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On Saturday, I moved to Columbia, SC, where I will begin working for the Social Security Administration on the 21st.  After four months of a fruitless job search and living with my parents, things finally came through.  (I’m still getting rejections from jobs I applied to long ago.)  I’ve only been here less than a week, but I think I’m going to like it.  I am using these two weeks to familiarize myself with the city and to get my apartment in order.  I live in a great place, two and a half blocks from the state house, one block from the University of South Carolina, and about a twenty minute walk from the Strom Thurmond Federal Building, where I will work.  It’s a great location.

Spring is very nice in Columbia.  The budding plants and fair weather suit the city well.  It takes me back, though, to springs in Ukraine, which finally came with all their glory after months of long and harsh winters.  The snow and ice disappeared, the frozen river would free up, and the trees and flowers exploded back to life after long sleeps.  And the grey skies finally gave way, clearing into brilliant blues and dazzling sunshine.

It is springtime in Donetsk now, too.  Pushkin’s Boulevard and the river walk must be beautiful and full of strollers.

Nostalgia for Ukraine has been intense lately.  I have missed the change in the seasons, my friends, the city I lived in for two years, my little, cramped apartment.  After so much time spent disliking a place, it is strange to sometimes want to go back to it.  Of course, I can never go back.  Maybe one day I will visit again, but the Peace Corps is gone, both figuratively, for me, and literally.  The EuroMaidan’s ouster of President Yanukovich led to the Peace Corps evacuating all of its volunteers from the country.  The continuing unrest in the East–whipped up by ludicrous Russian propaganda of Nazis in power in Kiev, while Russian saboteurs actually are on the ground fomenting the protests–has forced Peace Corps Ukraine to close the post until the situation normalizes.  All the evacuated volunteers will COS on April 14th.

My memories of the places I frequented in Donetsk are being supplemented by images in the papers and reports on the nightly news.  In the photographs, or behind the reporters, I can see the bus stop where I caught the No. 2 trolleybus to the train station or the statue of Lenin that was always a meeting point for my friends and me.  I worry about the Ukrainians I know who cannot evacuate and I am sorry that the PCVs did not have a chance to complete their service.

And in Donetsk, the pedestrians moving along the city’s walking avenues must now compete with raucous pro-Russian protests occupying Lenin Square and the city administrative building.  For now, at least, no Russian troops accompany them.