Since many people (well, two at least) have expressed an interest in recent events regarding the arrival of Sergey and his adjustment to life in Nebraska, I thought I'd continue this blog I started earlier this summer. The advantage to a blog in this case is that it is a pull media rather than a push media. A mass e-mail arrives in your mailbox whether you like it or not, and one feels guilty for including photos and using large chunks of disk space. A blog is just out there for you to choose to read, or not, and if pictures are included, well, it doesn't result in sleepless, guilt-ridden nights.
Last Tuesday (Aug. 16), Sergey went to the American embassy in Kyiv to try to get his visa again. He'd been there the week before and the consul had asked for a few more papers. Well, thanks to a quick response by Huda in Union's admissions department, he had the papers in hand by Monday.
But having the right papers does not guarantee a visa. He waited in line for seven hours (a pretty typical queue at the US Embassy) and of the 300+ people there, only about a tenth got visas. A girl near him, also wanting to study in America, got up to the window, had everything reviewed by the consul and was rejected. The consul said that all the papers were correct and in order, but she had the feeling the girl would try to stay in America--just a feeling--and therefore denied the visa. The girl had just paid the US government at least $1,200 to be rejected on a feeling. For the average Ukrainian, that's just over a year's wages. The US Department of State does not just reject a visa applicant though, they salt the wounds by marking in the passport that the visa was denied. The US is the only nation in the world to do this and once such a mark appears in your passport, it makes it harder to get a visa to anywhere and almost impossible to get one to the United States in the future.
So, you can imagine Sergey had some apprehensions as he came up to the counter and handed over his documents. On his first visit, he knew that he would be allowed to try again, but if he were to be rejected this time, he would have had to start the entire process over again. Plus, he'd have that awful stamp on his passport. He says the consul didn't even scrutinize them. She just glanced at each, said everything looked good this time and approved the visa. Of course, he had about three hours of other hoops to jump through at the embassy before the visa was physically in his passport, but he was approved in only a few minutes.
The next day he was able to buy a reasonably priced ticket for a flight less than 24 hours in the future (a miracle in itself) and by 8:00 am Thursday morning Kyiv time, he was sitting on the plane for his first trip out of the former Soviet Union. He hadn't slept at all the night before and he only slept for a couple of hours on the whole trip. He arrived in the Central Time Zone at 8:13 pm Thursday night, meaning his total traveling time was about 20 hours. When we met him at the airport, he was tired but still excited.
Unfortunately, Austrian Airlines had no way of getting him to Omaha or Lincoln, the closest place on such short notice was St. Louis. I had told him earlier that Chicago would be fine--partly because I know people in the area to stay the night with or even meet us half way. St. Louis wasn't a bad drive though. Dad and I went to pick him up and the drive was about 6 hours each direction. The only difficult part was a thunderstorm we ran into around St. Joseph, which Sergey managed to sleep through entirely. Since he has vocational training in carpentry, hair on the longish side, and is a Theology major, I can't help but think he intentionally tries to sleep through storms as part of a regimen of Christ-likeness.
We got to Lincoln around 3:00 am and were at Union trying to register by 10:00 am. One of our first stops was the ESL department and we were told they were just about to start administering the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and he wouldn't have to wait. Personally, I thought he should have the weekend to recover before taking the test that determines which classes he takes, but he chose to take the test then. We didn't get much of registration done since the test took two and a half hours and all the offices close down at noon on Friday.
Since we couldn't finish getting him registered, I led an informal campus tour when he finished testing. The college has had significant changes since I graduated, but since I was privy to the planning stages of many of the changes as an ASB officer, I can still talk about those areas in depth. Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour was in the computer lab on the third floor of the Everett Building. I was trying to tell him about logging in and he kept looking at this cute little redhead. He said he thought he knew that girl and I was thinking, "yeah, right." She looked up and said, "Sergey? What are you doing here?" Apparently, she and her older sister had visited Ukraine on a short-term mission trip a couple years ago and he had spent quite a bit of time with them, especially the older sister. They are both Union students now. The old saying deserves repeating: the Adventist world is small.
After accomplishing everything we could at Union, we came home and ate. By 7:00 pm, he was dead to the world.
The next morning we went to Sabbath Experience (Union's way of saying "Sabbath School") and then church at CVC (College View Church). He'd seen the church on a video Union had sent me in Ukraine, so he was quite as awestruck by the windows or the organ as most first-timers. After church, he went home with McClellands for lunch. Huda McClelland is the head of admissions with whom I worked getting the I-20 sorted out, her husband Jim teaches art at Union, and their daughter Laurel is an Associate Professor of ESL at Union. The family sees taking care of international students as part of their special mission--Mr. McClelland even donates the profits from his artwork to scholarship funds for them. Anyway, they had all of the newly enrolled ESL students over to their home for lunch and kept them until about 8:30 pm. I called them to make sure he would get to the ASB Handshake on time and Huda mentioned something about just adopting him. As I have said before in different venues, he's a likable fellow.
The theme of Handshake was superheroes so he needed something special to wear. Daniel, who considers himself Union College staff when it's convenient, was going to Handshake anyway, so I found Sergey's Orange Revolution paraphernalia and sent it along. The million protesters who forced democratic elections on a corrupt government last winter might not be superheroes per se, but they certainly accomplished more than some character in an escapist comic book. He said a lot of people asked about the orange garb and some even knew what it was about.
Sunday we went shopping. Earlier in the summer he had asked how much certain things cost in America and had decided it would actually be cheaper to buy most things here, so he saved the money he earned this summer. We still need to find some more things, but he was able to get a pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, a pair of pants that can turn into shorts, and a pair of dress shoes. He wears the same size dress shoes I do (13) and the same size of pants I wore back in high school (32/34) so I think we can keep him clothed at least, though not as fashionably as one might hope. In Ukraine, it's very important to most people to be in style, so most people only have a few outfits that they wear over and over again and by the time the fashion has changed significantly, they need new clothes. In America, we place more of a premium on washing our clothes between each wearing, which means having a lot of clothes to go through between laundry days and, unless one is rich, caring a lot less about fashion. In this respect, I think we will try to Americanize him for the time being.
Oh, and Sunday evening he was finally able to get a hold of his parents on the phone. He'd been able to contact some friends and his sister before to tell them he'd arrived safely and all was well, but he hadn't been able to talk to his mom and dad directly. Interestingly, all of his other conversations were in Russian, but when he talks to his mom, it's pure Ukrainian. Which means I could eavesdrop better. From his responses, I could interpolate that his mom was asking him what the apartment was like, if he was eating well, what he was eating, if he was helping out around the apartment . . . in other words, the exact same questions my mom usually asks me.
This brings us up to yesterday. I had class at UNL first thing in the morning, but afterwards we went to Union to finish registering. This time I managed to avoid ESL until we had just about everything done. As we met people like Jacque and Osa he kept saying how friendly and happy everyone seems. That is the thing about Americans that Eastern Europeans find enchanting, but I have also met many who became rather disenchanted when they found out how often it is just a mask we wear. But at Union, the vast majority of the smiles are genuine.
Around 11:20 we finally ventured into ESL territory to get his class schedule worked out and find out the results of the TOEFL. He scored 470. 475 is the when Union allows students to enroll in normal classes and 550 is when they say a student does not need any assistance with language learning. His listening, reading, and essay scores were all at an advanced level, but his grammar was intermediate and he needs to build his vocabulary. So, as planned, he will spend this semester taking ESL classes and then he'll begin regular classes in January, though he'll probably need to take one more ESL grammar class along with them.
Since the advisor he was assigned was in class at the time and she needed to clear him in the computer before we could finish registration, he went off to take his first two Union College classes and I went to the library to grade tests from my class at SeCC (Southeast Community College). At 1:30, we met at his advisor's office. He'd just been in class with her and they were talking as I walked in. After only an hour of teaching him, she was suggesting he meet and marry her niece who's about to graduate from UCDavis. Ah, that American subtlety. This conversation, combined with the reaction of one rather pleasant office worker in admissions and one very good friend of mine upon meeting him ("He's so cute!") make me think there are going to be powerful forces keeping him from his homework and his eventual return to Ukraine. Being tall and foreign goes a long way with girls. But I think I prefer it when I'm the foreign one.
During the registration process he's had to use his name as transliterated from Ukrainian (Serhiy, pronounced "ser hee") rather than Russian (Sergey, pronounced "ser gay") and he decided Monday to have people call him by the Ukrianian pronunciation. He says it will be less confusing for them that way, but I think it's because the Ukranian version is harder to make fun of in English. It's the same reason why he doesn't like it in Ukraine when people call him by the diminutive form Serozha--rozha means an ugly face so it's easy to make jokes. Sabbath morning he was asking Daniel if he could call him Dan or Danny, both of which Daniel hates, so I told him that if he calls Daniel, Danny, then we'll start calling him Serozhichka (something like "little Sergeylet").
But, as usual, I digress.
We finished registering him, we got him a job in plant services and got home in time for me to finish my grading and go to class. When I got home, he and Daniel were watching an American Football game on TV and Daniel was explaining the rules. It's nice to see them getting along and I took the opportunity to put on my headphones and watch German TV on the computer. Today is Serhiy's first full day of classes and work, so I'm sure there will be interesting opinions to hear this evening.
Anyway, here is a picture of him outside the apartment Sunday morning. As you can see, he let his hair grow this year, but I don't think it looks bad on him.
