Cow Story

Torpedo the Highly Intelligent Goat

I was walking by the river and I found these goats, mother and child, down a slope. As I was drawing them, a woman appraoched me, surprised. She was the owner of the goats. I asked her permission to draw the goats, and she gave it without hesitation. Her name was Svetlana, the old goat was named Torpedo. When Torpedo was younger, she was more ballistic- Svetlana said she'd hold one end of her chain and Torpedo would get an urge, and she'd shoot away,  knocking Svetlana to the ground. Svetlana definitely had affection for this goat, I saw love in her eyes.
She said the goat knows Ukrainian. She gives an order like "Turn" and she doesn't even need to nudge her, the goat knows. Although- there are times that Torpedo pretends that she doesn't understand, because she is feeling lazy or rebellious.
Svetlana said that if I was a real teacher, I should teach her goat English. "This goat learns fast," she said.

 

First days in Novoarkhanhelsk (Rewind to December)

These were some of the first photos I took upon arrival at Novoarkhanhelsk, my home for 24 months. "м'ясо" just means meat- people don't need to get too fancy with the names of their stores around here.

 

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.

An Unsettling Dream

It's been a few weeks since my last post. I've left Virginia Beach and have been re-absorbed by Paris. I'm prowling the internet for a job, committing myself to learning my French conjugations, and walking Lucie around the park. In the meantime, my brain is a dangerous place.