The university 
the university from the street
the view of the university (far blueish building) from our kitchen windowAfter a long wait for a schedule from the university director, we received a tentative plan yesterday. Aleksander said he thought they'd be scheduling us to help students with their English once every two weeks or MAYBE once a week.
This is a good place to stop and explain a cultural thing you learn fairly quickly in Russia (and which seems true here also): Keep your expectations about the concreteness of plans and times low.
However, knowing that we were still happily surprised to see that he'd scheduled us for two classes this week and FIVE next. So we'll start our language-helper careers on Wednesday at Noon. Unfortunately the visa trip I wrote about in our last prayer update will take place during the week that we have the 5 class times scheduled.
So, while I could have called and told him about the conflict in the schedule, another thing that long years in Russia have taught us is that you have to do things face to face where ever possible. For that reason I was at the U this morning at 9:00am to explain to Alexander that we were sorry that we wouldn't be able to come during that week but we would definitely be ready to do a lot when we come back from Moscow. He was very understanding and accomodating.
The 'deal' we've made with him is that we'll help his students with their English if we can work out a way for them to help us with Ukrainian...which brings us to another story: Ukrainian church...
This is a good place to stop and explain a cultural thing you learn fairly quickly in Russia (and which seems true here also): Keep your expectations about the concreteness of plans and times low.
However, knowing that we were still happily surprised to see that he'd scheduled us for two classes this week and FIVE next. So we'll start our language-helper careers on Wednesday at Noon. Unfortunately the visa trip I wrote about in our last prayer update will take place during the week that we have the 5 class times scheduled.
So, while I could have called and told him about the conflict in the schedule, another thing that long years in Russia have taught us is that you have to do things face to face where ever possible. For that reason I was at the U this morning at 9:00am to explain to Alexander that we were sorry that we wouldn't be able to come during that week but we would definitely be ready to do a lot when we come back from Moscow. He was very understanding and accomodating.
The 'deal' we've made with him is that we'll help his students with their English if we can work out a way for them to help us with Ukrainian...which brings us to another story: Ukrainian church...
No comments:
Post a Comment