By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

ATHENS, Ind. — Ol’ha Reva, 22, has mixed with Tom and Jill Weaver’s family so smoothly it’s difficult to believe she and Alex Weaver, a Purdue sophomore, aren’t brother and sister.

She’s equally close to the Weavers’ daughters – Emily and Erin – and their husbands as well as the Weavers’ other son, Adam, but she sees them less often than she does Alex, now spending the summer at home after a mission trip to Jamaica.

That’s the kind of family relationship Mark Kepler was looking for when he arranged the summer work/study program for Reva and Sergii Panchenko, students at Ukraine’s Poltava Agrarian Academy. “I wanted them to live and work with American farm families who have children of about the same age,” he said.

“We’re always looking for something new to show her,” Tom Weaver said. “I used the front-end loader to lift her and Alex up to look into a coon nest. I even convinced her to climb to the top of the grain leg twice.”

And he’s helped her discover she can use her mouth to catch grapes when they’re pitched from across the room. She’s equally adept with marshmallows, but prefers using them to make s’mores, a talent she took to a new level by topping graham crackers with bits of chocolate and marshmallows before sticking them in the microwave for a few seconds.

“Easier than a bonfire,” she said.

That’s not part of her summer studies; it’s called blending in culturally and, at the Weaver house, that means adding a little horseplay.

The passion that brought her to Fulton County is plant genetics.
She’s spending a few days at Purdue University working in the lab with Dr. Herbert Ohm, whom she met earlier in the summer.

Ohm, interim head of the Department of Agronomy, plans to have her do some DNA extraction and purifications as well as marker work.

“She’s a very excellent young person and I want to encourage her,” he said.

Actually doing DNA work in Ohm’s lab is a dream come true for Reva, who read about the procedures but had never observed their application.

Her summer in Indiana and the educational opportunities it affords came as a sacrifice for her parents. Her father, who operates a bus business, and her mother, his office manager, borrowed the $2,400 to pay her expenses. To help her reimburse them, the Weavers pay her a salary for the work she does around the farm – removing rogue plants from a field of seed corn, washing the family car and assorted other choirs.

“Inviting her here was a big decision,” Weaver said. “In addition to paying her, we provide her room and board while she’s with us.”

And they provide her with lots of hospitality. They’ve taken her to the Pioneer processing plant in nearby Plymouth, where Weaver sends the seed corn he raises; to Chicago; to the Quad Cities, where they hoped to see Weaver’s on-order combine being built at John Deere; and to Hannibal, Mo, where she explored some of the caves.

She opted to forgo pay to accompany them on a 2,200- mile road trip to Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C. “It was wonderful,” she said upon their return.

Overall, she likes everything she has seen in the United States, except big sandwiches and big lawns without vegetable gardens. “So much wasted space,” she said.

And, while she hasn’t experienced a tornado, she knows she hates them, based on the racket of warning sirens.

Overall, she gives life in Indiana a thumbs-up. “I like it here,” she said. “The air is clear. You can see long distances. You can hear birds. You can see deer and coon.”

She and Alex nurtured an abandoned baby rabbit and then released it back to the wild. These are all things she can’t do in Poltava, where her family’s home is surrounded by a small tract of land they own and on which they raise produce.

Most land, she explained, is not available unless it can be obtained from someone else. “You can privatize a house, but not land,” she said. “Ukraine owns the land; we can lease if we want to. Some farms are very large because they were created before the law changed.

“Now, the mayor of a village determines how much land each family can have based on the number of people in the family. For a good yield, you should have a good rotation. That is not possible with small farms.”

She previously worked on a farm in England and also on a French farm where she helped in a dairy. In the process, she brushed up on her English and learned some French to augment the Ukrainian, Russian and Polish languages she already spoke.

She has a diploma that allows her to teach English and literature for small children. Ready to complete her master’s degree in December, she hopes to obtain a position as an assistant to her favorite professor and eventually acquire a doctorate.

In her spare time, she enjoys dancing. Her father was a dancer until he was 26, and Reva considered going into dance but opted against it, to her parents’ delight. “I don’t like to compete,” she said. “I just dance for pleasure.”

She entered the open class at the Fulton Co. 4-H fair with a collection of bead jewelry she designed and won Grand Champion with her Ukrainian-style counted cross-stitch runner.

While she enjoys being with the Weavers, her own family is an important part of her life, and she looks forward to reuniting with them in September and to put to use the knowledge she acquired here.

“We’ve worked hard and had the opportunity to play,” said Jill, a fourth-grade teacher. “It’s been a fun summer.”

“We learn from them as much as they learn from us,” Tom added. “This program is not a one-way street.”