Playground Girls

To get home, I walk through a park about the size of a city block. It has orderly lines of trees, a dilapidated squat toilet compound, and a little playground in the middle. Sometimes there are playing children here and sometimes there are slightly older drinking children.
On this day, there were both. The girl on the right was hollering at me, not really friendly, but not really aggressive either. The girl on the left, who I think was her little sister, was laughing and swinging, rather sweetly.

Back to Life!

This is my sixth month in Ukraine as a Peace Corps volunteer. In this time I've learned meat and potatoes Ukrainian, made friends with a lot of babushka ladies, attempted to control the forces of childhood anarchy and teach english classes, developed a mild but very persistent digestive problem, and made a few drawings.
I'm going to give life to this blog again, and update it as regularly as I can, with photos, scans from these bizarre 1970s soviet magazines i found in my apartment, but most of all, with drawings. I would be very grateful for folks to tune in.

I was just flipping through the sketchbooks I've kept over this time, and here's something I really like. We encountered this man while waiting about 3 hours in the Fastiv train station. I positioned myself in front of this almost mythical creature and drew as covertly as I could.

The words say "The old accordion man sat across from us and stared with grey eyes into the distance. He pulled out a jar of some kind of pickled fruit and ate them- sticking his hand into the green juice, fishing for the sweet morsels, vigorously shaking the jar from time to time. Then he pulled his accordion up to his face and used it as a pillow, drifting off to sleep."

 

I might add that during this sleep, he was shaken awake by two tough looking police guys who shouted at him and demanded to see his ticket. He showed it to them, they stomped away, and he went back to sleep.