High Fives...Or Let's Not And Say We Did

Well, the project I have been working on with my group for the last few weeks has come to its logical conclusion. Yesterday at 4pm, we presented our forum to the Oblast Administration on how NGOs operate in America. During lunch I was lamenting that I had not learned my presentation well enough to go off the paper and that I would probably have to refer to my notes, and much to my surprise, I was told that I really should use my notes. “Ukrainians will expect you to use notes, otherwise they will think that you are making it up”. When I heard that I breathed a slight sigh of relief. I had also considered that since this was the first time I have ever worked with an interpreter, that it was more important for me to stick to the script and present the information that we had prepared, than go off the script and risk the interpreter missing something in the translation. We got to the office around 3pm for our 4 o’clock presentation. We set up the room and made sure all of our seats were where they needed to be. Then we did some last minute practices on our parts with the interpreters. One of the requirements for our project is that no Peace Corps people could serve as our interpreters. We had to go find them ourselves and work with them to make sure they were up to speed on the business language they would be interpreting. This was challenging, especially since we are learning Russian and living in a Russian speaking city, but since the project was being presented to the government, and Ukrainian is the official language, we had to make sure that our interpreters could speak Ukrainian, our PowerPoint slides needed to be in Ukrainian, and that all of our submitted paperwork was also in Ukrainian. We had some hurdles and hoops that we were expected to jump through and some of them were completely unnecessary, but will hopefully serve to show us what we can expect when we get to our permanent sites next month.
4 o’clock was showtime and the attendees all arrived on time. We were off and running at 4:05. The room, unfortunately, was so bright that the PowerPoint was a bit difficult to see. It was also so hot that the pictures show the sweat just beading on our collective brows. We didn’t care, we just wanted it to be over with. Considering everything that we saw and experienced with this project, I would say it could not have possibly gone any better! We were well coordinated and professional, the interpreters were awesome, and the audience was engaged and actually asking us a lot of questions about how NGOs in America differ from theirs.
Most group projects have one Peace Corp representative. Ours had four. Afterwards, we got some really great feedback about the presentation including from the Vice Director of the Department of Internal Affairs and Public Relations who was our contact on the project and was really instrumental in setting the course for the project. We were happy. They were happy. And as we walked out of the building, we were almost giddy at the thought of how great everything went. It was almost worthy of a high five moment. Instead we celebrated with a shot of vodka and a beer and nothing could have hit the spot better or suited the feeling in the room more appropriately.
I learned a lot from my group and this project that will hopefully serve me well when I get to my site.