Community Development Project

We have finally come to the conclusion on our first community development project! The Peace Corps uses these 3 months of training to teach us the formal way of conducting a project. One very important step is conducting a Need's Assessment. So we ended up creating a survey for potential projects in our village and then passed it out to numerous families and local community members. The list comprised of a Business Seminar, Healthy Lifestyles Seminar, English/American Culture Club and materials, and Tourism Seminar. After receiving back 42 of the 50 surveys, the majority was in favor of the English Club and materials.

We have found two teachers at the local school willing to work with us to come up with possible topics that are needed. They seem very appreciative for this because although English language is required in all Ukrainian schools, the materials they possess are very old and limited (not to mention most of the cultural resources are British). It was expressed that it is very important for children to learn not only about British Culture but American as well.

We are going to conduct a trial club this Friday to see how many children/teens will be involved. We are also hoping to find a few older students who have high English skills to consider running the club after we leave in June. If this is a success we will have touched on two major PC tasks: leadership training and sustainability. There will also be some sort of training session for these facilitators to introduce to them sample activities for the club and also how to come up with their own lesson plans/materials going forward. The PC has given us lots of resources for starting our own English Clubs when we reach our permanent site. A lot of these resources will be used throughout this community project.

Some people may think such a project sounds so easy because we are American and we speak English! But there is so much more to it when you have to actually teach it and come up with activities to make it entertaining. The grammar is what I'm scared about most because the English language has so many different rules but also so many unexplainable contexts. I will of course keep you updated on our progress!



**This is a picture of one of the most famous towers in Chernigiv. Years ago when this was built it was actually one floor taller. The leader of Ukraine made the builders remove the top floor after they found out it was taller than any of the towers in the capital city of Kiev. Since hierarchy is one of the most important characteristics in Ukraine, the city of Chernigiv quickly agreed and removed the top floor.