In 2005, I first visited Russia as a volunteer for a USAID sponsored organization called ACDI-VOCA in a program called Farmer to Farmer. Although I was not directly working with farmers, I was assisting agricultural professors in developing distance education/technology skills in order to teach farmers in remote locations. Olga went with me on this trip and we spent a little more than a week at a university named Mari El State University in a city named Yoshkar-Ola, 600 kilometers east of Moscow.
We were both really impressed with this beautiful city, but even more, the kindness and hospitality of the people in Yoshkar-Ola. A perfect example of this was through Igor and Elena Savinykh and their daughter, Julia. Igor worked in technology at the university I was assisting and we interacted a good bit during my project. Before we left, Igor and Elena invited Olga and I for dinner at their apartment and we had a wonderful evening as the food AND entertainment were both wonderful (Webpage from visit).
Thursday evening, Igor came to stay a couple nights with me at the Hostel. He has a conference that he presented at in Moscow (about distance education) and he is working to complete his dissertation in this topic area. We have MANY commonalities, including a strong interest in educational technologies, distance education and we are both married to beautiful Russian ladies.
One touching note to point out. When Olga and I first visited Igor and his family five years ago, one of the gifts I took was a popular ceramic cup from a local artist in Clemson, with a palm tree and crescent (found on the South Carolina flag) on it. I also took some pencils with Clemson on them. Igor brought both the cup and the pencil and explained that both of those items have been his main cup for use over the past five years and the pencil has been with him all the way through his Ph.D. I just thought this was really neat (see picture).
Igor and Elena brought a gift for Olga and I that is made in a small city southeast of Moscow called Gzhel. This Gzhel porcelain tea set is all hand-painted and made in Russia. See more about Gzhel at this page presented by Wikipedia. Words cannot easily express how kind this gift is as it is so beautiful. I really appreciate this and know Olga will love it.
Igor and I had some of Lyudmila's wonderful food for dinner so he seemed to feel right at home here in the Hostel. We had a wonderful evening talking about all of the new innovations and teaching techniques that we have learned about over the past five years. I am hoping to work on an opportunity to go back to Yoshkar-Ola and work more with the faculty at the agricultural institute there and share some of the newer ideas on educational technologies so they can assist their farmers even more.
On the last picture of the slideshow, you will see how I often communicate with Olga, via iChat. Since we both have Macs, we can use this program for free, which allows me to use high-quality audio and video, share my screen or hers, give her files, and the picture on both ends is great (or at least on my end it is, a bit scary on her end). She is holding up a map of New York as soon she will go see a performance in New York City, Cyrano de Bergerac, and the lead actor is the same one I saw earlier this week as the lead actor in Dead Souls, Sergey Bezrukov (her favorite Russian actor). It is quite ironic that the American guy watches a performance in Russia and Russian lady watches the same person soon after in New York! Needless to say, Olga is excited.
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