11 Steps to planting a Ukrainian Garden

Step 1: Go to college. Lose yourself. Become convinced you need to do something outlandish in order to get rid of your upper white middle class Jewish guilt. Go out with friends one night senior year and announce you are joining the Peace Corps. Start the application later that week just to prove wrong the doubts milling in your head. Wait one year. Receive your invitation to go to Ukraine.

Sep 2: Arrive in Ukraine. Experience culture shock, followed by immense guilt that you chickened out and didn’t go to Africa and get attacked by mosquitoes every night. Express your desire to the Peace Corps personnel to go to the smallest, most remote place they can find.

Step 3: Begin life in your small Ukrainian village. Realize you have no idea what you are doing. Wake up at 6 with the roosters. Go to the well for water. Head over to school during the summer holiday lull and realize you have nothing to do. Play with small children, because they find you of interest. Teach how to throw a baseball. Build a seat for your toilet. Memorize a poem or two by Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian National Poet.

Step 4: Take baby steps. Give English lessons. Have absolutely no idea what you are doing. Learn rules of English Grammar. Refuse to accept monetary payment, taking potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, and various basked goods in their stead. Teach Vannya the guitar. Clean up the trash that litters the side of the road, first alone, then with previously stated small children in tow.

Step 5: Help with the fall harvest. Dig, Collect, Sort. Potatoes, Beets, Hay. Chop Wood. Learn how to seal tomatoes for the winter. Run the soil through your toes. Cut grass using a scythe. Try to gain a sense of what your urbanized ancestors lost some years ago. Take a bucket bath.

Step 6: Invent a project idea out of thin air. Write a grant. Buy some wood. Learn to hammer, nail, measure, cut, sand, paint. Build some trash cans. Tell your English students that in exchange for lessons, they have to help collect the trash. Try to create something sustainable. Fail, try, try again.

Step 7: Notice the cold is beginning to set in. Seal up broken windows. Become sad when days end at 3 or 4 o’clock. Continue giving English lessons until 8 in the evening, for lack of a better idea of what to do with your time. Question your purpose. Have Vannya come ask if he can begin giving guitar lessons to others. Teach some English songs for a big concert. Go Sledding. Go Ice Fishing. Watch your clothes freeze on the line. Have the days begin to get longer. Regain momentum. Start anew.

Step 8: Hear an idea for a new business, to sell produce over the internet to people in Kiev. Decide its time to become a music producer, and start recording an album, the children as the stars. Be approached about an ecological project. Write a grant. Begin to earn trust of people who never trust, speak a language beyond verbs and nouns and conjugations. Push ideas to completion, even when they tell you they cant, even when you tell you you cant.

Step 9: Ask your neighbor for a plot of land. Have neighborhood kids, the ones who clean up trash and learn english and rock out on the guitar, help you dig holes and plant seeds and water tomatoes. Learn how to hoe, the difference between a weed and a cucumber. Identify Potatoes, Beets, Watermelon, Onion, Garlic, Peas, Peppers, and everything in between. Wake up extra early every day, just to see the progress your plants are making. Pray for Rain, but not too much.

Step 10: Wake up with the sunrise and go to the well. Feed the dog. Cook some Borscht. Teach English. Record Vannya’s new song. Write a business plan and translate it into Ukrainian. Build a Bench. Learn something. Head for your garden, your land. Hoe some weeds. Feel the sun on your chest and the earth under your feet. Stand and admire. Realize you have returned to something, the joy in planting a tiny seed in the ground and watching it grow to something huge and wonderful and hopefully delicious. Be proud. Forget about Africa, and about guilt, and about the myriad of your villages problem. Work the land, work on yourself. Learn Something.

Step 11: Repeat, if necessary. I guess that’s why Peace Corps is two years.