hello

It was 1996. There I was, 26 years old, living in Detroit again with my parents, recovering from a car accident, and loathing my job as the office manager of a snooty hair salon (cursing my liberal arts degree)… 

 

The whys and the hows

One fateful day, I decided to go through the mounds of boxes I had stored in my parents’ basement (that I was a pack-rat puts it mildly). As I sifted through letters, movie stubs, drawings, and my entire past, I found some old letters from a Ukrainian penpal I had been matched with during my first-year Russian class in 1989. We had lost touch about three years earlier, around the same time I moved to Seattle in 1993. After graduating from Xavier University in Cincinnati, I moved to Seattle as a lost soul with a penchant for adventure. I found adventure, but was still wandering. Working at Bulldog News on the Ave, and in the Broadway Market on Capitol Hill, definitely lended itself to some good adventures (and stories), but I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do something internationally (thus my BA in International Relations) and I wanted to do something with human rights (thus my active Amnesty International membership).

 

A short year and ½ after moving to Seattle, I moved back to Detroit to heal injuries sustained after being hit by a car, as a pedestrian. I am a believer in the old adage that everything happens for a reason. Good things can come out of bad situations. I still suffer from injuries acquired in that first car accident, yet I believe it was a good omen. It set me on the path to, yes, you may have guessed it – beets!

 

To do my best to make a long story short, I found the old letters from my penpal and wrote to him to see if he even still lived at the same address in Berdyansk, Ukraine. He wrote back to me, and we corresponded over the course of a year. One day, he had some surprising news: he had won a scholarship to study in the United States for a year. He asked me if I would like to come and live with his family (wife and son) and teach English at the Institute where he was teaching, while he was in the United States. He said my BA would be enough because I was a native speaker and that, as you all know, was of course, enough. (laughter and scoffing pause…)

 

Beets Galore

So, I packed my bags with my passport, very little money, no books, no insurance, and no teaching experience. I was simultaneously excited and terrified. My only other experience out of the country had been Canada (although some may argue that Detroit is a country in and of itself).

 

Bridge on Dnepr River