Easter

Saturday, April 23rd

I smile.  Sometimes.  You may not believe it, but occasionally I smile.  I smile most mornings when I arrive at school and never fail to be greeted by ten to fifteen children telling me “Good morning!”, “Добрий День”, or “Hello!”  I smile when students do really well in class, or when they say something really funny (“For Woman’s Day I buy my mother a flower bucket.” “Bucket? Відро?” “No, bucket.” “Ohhhh, bouquet!”).  I smile when I overhear hilarious conversations while walking around town (Your boyfriend is fat because he eats too many varenky).  I smile when I watch fabulous Ukrainian TV shows, like Україна Має Талант (Ukraine Has Talen), where contestants whistle dramatic songs with full orchestral accompaniment and play classical symphonys on the water glasses.  I smile when I receive wonderful text messages from the Korzhi Kids (If you start a chupacabra vigilante group, I will join.  It’ll be good for the resume and I can justify buying a shotgun in the Peace Corps).  But today I smiled a lot.  Today is the day before Easter, and Ukrainian holidays make me smile.

Yesterday was Friday, a market day, and I needed to prepare for Easter.  I bought a small wicker basket, eggs, blood sausage, a candle, and most importantly, паска, ( paska) Easter bread.  Home-made паска is obviously better, but since a) I am not a pastry chef, or any kind of legitimate baker for that matter, and b) I am terrified of my oven; it makes really scary noises and I am always afraid that it is going to get angry and blow up, I bought a паска.  For the past two weeks in the market there have been baby chicks for sale.  I seriously considered buying one and raising it, building a coop to house it, and collecting its egg every morning.  I smiled.  But then I realized that I would need someone to feed it while I was away, and maybe more, maybe less importantly I don’t know how to raise a chicken.  I frowned.

  I returned home and took a nap, then when to music lessons.  I am learning to play the accordion.  After two weeks I know two songs, a French one called Fine Fellow (I think that’s the name), and The Entertainer, also known as the ice cream truck song.  I just learned the bass part to the French song, but I am having a really hard time getting the left hand and the right hand to cooperate and play together.  I always smile after music lessons.  Then Julie (a 9^th former in my English club who plays piano and takes me to music school.  Yes, “takes me” makes it sound like I am an 8 year old, but in this country that’s basically what I am) and I went to church.  We crossed ourselves three times; in between each cross we knelt and touched our heads to the floor.  Then we prayed, and joined a procession of kneeling people inching their way towards the relics: a golden crucifix, a Bible, and a picture of Jesus on the cross.  We kissed each of them and crossed ourselves, then stood up, crossed ourselves and knelt three times just like how we entered, and left. We only went about ten meters but my knees still hurt ten minutes later.  We got ice cream at the supermarket then walked home.  About a month ago we were communicating using about 25% Ukrainian and 75% English.  Now those numbers are reversed and it has helped me a lot.  However she is a Ukrainian and will hound me to correct mispronunciations, but after three or four attempts I give up and tell her that later I will say it better.  There is one word that she loves to hear me say: точно, (tochno) exactly.  As we each went our own ways home, she told me to be ready at half past five to go to church on Saturday.  I told her тойчно; she smiled.

This morning I woke up at 4:15 to watch the Lakers game.  They won, because I’m sure you were interested.  Then I went back to sleep and woke up four hours later to meet my friend Oles.  He is a student at the medical student in Lviv and his mother is an English teacher at the third school; he is going to participate in the national English competition next month, so I am helping him practice his English.  We went to Казка,(kazka), Fairytale, the best café in town, and drank juice.  We usually order pizza, but he isn’t eating meat until Easter is over, and in his words, “There is no use in eating pizza without meat”.  I chuckled.  I came home with about two hours to prepare my Easter basket.  First I dyed my eggs by boiling them in a pot full of onion skins.  The water was a deep red color after the eggs cooked, but I bought brown eggs instead of white at the market so their color didn’t change too dramatically.  Then I set about using my decorating kit.  It’s the same thing we have at home, with different color crayons and dyes.  My first two weren’t so pretty, because I put one egg with blue zig-zags and another with green flowers in green dye, so the art didn’t show up well.  The other two were fantastic, though.  I dyed them red, one polka-dot and the other with horizontal and vertical lines in different colors, like longitude and latitude.  I was very proud of those, and I grinned.  Then Julie called and asked if I had an embroidered towel for my basket, and I replied that I had embroidered napkins.  She told me to wait in my yard and she would come in five minutes.  I polished my shoes while waiting outside, and then she came and showed me how to set up the basket.  A small plastic bag goes on the bottom, then all the food, then another plastic bag on top of the паска it won’t dirty the towel, and then the towel on top.  So I arranged my small basket, trying to get everything to fit and look pretty.  I had it set when I forgot to put in the candle, so I reorganized it.  It turned out well enough.  When I finished I smiled for two solid minutes while I put on my dress clothes.

  I met Julie and her mom, Halya, an English teacher at our school, outside of our school.  I was beaming while they approached me; I’m sure they though I looked like a loon because they started to smile, and I’ve never seen Halya smile.  We walked to the church and I asked them to take a picture of me by the Shevchenko statue.  Halya said, “Cheese!” and I had no problem obliging.  Then we joined the circle of people standing around the church.  The family of Nyko, a boy I tutor who will be working in Montana for three months this summer, was a few places to the left of us and they asked me to take a picture of them.  Later a woman took a picture of her daughter and said, “Cheese!” which made me smile.  I have also heard people say the Ukrainian word for cheese, “сир”, when taking pictures, but I’ve heard cheese just about as often.  At a little past six the priest starts saying a prayer, which we all heard thanks to the speakers on the church walls.  I understood when he said, “Christ is risen, Indeed He is risen” and a few other words even though priests say prayers very fast.  We crossed ourselves when appropriate.  Then everyone took off their embroidered towels and lit their candles.  The priest proceeded to make his way around the circle, dousing people and their baskets with holy water.  Douse is the correct verb, because it’s like standing in a shower for one second.  Then we recovered our baskets with our towels and walked home.  Halya invited me for breakfast to eat the blessed food, but I told her that I was eating breakfast with my friend Ira’s family.  She knows the family, as Ira’s mom works in the Methodological Department in town.  She was a little disappointed but told me to come for dinner on Monday or Tuesday after school.  “No, Sunday is better,” she said, “Because you need to eat the паска I made, and I am afraid my husband will eat it all by Tuesday.  So tomorrow, please.” I smiled and said ok.

Sunday,  April 24th

Хрістос Воскрес. Воїстину Воскрес.

Christ is risen. Indeed He is risen.

            This will be the greeting and response used by people for the next forty days.  Usually only the older people say it for the full forty days; at school it will last for two or three weeks at the most.  Unlike during Christmas, where we greet each other with “Christ is born, Glorify Him”, I learned these phrases within a day.  It took me at least three days to remember to say the answer at Christmas, either because I wouldn’t remember it or I wouldn’t be able to comprehend that people were telling me “Christ is born” fast enough to respond before we were ten feet apart.  I had the option to go to church at 7am today but I declined.  I probably should have, but I know it was very crowded and I would have understood very little.  I will go next year when I will be able to understand at least half of what the priest is saying.  During Christmas Mass I understood about six words total, including “Christ is born, Glorify Him”.  I met Ira and her family outside of the white church at 9:30.  Actually there are two white churches in our town and I went to the wrong one, so it was more like 9:40.  We drove to her grandparents’ house in the old part of town.  They have some big fields, so this is where the family does the gardening.  Any Easter meal, in this case breakfast, is heavy on meat.  There were five different kinds of home-made meat products, three pig and two rabbit.  Horse radish is the condiment of choice when it comes to meat.  I really like spicy, but Ukrainians don’t so much, so it is just about the only item I can consume more of than most Ukrainians.  We also ate холодець, or meat jelly.  To me meat jelly is edible, as in I smile and gulp it down so the taste doesn’t linger too long.  Of course the most important part of the meal is the паска.  Everyone is proud of their recipe and says that theirs is the best.  I will probably try ten different kinds by the end of the week.  Also, of course, we drank vodka and home-made wine.  So by 12:00 I was very full and a bit tipsy.  Ira’s mom said she wanted to sleep, and I told her we call it a food coma.  She laughed because coma is the same in Ukrainian, and food is a word that almost everyone knows.

            After a few hours at home doing laundry, I went to Easter dinner at Julie’s house.  This time there were four different kinds of meat, horseradish, паска, normal bread, and ham and egg salad.  Halya insists on speaking English with me, which is fine.  I can learn Ukrainian by speaking to everyone else in the town.  At the end of the meal Julie’s grandma, a math teacher at our school, came over.  She lives in the house next to theirs.  I’ve never seen someone refuse food like she did.  Halya kept telling her to have some bread, some meat, some salad, some champagne, some water, come coffee, and she refused every time.  This was interlaced in the conversation they were having about Halya’s native village and lasted about five minutes.  Finally she asked what I was drinking and I said tea so she relented and acquiesced to drink a cup.  The game of back and forth was playful but really funny to me.  I was half-smiling the whole time, and at one point Julie kicked my shin under the table and gave me a look of “What’s so funny?”  I explained after dinner while we were taking a walk and she just laughed.

Monday, April 25th

I woke up early again to watch the Lakers play.  This time they lost.  That’s the way she goes, as they say in Trailer Park Boys.  After the game I went back to sleep until noon, when I woke up and ate breakfast. At about 1 I saw a group of boys come up to my house.  They knocked on my door and ran away.  About five minutes later they knocked again, but called my name.  There were six boys from various 7^th grade classes, and they asked me to go walking with them.  I changed out of my pajamas and went with them.  They all had bottles of water and were slightly wet.  I didn’t put this together until we saw some other boys with a bucket by the school.  We ran away from them and I remembered; the day after Easter it is tradition to walk around town with a bucket or bottle of water and get everyone wet.  So that is what we did.  We walked around the town and stopped at some of their houses so that they could refill their bottles and their parents could feed me паска.  At Anton’s house I talked to his grandfather for a few minutes while drinking coffee.  They occasionally threw water at girls they saw and threw water on themselves.  There is a nice Ukrainian verb, хуліганати, which describes today’s activities.  Pronounced “hoo-li-han-a-ty”, it means to act like a hooligan.  They weren’t really acting like hooligans, they were acting like 12 year old boys.  At one point we spotted some 15 or 16 year old boys on a scooter with a bucket behind us.  We ran away and took cover in Andriy’s house.  His mother have us coffee, паска, and other desserts.  About half an hour later his grandmother came over, having just come from the cemetery.  This is the other tradition that happens on the day after Easter; people visit the cemetery.  I still don’t know what to think about the playfulness of the children on the day their parents visit their relatives who have passed.  I can say something about the dichotomy of life and death and blah blah…but I won’t because I don’t know what it means.  His grandmother was impressed with how I speak, and upbraided her grandson and grand nephew Anton not being able to speak English after learning for six years.  Then Andriy’s mother asked me how her son and nephew behaved in class.  They looked at me with horror in their eyes, because they aren’t the most attentive pupils.  But I reassured her that they are both clever and they listen to me most of the time.  She seemed satisfied and let slip a little smile.

I’m not sure how to describe those smiles during Easter weekend.  They weren’t all because of something funny or ridiculous.  I think I was happy, or proud, or having fun.  I noticed that other people smile a lot more during Easter than they did in the month before.  Maybe it’s because spring has finally arrived, maybe people enjoy hearing my gibberish Ukrainian, maybe because Easter is the start of the holiday season and we don’t have to work on the next two Mondays.  Whatever the reason, Easter is my new favorite holiday, and that makes me smile.