Desire to serve others draws local man to Peace Corps and Ukraine
Ethan Scharf (pink shirt, beard) engages with some of his students along with the Ukrainian English teacher he shares classrooms with.What does it take to leave home and spend two years in the Peace Corps working in a foreign country — courage, a sense of adventure, curiosity, intelligence? One would imagine all of these things and more.Ethan Scharf, 24, is in the middle of his two-year term teaching English at a village school in Ukraine, while also helping to educate teachers on better methods of classroom management, promoting critical thinking, improving lesson plans and promoting academic integrity.Shortly after graduating from the University of Kansas in the spring of 2018, with a degree in exercise science with a focus on medicine, he became a fellow in the Szarvas (JDC Lauder camp in Hungary), an international summer camp that educates and promotes Judaism to children and teens from post-Soviet countries.Scharf said the camp was so successful at promoting pluralistic Judaism that it expanded to Jews from all around the world. While there, he met Jewish teens from Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, India, Turkey, Israel and many more countries.“Most of them spoke good English, making conversations about similarities and differences between our cultures easier,” Scharf explained. “Surprisingly, I found working with the young Hungarian campers who spoke almost no English to be equally engaging. Interacting, doing activities and playing games with the kids through the language barrier was an exciting challenge for me. After returning home, I promised myself I would find a way to work with children in a similar fashion again.”So he joined the Peace Corps in August 2018 and has been in Ukraine ever since and still has nine to 10 months remaining of his service. He said another part of his desire to join the Peace Corps was to “travel the world while also integrating and helping a community.”While there is a war going on in Ukraine with Russia, Scharf said he is “quite far from Russia and most of the conflict. I am closer to Budapest than to Kyiv. I feel very safe in my town and region.”He is able to travel on weekends relatively freely throughout the country as long as he reports his location to his regional manager, a Ukrainian employee of the Peace Corps who helps monitor volunteers in different regions.Scharf spends most of his time in a village in western Ukraine in the Zakarpattia Oblast — on the western side of the Carpathian Mountain region — but he has traveled around the country to other cities like Kyiv, the capital, where the Peace Corps office and many trainings take place, Lviv, Odesa, Chernivtsi, Uzhgorod, Mukachevo and Uman, the resting place of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (or Breslov).He said traditionally on Rosh Hashanah, 40,000 Jews of various sects of Judaism visit Rabbi Nachman’s grave in Uman and there is a big celebration.“These are all cities that had large Jewish communities and a rich history,” Scharf said. “The more I learn about Ukraine, the more I see it as a place that has deeply impacted the modern Jewish culture and the world as a whole. Many aspects of Ashkenazi culture and American Jewish customs come from this country — from the story of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ to the cuisine with deruny (Ukrainian latkes), borsch, challah and many other foods being common here.”Like any other country, Scharf said people watch the news, sometimes voice their opinions against decisions of the president and worry about the future. However, most people in Western Ukraine are more concerned about providing for their families. Living so close to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, many of them work abroad for several months at a time for better wages.Education in UkraineScharf teaches 14-18 lessons a week with a Ukrainian English teacher.“My goal is to help create more engaging lessons and activities for kids, while also teaching creative and practical skills to my counterpart teachers,” he said. “Secondary projects I do are related to teaching basic health information like proper handwashing and cold/flu prevention, food safety handling, trash cleanup and park restoration.“I am also working on a grant to assist teacher training and improve our school environment.”The purpose of the Peace Corps working in Ukraine is to promote the youth, education and economy. Scharf said volunteers are in three sectors: Youth Development (camps and clubs), TEFL (English as a foreign language) and Community Economic Development. The latter category is very broad because it is hard to see tangible results in development work.“At times this can be very discouraging as I feel like I need more infrastructure, training and/or specific language skills to make a greater impact,” Scharf related. “Still, I try to remember that little interactions and moments have a greater impact than I may realize, as simply participating in games, activities or culture sessions may affect students futures more than I can see. Overall, I think my work here is a mixture of trying to improve education in my school and community, but also just being a good role model and representative of America.”Scharf’s mom, Janice Scharf, is completely on board with her son’s decision to join the Peace Corps.“I am so proud of Ethan giving two years of his life to move to Ukraine and assist the people of that country, sharing the goodwill of the United States with the great citizens of Ukraine,” she said. “He is gaining the experience of a lifetime, which should be useful in whatever paths in life he follows.”Scharf grew up in Overland Park and attended and became a Bar Mitzvah at Kehilath Israel Synagogue.
