я не понимаю!

Too funny for words (and yes, it is a joke!) but the scary thing is, now that we're native English speakers who also speak Russian, it's probably not too far from how we sound when trying to communicate with non-native speakers!

"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peple wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."

No, didn't zat mak yu smil?

We're off to Kyiv tomorrow so that Lauren can close out her Fitness Center grant and give a brief presentation to the newest PCVs on human trafficking in Ukraine. Next stop: Budapest, Hungary (or so we hope) to stock up on holiday cheer and back in time for American Christmas, as it's affectionately called around here.

We recently invited our host family over while Yulia was home for the weekend. We always try to serve them something new and different for dinner although by now, we've pretty much exhausted our "exotic" cooking repertoire with them – we've had them over for burritos, lasagna, pizza, plov, and Thanksgiving. This time, we decided to pull out a standard – hamburgers and French fries! We actually haven't had those in some time. The last time we made hamburgers was for Michael's host family in Chernigiv, back in training.
The meal was a smashing success! We couldn't find 100% hamburger meat so we decided to go with 50/50 (hamburger/pork) and in the end, Michael thought that the burgers were much less greasy than usual. He also sauteed chicken, which is something he does quite well, and Lena chose that over a hamburger. Ira and Yulia had cheeseburgers with all the fixins' and thanks to the wonderful French fry cutter Lauren got for her birthday from her parents, everyone enjoyed the restaurant quality fries. They were a little shocked that we eat them with the skin on though – we told them it's the best and most nutritious part!
Yulia and Lena had no problem handling their burgers, bun and all – after all, those girls have been educated in McDonald's! Yulia's dorm is about a 5-minute walk from the closest McDonald's and though her mother doesn't know it, she goes there about every day for a little something. She looks like an old pro, doesn't she?

Ira had a tough time getting started; in fact, she said, "it wouldn't be very nice if I opened my mouth wide enough to actually fit the sandwich in, would it?" Funny.

We also introduced them to Kool-Aid, which we got from a PCV who was finishing his service. We made the cherry kind and when Lauren explained to Lena that it wasn’t juice, but a sweet, fruity drink, she said right away, "I'll take that!" Her mom and sister quickly followed suite and they all had seconds

As we were saying goodnight, Lena wanted to show Lauren her new hat, which looks
exactly like the hat Lauren bought last winter, only Lena's is pink. Whenever Lauren is in pictures with Ira or Yulia, people always think they're sisters or cousins -- what do you think?

We can only guess that Lena wanted in on that action as well so here are the "sisters-in-hats":

Although Michael did the bulk of the work preparing for the meal, he missed out on most of the fun but for good reason. He just found out that his USAID grant was fully funded and so, he had a meeting with his colleagues to discuss their next steps! Since you've read a lot about Lauren's projects, we thought we'd turn your attention to Michael's.

The plan is to start a community film and photography festival that will address various concerns facing local citizens. His partner organization will lead the community through this process by selecting a festival theme (the first of which is ecology), researching/collecting relevant data, creating its own video on the topic, and inviting various community entities to contribute video and photography. On the day of the festival, which is roughly scheduled for April, the community will gather to view the submissions of film and photography and afterwards participate in a round-table discussion to brainstorm feasible solutions. Ideally, those who attend will be educated on the festival topic and given a platform to express concerns and solutions. But between now and then, Michael and his partners will be busy training on the new video equipment, advertising, and making a local blockbuster!

We had a very memorable Thanksgiving weekend, surrounded by good friends and packed with loads of fun activities and most importantly, delicious food! Since Ukrainians don't celebrate Thanksgiving, everything from grocery stores to ice skating rinks was open for our enjoyment, which was a major plus. We also received a wonderful package from our friends, Tim and Corene, and just in time to help us with all of our baking needs!

Our friends Cary, Jordan, Nathan, and Tess joined us on Wednesday and we started the gourmet cooking with a "plov-off". Cary and Michael each made their variations of plov; Cary's was probably more authentic, because he got his recipe straight from the Tatars who brought the dish back from Uzbekistan, but they were equally delicious. Michael's was made with chicken and Cary's, with pork:

There was some concern about whether or not she would fit in our oven, but as you can see, Jordan managed to squeeze her in. A Thanksgiving miracle!

It took about 3-4 hours to cook her completely and we were definitely taking some risks, without a meat thermometer to verify a finished result. Cooking was a group effort and everyone contributed something along the way, but Jordan and Tess deserve all the praise for the turkey! We had hoped to eat around 6 p.m. but since Lauren was busy preparing for both her HIV/AIDS project and Fitness Center opening, she had to work all day and it turned out for the best that we didn't eat until 8 p.m. For six people, we had just enough food and hardly any leftovers for the next day, minus the turkey, which we barely made a dent in. In case you can't tell from the picture, we had turkey, macaroni and cheese, devilled eggs, cranberry sauce, creamed corn, rice dressing with pork, mashed potatoes (Michael's mom's recipe), molasses cookies, brownies, and chocolate covered peanut butter crackers. For the first time we can remember, the meal was made entirely from scratch, with the exception of the rolls!

The day after Thanksgiving, while you all in America were probably scoring some amazing deals, Lauren went to work and Michael took our friends to the neighboring town for some pizza and ice skating. They befriended a deaf 12-year-old figure skater, who enjoyed teaching the Americans how to skate better and kept texting them long after they had parted ways!

That night, Katia and Mike joined us for jambalaya, made by our friend with Louisana roots, and a trip to the sauna, where we enjoyed a couple of hours of alternating between sweating and relaxing in a room temperature jaccuzzi. It was amazing and for the equivalent of 3 USD per person, you can't beat that! Afterwards, Tess, Katia, and Lauren took advantage of their open pores to apply a homemade beauty mask of pumpkin, milk, and honey -- not only does it do wonders for your skin, it tastes good too!

The following morning, Carey and Gretchen, arrived all the way from Kyiv for a second Thanksgiving meal and Katia made some pretty fantastic pumpkin pancakes -- she got 20 cups of fruit out of one pumpkin and she's been pretty creative in using it. For Thanksgiving lunch, we had even more food than we did on Thursday -- all of the above freshly prepared for round two, plus green bean casserole, potato salad, yeast rolls, sugar cookie cut-outs, pumpkin pie, and peanut butter pie. Again, everything made from scratch!

With all that food, we barely fit around the table but thanks to a borrowed table from the church and our couches, we managed to squeeze all 10 of us in:

It was Carey's birthday so we made two peanut butter pies, one in honor of her; the pie is another recipe courtesy of Michael's mom:

After everyone went for seconds and some, even for thirds, we still had leftovers! That turned out to be a good thing since we had to feed our guests dinner and lunch the following day. As of today, we are happy to report that we only have enough turkey left for a couple of sandwiches so a 20 lb. bird was right on the money for two Thanksgiving dinners and a weekend of leftovers.

After the big meal, a tiny break, and then dessert, we headed off for a Thanksgiving Concert, which Michael had organized for our Ukrainian friends. About 45-50 people showed up to hear Michael, Nathan, and our pastor play their respective instruments. Together, they played "Yesterday" and "Chervona Ruta", a Ukrainian favorite, plus a few pieces by themselves:

Two of our friends also shared a Thanksgiving memory to give our Ukrainian friends a better idea of what Thanksgiving means to Americans. Since some of us speak Russian and others Ukrainian, we stuck to English and our tutor provided the translation services. As it was her first time, she was very nervous but she got all the main points across! At the end, Lauren sang "O Holy Night" to kick off the Christmas season and then we shared some Thanksgiving goodies (pumpkin bread, iced sugar cookie cut-outs, and molasses cookies) with our audience. It was a really nice event and everyone seemed to appreciate the effort Michael went too. It also made us feel better for not preparing a Thanksgiving meal for our Ukrainian friends or family, like we did last year! Here we are with our American friends, Michael's English club, and two of Lauren's colleagues after the concert:

On Sunday, we enjoyed some fabulous cinnamon rolls, courtesy of Carey, along with baked apples and homemade granola bars. After a lunch of turkey sandwiches, we bid our friends farewell in pairs and we got in one last Thanksgiving meal with the final pair. Carey's family tradition is to make enchiladas with the leftover turkey meat and since we love Mexican food, that worked perfectly for us! We made the enchiladas with adjika, wheat and sun-dried tomato wraps, mozzeralla cheese, black beans, and turkey. They were delicious and will probably become a tradition in years to come for us too!

Was it the best Thanksgiving ever? That's hard to say--it's definitely up there. It was extremely fun, memorable, and packed with great events. For those reasons we're thankful and will never forget it!

We got our Thanksgiving turkey over the weekend – all 19 pounds of it! We read on the Internet that we should budget about a pound of meat per person, but it looks like we'll now have more than two pounds of meat per person. We almost didn't get a turkey, just because they were so hard to find but after talking to enough people, we learned of a couple in a village about 30 minutes away who used to go to our church here. They raise turkeys and they happily delivered one to us on Saturday. It cost 35 UAH/kilogram (about $2/lb.) and was the smallest one they had! It was freshly killed, featherless, headless, and we think it's been cleaned but to be honest, Lauren was too faint of heart to check. They passed it on to us in two plastic grocery bags and we put it straight in our freezer. We've never made a turkey before so Thursday should be an adventure—but then again, there will be 6 of us working on the project and 4-6 more enjoying the end results!

After four weeks off, school will be back in session on Monday and the next two weeks will be busy ones for us!

First of all, Lauren and her students are moving forward with their HIV/AIDS community project and over the next week, they will be conducting lessons on the transmission of HIV to 9th-11th graders in five different schools. After the lessons have been completed, the student trainers will invite a small sample of the student trainees to an assembly on World AIDS Day (December 1st) to learn more about stigma and discrimination of those living with the virus. We were lucky enough to find two individuals who were willing to tell their personal stories of contracting HIV, which will serve as a much more powerful presentation tool! Secondly, we have eight guests coming to celebrate Thanksgiving with us so we will be quite the busy host and hostess, all while the above project is going on. Finally, as soon as the guests leave and World AIDS Day ends, the long-anticipated grand opening of Lauren's Fitness Center will finally take place on Friday, December 4th. Phew!

We can't remember a time, other than in training, when we've been so busy in Ukraine and frankly, it feels a little strange but we know it will be rewarding! The students we took to Camp HEAL continue to amaze us every step of the way. They have been incredibly responsible throughout the process, showing up for every meeting and rehearsal and fulfilling the individual assignments they are given in between meetings. They are very nervous about this week though, so keep them in your prayers! We also have to say how much easier it is to plan such a project with Peace Corps' support. While we didn't write a U.S. President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) grant and won't receive funding of any kind, Peace Corps is supplying us with hundreds of brochures on HIV transmission, testing, and relationships, as well as a film on stigma and discrimination. Our city administration has been pretty terrific too; they have supported us by giving the participating student trainers permission to miss class on seven separate occasions, printing some of our materials, and helping us to gather accurate statistics.

The People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWH) network of Kramatorsk (Donetsk Oblast) has been amazing, in that they are willing to travel over six hours in one day so 125 students from our town will have a chance to hear their personal stories. To be honest, they really weren't on board at first, saying they would only come if we could find the money to pay for their trip. When the city administration wasn't able to pay for it, our students decided to each give a few UAH to cover the cost and upon hearing that, the Initiative Group leader was so impressed that she found more money to send a second person!

When you think of HIV, you probably think of Africa but Ukraine has one of the highest rates of growth of new HIV infections in the world and the highest in all of Europe. You would be hard pressed to find a place in Ukraine more in need of this kind of training than our little town. After reviewing the statistics for both our city and oblast, we were shocked to learn that the number of new infections has increased 60% between 2008 and 2009. We have the highest number of HIV infections and AIDS victims in our oblast since Ukraine started keeping records in 1992, and our oblast has the ninth highest rate (out of 27) in all of Ukraine and the highest rate of new infections. Even today, most Ukrainians still think that HIV is for drug addicts, prostitutes, and those in prison – in their opinion, bad people. The truth is that only 39% of the new infections in our town over the past year were contracted from injection drug users; 48% were contracted from unprotected sex. Sadly, the remaining percentage of infections was passed from mother to child. That is way too high of a percentage for a country as developed as Ukraine, which has socialized medicine, and it stems from fear of stigma and discrimination when seeking out treatment.

On December 1st, we'll be passing out Red Ribbons as a symbol of support for those who are living with HIV, who have died of AIDS, and for those who care for and support its victims. As one of Lauren's Ukrainian colleagues told the students, the color red doesn't stand for blood – it stands for love, because those affected by this virus need our love and support more than anything. If you have a chance, wear a ribbon in honor of the hard work our students are investing in their country's future!