PCHS Graduate Katie Ford – From Russia With Love

Green Bank, WV – Katie Ford, a 2007 graduate of Pocahontas County HS is now a senior at Ohio University, majoring in Accounting. She’s also immersed in the schools Russian language program.

“It’s a program that happens every other year and you go during spring quarter which is 10 weeks with a professor from OU and with students from OU” she says. “We stay with host families and take four classes, all in Russian.”

This past spring, Ford and nine other students from Ohio University and three from Ohio State University traveled to Russia, staying with host families in Moscow, She says her interest in Russia started in high school.

“It actually started at PCHS” says Ford. “My freshman year I was in ESSH, which is the honors English-Social Studies program; and during the spring with Mrs. Vance, we had to pick a country and research it. I chose Russia and I learned about the geography, the culture, the history; then I knew I wanted to see it in person.”

Ford says a minimum of two years of language training is required before embarking for Russia. She says Russian is completely different from the romance languages, borrowing letters from the Greek and Latin alphabets, as well as letters that uniquely Russian in origin. Because she didn’t travel until her junior year, she actually had three years of Russian under her belt when she went to Moscow. Once in Russia, she says they were for the most part immersed in the language and culture.

“We were in a special language school, so it wasn’t like the students who come to PCHS where you’re thrown in with the native culture” she says. “We just had classes with ourselves, but with Russian teachers. We were staying with host families alone, but it was a great program and a really good chance to see the people and what they really were about, and to get better with language skills.”

“My host mom knew no English, so there was a lot of pantomiming, drawing on newspapers; so it was a fun time.”

She says her teachers prepared the students as well as they could prior to the trip.

“We had to take a class during our winter quarter about Russia so we kind of got the logistics of okay, we’re going to need Metro passes, and these are common phrases you would use in the Metro” she says. “like get out of my way [Russian term] and just little day to day things.”

Ford has much more to say about her adventures in Russia and her impressions of the Russian people and culture. But you’ll have to tune in for noon hour on Monday to hear more about that.

Please click on the link above to hear a greeting in Russian from Ford.