Our happy little Christmas tree!

Greetings, Family and Friends!

It’s time for another belated holiday letter from the McHardy/Griffis household! (On the Orthodox calendar, Old New Year is celebrated on January 14th, so we’re actually still just barely in the holiday season!) Although 2012 was a very different year from the last few (no international traveling, no big moves, no job changes, etc.), it was a busy year for us here in Denver, Colorado!

Alex celebrated his one year anniversary as a user interface web developer for Beatport, and all his hard work was rewarded with a nice raise! A big success for his team was developing a website for DJs to upload and sell their mixes. He continues to play hockey every week, and his team won the league championship last spring! Alex’s newest hobby is fixing up our old road bikes and tricking them out with colorful tires and accessories. He also became an expert chef and dishwasher while Emma spent her evenings doing school work.

Emma’s completed MPH Capstone Project!

Most of Emma’s time this year involved studying for her Master of Public Health degree at the Colorado School of Public Health. She completed an internship and final master’s project at Denver Public Health, prioritizing injury concerns for school students (bullying, assaults, suicide, and sports-related injuries). All her hard work has paid off, with a scholarship awarded by faculty members in recognition of her academic and leadership excellence. With just one course left to graduate, Emma’s pretty darn excited to get the degree finished and start making an impact!

Alex gets our campfire going!

Of course, we kept ourselves pretty busy outside of work and school. We joined Park Hill United Methodist Church in the spring, serve as ushers every-other-week, and have made great new friends through our young(ish) adult small group. We also played on the church’s summer softball team and contributed to the team’s “perfect” 0-11 record. Of course, living in Colorado means occasional trips to the mountains for hiking (including summiting Emma’s first “fourteener,” Mount Bierstadt), skiing, and camping. We spent a lot of time on our bikes, commuting to/from work and school and generally just riding around town.

2012 found us mourning the deaths of Alex’s grandparents, Rudy Kunza and Hazel McHardy. Fortunately, we were also able to spend some good quality time with family. Our parents made it to Denver for visits, complete with brewery tours, skiing, and hiking. We also got to spend some time in Missouri and North Carolina with the McHardys and Griffises. Emma’s sister, Anna, moved to Denver in the summer to start nursing school, and Alex’s twin brother Bill just moved to the state with Steph and Jonah. We’re pretty thrilled to have some siblings nearby!

The first pictures of our little squirt!

As for us, we’ll become a family of 3 sometime in late February or early March with the birth of Baby McGriff/Griffardy! We can’t wait to meet the little one and begin the wild and crazy adventure of parenthood! Emma is particularly excited for the kiddo to stop using her ribs as a jungle gym.

So, here’s to a happy, exciting, and fun-filled 2013 for us all! Remember that you always have a home-away-from-home with us. Happy New Year!

Love and peace,

Alex & Emma

2012: A sampling of pictures from the year.

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Oh, Christmas Tree!

Dear Friends and Family,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We are so thrilled to be celebrating the Holidays in America again! We’ve been enjoying our frasier fir Christmas tree, drinking plenty of eggnog, listening to festive music, and enjoying the lights and decorations of our neighbors. We’re lucky to have been able to spend Thanksgiving with Alex’s family in Missouri and will be with the Griffises in North Carolina for Christmas. There’s nothing like a couple of years away to make us appreciate our wonderful families and crazy American Holiday traditions!

Using that Electrical Engineering degree for something.

As you know, it’s been a wild and crazy year for us, but we feel really happy to be settled down in Denver now. Alex is enjoying his new web development job at Beatport, where they bring in a DJ every Friday afternoon and have happy hour in the office. He’s been biking to work just about every day and has only lost one pair of gloves in the process. Just in case the job ultimately doesn’t work out, Alex has been dabbling in alternate career options, such as: pinball repairman, bike fixer-upper, professional foosballer, and speciality crocheted monkey-clothing designer. He finally joined an ice hockey league and gym and is trying to remain modest about his two years of soviet arm-wrestling training.

What is this strange American custom called shoveling?

Emma did really well her first semester in the Master of Public Health program at the University of Colorado, Denver. She’s bringing joy to Christmas parties everywhere with her enlightening tales of the theory of biostatistics. She’s been biking to class and running most days. After the last two years, she has newfound appreciation for concrete sidewalks, storm drains, and people who shovel snow from their walkways. (Did we mention that we’ve had 4 big snowstorms in the last 2 months?!) Emma’s also been trying her hand at a variety of new healthy-living projects, such as homemade granola, shampoo, and deodorant.

Saying goodbye to Ukraine

Although we’re happy to be back in the States, we really miss our friends in Sofievka. If you weren’t able to keep up with our blog (which we totally dropped mid-July—sorry!), we had a very busy last few months in Ukraine—finishing work at our schools, saying goodbye to all our friends, and frantically completing a playground project, which couldn’t have been done without an amazing amount of support from you folks back home! Anyway, we’ve had a couple of Skype conversations with some Sofievka friends, but it’s really hard to keep in touch. It’s still very surreal sometimes to realize that we were living in Ukraine just 7 months ago. (Alternately: it’s been 7 whole months?!) We continue to be very thankful that we had such a wonderful experience. It was hard and trying at times, but we’ve already gotten beyond that and now only think fondly about our time there!

One more adventure, this time in South-East Asia

We tried our best to have a smooth transition from Ukraine back to the US, but everything from June through August is pretty foggy! We left Ukraine (flying directly over our training site and Sofievka on the way) headed for DC, with a six-week layover in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, in order to see another awesome part of the world. The food was amazing, the beaches were beautiful, and the people were super friendly. We even got SCUBA certified! However, the bus rides were long and uncomfortable, we were living out of our backpacks, and we were pretty ready to be back in the US after 2+ years away.

What a great country!

Once back in the States, we got to spend about a month visiting our families and hanging out with friends before we felt the pressure to get to Denver and settle down before Emma’s classes started. But, we had a seriously wonderful time visiting with our loved ones, relaxing, and enjoying American life. Many thanks to our families and the Caudles for hosting us along the way!

So, here we are, in Colorado and enjoying just about every minute of it. We’re in a lovely rental home with a guest bedroom, so we’re expecting lots of visitors in 2012. (That means YOU!) Shout outs to sisters Cara and Anna for being our first guests!

Best wishes to you and your loved ones this Holiday season. Here’s to a new year full of peace, love, and happiness!

Love,

Emma & Alex

Alex and his grandpa Rudy (in his daily overall attire) hanging out in Missouri this past summer.

Update: We found out on December 31st that Alex’s grandfather, Rudy Kunza, died. He was a real character who made friends with just about everyone he met. He turned 90 this year, and he just kept on farming – he was remarkably active and healthy till the end. He survived WW2 and many close calls with farm equipment, but apparently a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurism finally took his life. Although we are sad that Rudy’s gone and will miss him greatly, we’re thankful for the times spent on the family farm and around the kitchen table: playing cards, listening to funny stories, eating toast straight out of Rudy’s toaster, and hearing his good ol’ Missouri drawl.

2011: Our whirlwind year in exactly 100 pictures

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No luck! We haven’t seen the sky yet in Laos. From what we can see through the rain, Vang Vieng is a beautiful place. There are huge limestone mountain outcroppings that are just barely visible on the other side of the town’s river. Normally, the many tourists spend their time here tubing down the river and exploring nearby caves, which would be amazing. Unfortunately, the river is super swollen so that tubing would be ridiculously unsafe, and we weren’t allowed to cross the bridge to get to the caves on the other side. Instead, we spent our day today wandering the streets of this little town, watching “Family Guy” episodes at a nearby restaurant, relaxing with a Lao beer on our deck overlooking the river, and surfing Facebook. So, kind of a bust, but hey, we’re relaxing in Laos, so life can’t be too bad!

We’ll cross our fingers for better weather tomorrow. Either way, we’ll probably head back to Vientiene by Tuesday (hopefully with a clear day or two to explore that city) and from there over into Cambodia via Bangkok.

Basically, we’ve had:
-3 days in Bangkok
-over night train to southern Thailand (Surat Thani)
-3 full days on the northeast side of Ko Pha-ngan (ferry to and from the island), relaxing on the beach
-two day trip across Thailand to the west coast, with an unsuccessful detour to Kao Sak national park
-day in Kao Lak, which is totally shut down this time of year because of weather, but enjoying a small street festival
-day in Krabi, trying to figure out scuba diving, eating street food at the night market
-week+ in Ao Nang, taking scuba lessons, relaxing on the beach, with a few days break due to bad diving weather and bed rest for Emma who had a bit of a fever

Besides the fever, we’ve had a good time here in Ao Nang. We spent two days getting educated all about scuba diving and practicing in a local pool and then got to go to the Phi Phi Islands to put our new skills to practice. Although a little nerve wracking at first and a little counter-intuitive, it is pretty amazing to be able to breathe and move around so freely underwater. Unfortunately, the weather’s not the best for diving this time of year and visibility was poor, but we got to see lots of cute little Nemo clownfish, bright blue sea stars, a crown-of-thorns starfish, a moray eel, a lionfish, some giant-caterpillar-type sea cucumbers, and the back of a sea turtle as it swam away! We were lucky to have a great instructor, Terry, who taught us the number one rule of diving: look cool! I don’t know if we succeeded, but we’ll keep working on it!

You never know with this kind of traveling, but hopefully we’ll be in Laos a couple of days from now. We’ll take an overnight bus up to Bangkok today, then probably another overnight bus to the Laos border the next night. Fingers crossed everything goes smoothly. In Laos, the plan is to spend a few days each in Vientiane, Vang Vieng, and Luang Prabang. If we have the chance, we may go for a ride on the Mekong River.

Finally, we got some photos uploaded! Enjoy!

Emma enjoys an evening on the beach.

I’m sitting in under a fan in an internet cafe in Khao Lak, Thailand, sipping on an iced coffee from a 7-11 (which are on every street corner). We packed our trusty Macbook Pro between a couple sleeping bags, said a couple Hail Mary’s for it, and shipped it home on our last day in Ukraine – so we have to go old-school with the internet cafes to stay in touch.

Anyway, we’re alive and sweating and enjoying our break between the stresses of Peace Corps and the inevitable post-Peace Corps “let’s figure our lives out again” phase.

On April 28th, the post holes had been dug in the Milaritivniy neighborhood—near our very first apartment (where we lived our first month at site).

Within a few days, the fence had been installed and painted.

Our third playground is in a neighborhood called Milirativny. A bit farther out towards the edge of town, it’s the neighborhood where we lived during our first month in Sofievka. We chose a nice spot in a grassy area near some chestnut trees in front of the apartment buildings.

The timeline for this playground paralleled the one in Molodyozhny. We painted the fence here in early May theday after we finished the fence at Molodyozhny, and we waited the same two weeks for the carpenters to build the rest before we could paint it in another marathon volunteer day. The residents really came through for us and helped, though, and the results are something to be proud of.

As we held the final opening ceremony here and watched kids running around, we felt a great deal of pride at what we managed to do for our beloved hometown in Ukraine. Thank you again to everyone who supported us and made this possible. The people of Sofievka won’t soon forget your generosity!

A week later, the bench and trash can were finished, and the other structures had been started.

It was a great day for painting playgrounds - and we were experts by then.

Superstar volunteer Solya and another local kid cut the ribbon.

Congrats to Peace Corps for making it 50 years!

Finally, more than a month after it was begun, the Milirativny playground is finished and open for business!

This is the Molodyozhny site before any work was done...

...halfway finished...

... and Molodyozhny after we painted everything.

Our volunteers made quick work of painting the fence.

The second of our little parks is located in a neighborhood called Molodyozhny, surrounded by several apartments and a preschool. This part of town is just behind the secondary school, so a lot of teachers and young families live in the apartments.

The carpenters didn’t get started on this playground until the end of April – well late enough to make us nervous about our timeline. First, they cleared a couple trees for space, and put up the fence, bench, and trash can. We organized a community work day right away to paint what was finished. We had a lot of help from residents that day, and it was fun to see neighbors coming together and volunteering – something that doesn’t happen very often here.

Once we painted the fence and bench, we had to push for nearly two weeks before the carpenters finally finished the playground on the very day of our grant deadline (which we had already extended). We were frustrated by the delays, needless to say, but we organized a work day for the next day to get it painted. This time, with such short notice, only a few very dedicated neighbors were able to help. Nevertheless, after five or six hours of sloshing on red, yellow, and blue paint, we managed to mostly finish. We returned a couple evenings later with a ladder to get the high parts and some other details, and then prepared for an opening ceremony a couple days after that.

When the time finally came to hang balloons, take photos, make speeches, and cut the red ribbon, we enjoyed the moment. Kids ran around and had a blast, parents sat on the bench and chatted, and we gave off a big sigh of relief!

It even has a climbing wall! That's Mountain Dew Extreme™!

Time to play!

A lot of trash and yard waste had piled up over the winter in our neighborhood.

Luba and Vika, who live nearby, come to check out the playground's progress.

Neighborhood volunteers do a fabulous job painting.

Olya finally got a chance to really paint in color—here she works on the sandbox roof.

There was much excitement in the air when the workers came back to finish off the roof and swing!

An incredible transformation can be seen on the playground's opening day!

It was really fun to watch the transformation at the first playground, since we can actually see this one from our apartment windows! The first step for this site was to clean up the area, which was no easy task. The neighborhood dumpsters were located about 10 meters from the site, and although the dumpsters themselves were regularly emptied, a huge buildup of trash formed around them throughout the winter. Additionally, people nearby decided to put their yard waste there last fall, which turned into a giant pile of branches and leaves.

Alex and I were a little skeptical that the area could actually be cleaned up, but everything turned out great. First, the town council arranged for the branches to be hauled away. Then, they had the dumpsters moved around the corner, near an abandoned building. Finally, the last bits of trash and yard waste were cleaned up. We immediately noticed an increase in the number of kids playing on the old, worn out equipment. There were a couple of teetering, rusty slides (which were later removed), a swing, and a butterfly-shaped jungle gym. What a difference a little clean-up can make!

So, the site was clean and dry! Our carpenters first installed the perimeter picket fence, then the bench, trash can, sandbox, and play structure. Once the basics were all ready to go, we held a neighborhood work day to paint. Alex and I printed up flyers and put them on all the apartment building doors in the neighborhood – about 12 buildings and 20 doors in all. We weren’t sure what kind of turnout we would get, and were pleasantly surprised when at least 20 folks came out to paint. Most of them were young parents, plus our partners Tanya and the mayor (also a neighborhood resident), a few school students, and even a babushka or two. We finished the majority of the painting that day, although Alex and I had to go back a few additional days to finish off some of the detail work.

For reasons unknown to us, the playground sat mostly-finished for about a month. Finally, the carpenters finished off the details on the play structure (steps, climbing wall, slide, and swing), town workers moved the sand into the sandbox and play structure, and we painted the last little bits. The town hauled away the old, rusty slides, and we were good to go!

Last Thursday, we held the official opening ceremony for the playground, even though kids had already been playing in and around it for a month or more! The mayor, Alex, and I gave some short speeches, some kids from the nearby preschool recited some poems and gave us flowers, and a little boy cut the red ribbon hanging across the gate! The kids in attendance rushed into the playground and began swinging, sliding, climbing, and playing in the sand. We passed out some drinks and cookies and took some pictures. Overall, a very successful opening!

Everyday, we look outside and see all kinds of people—small children with their parents, babushkas, teenagers, school kids, random passers-by—playing and sitting and enjoying the space that was previously filled with trash and completely unused. Thanks again to everyone who helped make this project a success!

View photos of the entire project!

Our little neighbor keeps Jenya the carpenter company on the first day of work installing the first playground.

After 2+ weeks of rainy days, our carpenters were finally able to start installing our playground equipment this week. The whole thing should be finished tomorrow! On Sunday, everyone will celebrate Easter, and then we’ll have a community workday on Monday to paint it all. Hopefully people will come out and help, since it’ll be a day off.

We can actually see this site from our apartment windows, and it’s been fun to watch our neighbors—adults, kids, parents with small children—already walking by to examine the site and even try out the new equipment. I think it’s going to be a really popular spot!

Finally: a side note about another noteworthy project in Ukraine. Peace Corps’ Gender and Development Council, of which I am a member, runs three annual summer camps for Ukrainian girls and boys. These camps offer wonderful opportunities for Ukrainian kids to discuss important issues such as gender, violence, HIV/AIDS, and human trafficking, all while having a great time at camp! It only takes $72 to send a child to camp for a week. So, if you missed the chance to help us with our Parks & Playgrounds Project, or if you want to do contribute to another fabulous project, donate here. To find out more information about the camps, please visit this website.

Workers put together a bench in the lumber yard behind the workshop.

We’ve learned a couple new details and changed plans a little. First of all, it turns out that we need to treat all of the wood with a flame-retardant liquid before we can paint it. Ukrainians traditionally love going to the park and cooking shashlik (grilled meat) over an open fire. We don’t want some “resourceful” fellow using our beautiful picket fences as shashlik fuel! Secondly, we learned the carpenters are planning to bring the wood to our sites and assemble the playgrounds on-site, rather than put them together at the workshop. So our part in this is now two stages: treat the wood with flame-retardant while it’s in pieces at the workshop, and then paint it after it’s assembled on-site.

So, for these last two weekends, we got busy slathering on flame-retardant. We recruited some volunteers from among the students we know at the school and lyceum to help us get it done.

We started treating the fences inside, since it was still cold out.

Olya and Carina worked hard to help us finish the fences. Alex wore his iContact t-shirt as a shout out to colleagues who donated.

We started last weekend with the little picket fences that will surround the playgrounds. A couple of my star English-speaking students at school, Olya and Carina, volunteered to give us a hand. It was still a little cold outside, so we worked inside the workshop. We had 50 2-meter sections of fence, 20 pickets per section, 4 sides on each picket – and we had to cover it all with the clear liquid. It was tedious, thankless work, but Olya and Carina were real troopers. They helped us knock out almost all the fencing that first day, and then volunteered to come back and finish off the rest after school. The fence pieces were the hardest parts to treat, so we owe Olya and Carina a big thanks for their hard work.

Lyceum students and the mayor pose with Alex for an action shot. Those bench legs, by the way, are made of recycled school desks.

After the fencing, we mostly just had a huge stack of flat lumber to treat, which we managed to finish off in one long Friday’s work. In the morning, we recruited 6 volunteers from the 2nd course farmer class at Emma’s lyceum: Roma, Kolya, Sasha, Dima, Vitaliy, and Sasha. These guys made swift work of a sizable stack of lumber, so Emma and I were able finish the rest that afternoon.

It felt satisfying to finally get our hands dirty (or chemically, I should say), and put some “elbow grease” into this project rather than just the “brain grease” we’ve invested thus far. To see and actually pick up and carry around the giant stack of heavy-duty lumber our friends and family bought with their hard-earned dollars – it makes us really grateful once again for your support.

Emma, Olya, and Carina take a break from their hard work on a new bench behind the workshop.

We had a lot of heavy-duty boards to treat with flame-retardant.

Alex and one of the carpenters share a moment on one of our benches.

Emma finishes off the last batch: a stack of roof slats.

You can see all our photos of the project in this gallery. Next weekend, weather permitting, we’re planning to install the first playground in our neighborhood! Wish us luck!