Soccer regular season is over, but we are playing in a post season tournament. So much for achilles rest. But the weather has been beautiful, and yesterday I could almost ignore how rusty I was while limping around the goffer pocked field and just enjoy the sunny autum breeze. we won 4-2 thanks to our golie stopping two penalties, one of which I committed. It's also really nice to have that base of friends, sitting up in the pizza place on sunday night rather than getting ready for monday.

Teaching is going alot better this semester. I have completely given up trying to teach out of the book or with methods that the teachers here already use. What's the point of doing that if I'm supposed to introduce new methods. Besides english, i'm teaching or helping to teach sexed, which right now is limited to HIV/AIDS education. We've done exercises on personal impact, now are doing in depth biology, and next will have a unit on stigma and discrimination.

Then I have my other community project dreams, revamping the youth center or getting computers and internet for the public library. Maybe I can turn the old abandoned school building into a community center. Of course saying that I will be the agent of change is an exageration. As I learned very clearly from the cleanup project, the most I can realy do is connect resources in favorable ways. I can't create things or actions from thin air, but I can forge connections and think about problem solving with existing solutions with a unique outsider's perspective.

So this feeling of productiveness, variety of projects and activities has really made V. Mosty feel like home. I'm still reluctant to buy anything, such as a desk lamp, carrot scraper or second plate, but I think this month I will overcome those feelings of impermanence, even as I pass the 'less than one year to go, I'm not really counting any more' mark. It's odd to see how the experiences of volunteers really start to diverge at this point. Some keep counting and don't really get settled. Others have decided to go home after this first year. I'm lucky enough to be on the other side, really taking advantage of the opportunities that having food, rent and a job opens up. That's all for this month. I've got to write an article about our cleanup for a newspaper up in Chervonograd (in Ukrainian, uh oh). Also got to write a letter to a bunch of environmental nonprofits on behalf of the working group that I'm co-heading. The Environmental working group is a volunteer group works to provide and distribute resources to educators, runs an environmental summer camp (or a few this next summer) and works to get other environmental projects off the ground. I'm kind of the talking head, trying to make sure everyone is clear on what they signed up to do and making relatively meaningless executive decisions coin toss style.

That about sums up my last month. This post is going to be really long. Now, can I get some pictures up also?