Feeling Fulbrighty

Hello readers!
This week offered me an interesting opportunity to feel very much a part of the fulbright family. Quite often staff members from the Fulbright office in Kiev travel around Ukraine to speak at universities and press conferences about the Fulbright program for Ukrainians to study or teach in America. It is a sort of recruitment arrangement of sorts. Well this week they happened to have their conferences scheduled in towns near Artemivsk and so I was invited to join them and serve as a "real like example of Fulbright goodness" my words, not theirs ;)

Anyways, I left Artemivsk on tuesday to travel to Donetsk the nearest regional capital city where I participated in a press conference. I had to speak to the reporters in Russian primarily because the interpreter that was supposed to be there was not able to come...I was terrified but in the end it was a huge boost to my confidence because I actually did quite well. I was able to say nearly everything that I felt I really needed to say and got only a little help from one audience member who had studied quite a bit of english.

At the end a reporter approached me and told me she herself grew up in Artemivsk and she wants to write a story about me for the paper she works for in Donetsk and for the Artemivsk paper. She is planning to come into town this weekend so we can meet up. Kind of exciting to be "newsworthy"

After that we boarded a bus for 2 hours and headed north to Luhansk where I again participated in a press conference today and then tomorrow I will get to lecture to some medical students and faculty about my research project and what occupational therapy is in the states. I am pretty nervous about it but I'm sure in the end I will surprise myself.

It is very very cold here in Luhansk and it has me feeling very thankful that I am spending most of my time in Artemivsk where at least the sun has been shining a lot lately.

I met a lot of interesting people and made a lot of helpful contacts.