Office Staff (cont'd)

Here's Lena at her desk. Lena actually works "part-time" for us because she has a young daughter who she needs to drop off and pick up every day from kindergarten. But she still manages to work about 36 hours most weeks.

Our out-of-office staff consists of four men: Vitia Statisiuk, Costia Kusov, Andrii Deyneka, and Ivan Onishuk.

Vitia works with the lectures. He was part of the studio that filmed the lectures and now he is making them "look pretty" by adding titles and intro music and words for students to use to fill in the blanks on their student notes with. He and his wife have one child. They live here in Rivne.

Costia Kusov is our translator. He lives, with his wife and two daughters, in eastern Ukraine. He does Russian translation only, so we won't be able to use him for our future Ukrainian projects. He does large projects: individual books, like course guides, and whole courses. This is quite different from Kostia who works in our office. He tends to do smaller edits/changes that we have made rather than translating a whole course from scratch. Costia Kusov is a very gifted and humble man. He doesn't ask nearly as much as he could for salary and his work really conveys the feeling of the author, not just the words in the text. We're really blessed to have him working for us.

Andrii Deyneka is our artist. He has worked with us for many years already, probably six or seven, but a couple of years ago he immigrated to America with his wife and kids. We've looked for other artists since then, but have not found any that convey as much through their pictures as he does. Not only that but his work is highly detailed and just excellent quality. Sometimes he's a little slow, but he is always faithful. He really has a heart to do this and has at times even offered his services for free!

Ivan Onishuk is our tech guy. He does anything and everything related to computers, cameras, printers, etc. Until last March he was full-time with us, but at that point he asked if he could switch to part-time as our computer systems were at a place that he just wasn't needed daily. I was quite nervous about the change, but he was right and we have been doing fine with this arrangement. Right now he comes in once or twice a week for a few hours to take care of any problems and back up our server files. He's also on-call in case we have an emergency.

Last of all, there is me. I oversee everyone in the office, make sure they come on time, give them permission to take time off, help set their salaries, keep them motivated and organized, etc. At least half of my work is concerned with just keeping everyone else going. I'm the one who communicates with Andrii and Costia about their work and makes sure they know what they are supposed to do and are doing it. I also plan the work for the office, deciding what course we are going to work on and who is going to do what job when unexpected things come up--which they do most weeks. ;) In addition to overseeing the office, I do editing and write the course guides. I can't say that I really enjoy the writing, but it is a job that needs to be done and one that I have done for many of our courses already. On the other hand, it helps to keep me in tune with the things that other people are dealing with in their work, formatting and editing issues, that I probably wouldn't understand as well if I wasn't doing that kind of work myself.