A Step Home into the Unknown, Part 1

by Michelle Arkow

October 3, 2010

I was a college senior majoring in Spanish. I had just filmed a documentary in Buenos Aires on the Argentine Jewish community as part of my senior thesis (never mind I never got around to editing the film, the paper was excellent). I wasn’t ready to go home, I was done with school for a while, and I still couldn’t resign myself to getting a corporate job and beginning my ticky-tacky American adulthood. It was a no-brainer that I was going abroad. The only question was where.

I had traveled with the American Jewish World Service Corps (AJWS), and from their weekly e-newsletter learned that there were two Jewish organizations sending young Jews abroad: AJWS and The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). These programs place applicants in the communities worldwide in which they work, both Jewish and secular. AJWS was looking for higher degree graduates, but JDC was interested in Bachelor’s graduates. Like me.

I applied, hoping to go to someplace exotic, like India or Ethiopia, but ready to go anywhere, really, so long as I had some connection to the place. I received a call several weeks later – how did I feel about working in Ukraine, in a city called Dnepropetrovsk?

Well, it wasn’t India. It wasn’t your typical warm, exotic locale. I felt so removed from Ukraine. I didn’t know what language they speak there (Ukrainian or Russian?). This was probably the first time I had even heard the country not referred to with the proper pronoun “The,” as in “The Ukraine.” Isn’t it a barren tundra, covered in snow year-round? At the same time, my family hails from there, from Russia, some of them from what was back then The Ukraine. My great- and great-great-grandparents, once they arrived in New York from the old country, all disavowed their former life, their former language, and never spoke of it. I had very little knowledge and connection to my history; this would give me a chance to learn firsthand. Also importantly, the community I would be working and living in, the Jewish community of Dnepropetrovsk, had a lot to offer. I didn’t fully understand the work I would potentially be doing there – something about voluntarism and family camps – but it sounded interesting and challenging. I thought, why not?

It’s scary to plunge in, to move to a place you have never been, to a part of the globe you have not yet trod, where they speak a language you have no experience with. I am something of a polyglot, conversant in Spanish, French and Hebrew. My language skills equipped me to travel to many places, but Ukraine was not one of them. How would I meet people? How would I buy groceries? How could I possibly work in a community I did not understand?

The interview process lasted several weeks. There was a phone interview with a placement officer from JDC, a live interview with an Assistant Executive Vice President of JDC in New York, two phone interviews with the director of JDC Dnepropetrovsk, a phone interview with the former volunteer to Dnepropetrovsk, and then one final phone conversation again with the original placement officer before I was finally offered the position.

Over the course of those interviews, I was made an offer that I couldn’t refuse. If I were to work in JDC Dnepropetrovsk for the year, I would receive private Russian lessons as part of my position. That tipped the scales. I signed on as soon as I was made an offer.

So as not to arrive completely unarmed, I took beginner Russian courses over the summer while living with my parents in New York. By the end of the two-month two-part course, I was able to read and write, had a firm grammar base, and could string together enough simple sentences to survive in many basic situations. I would need this simple base, I soon discovered, as soon as I arrived in the Dnepropetrovsk airport.

[Part 2 will continue with my first experiences in Dnepropetrovsk]

Michelle Arkow received a Bachelor's degree from Yale University in 2008 before working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. She currently lives in the Boston area and works as a project manager at Concordant Rater Systems, a technology and research company involved in central nervous system trials. For more information on her year in Dnepropetrovsk, visit arkow.wordpress.com