Since my first student exchange trip to Russia when I was still a high school student, I have been interested in environmental issues of the Former Soviet Union and how Russian citizens feel about these issues.  In order to study these questions formally, I pursued majors in both Environmental Studies and Russian language as an undergraduate, and began a "Dual Master's Degree Program" in which I was combining research on environmental policy and Russian Studies.  After a year of graduate studies, I was really frustrated by the difficulty of finding up to date materials about environmental awareness in Russia.  Further, I lacked the self-confidence in my Russian language abilities that I needed to have in order to start conducting my own research in Russia.  I decided that I needed to spend a year living and working in Russia.  I received a grant from IREX (Young Leaders for Public Service Fellowship) that allowed me to take classes on my area of interest (environmental policy) at a Russian University, have individual language tutoring for 4 hours each week, and volunteer 40 hours a month at an environmental organization.  IREX placed me at Irkutsk State Technical University, and I was thrilled to discover that there was an organization in that city that worked on exactly the issues that I was interested in: Baikal Environmental Wave.

During my year in Irkutsk, I worked on a variety of projects at the Wave.  In the fall, I helped with preparations for a seminar on plastics recycling.  Even though my Russian language skills were still very shaky at that point, the people at Baikal Wave encouraged me and another American volunteer to prepare a short presentation on how recycling of plastics works in the United States.  The other volunteers and employees working on the seminar gave us lots of support in writing the presentation and practicing reading it before the seminar, and our information was received with great interest by the businessmen, city officials, and local teachers who attended the seminar. 

Another project that I was involved in with several other foreign volunteers was the preparation of a newsletter about Chemical Pollutants. Baikal Wave constantly receives information about Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), mercury, and children's environmental health issues from Internet list serves.  These list serves all operate in English, and the announcements often contain a great deal of technical information or information that is not relevant to the citizens of Irkutsk.  We wrote summaries of the most important information from these list serves and worked with students of the Irkutsk State Linguistics University to translate the information into Russian.  Once the information was translated, we formatted the information into a bulletin for distribution by Baikal Wave.

The project that I worked on that was both the most challenging and the most rewarding was conducting lessons about ecology for local school children.  Throughout the school year on Saturday afternoons, I worked with two or three other volunteers to teach lessons about birds, seasons, the water cycle, air pollution, food webs and other topics of ecology.  Our lessons were open to any children who saw the announcement posters on the street, and we usually had about 10 children between the ages of 5 and 14 each week.  We showed videos from Baikal Wave's extensive video library, played interactive educational games, and had the children draw the things they had learned about.  These Saturday lessons were so popular and successful that one of the Russian volunteers and I decided to write a grant to enable us to extend these lessons into a small summer camp.  For both of us, it was our first experience writing a grant application, and we were very pleased to find out that we had been awarded the money and could go forward with the planning of our "Summer Ecology School." We recruited children from the neighborhood right around the Baikal Wave office, hoping to give these children something constructive to do during their summer vacation and to keep them off the streets.  Because I had spent a year teaching environmental education at a National Park in the U.S., I did the majority of the lesson planning and gave the other volunteer teachers pointers on how to teach kids about nature IN nature.  Our two-week camp covered topics such as the energy cycle in nature, habitats (with special focus on forests and meadows), what is unique about Lake Baikal, water pollution, and what kids can do to improve the environment in their own neighborhood.  We took the children on field trips to the Irkutsk Museum of Natural History and to Lake Baikal (although the lake is only 60km from the city, many of the children had never had the opportunity to see this unique natural wonder!). 

Our Summer Ecology School took place in the last few weeks before I left Irkutsk to come back to the United Sates and continue my graduate work.  It was a wonderful way to end my experience at Baikal Wave—the children really seemed to enjoy the lessons, and also really enjoyed the opportunity to get to know someone from another country.  Of course, it was often extremely frustrating to try to teach children in a language that was not my native tongue, but the children were amazingly patient in listening to me try to explain activities or concepts, and the other Baikal Wave volunteers were wonderful about helping me.  By the second week of the camp, the other volunteers had gained enough experience and confidence so that they took over the majority of the actual teaching, and are now also continuing the Saturday lessons during this school year.