RUMFORD – Sara Ray sometimes thinks she’s living in a turn-of-the-century painting when she looks out at the Macedonian countryside.

The countryside is green with yellow hay in the fields.

Ray, a Dixfield and Canton resident who graduated from George Washington University last spring, is a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English as a second language in the small city of Vinica in the east European country that was once a part of Yugoslavia.

She’s in her fourth month of teaching primarily high school seniors. Prior to entering the classroom, she underwent 12 weeks of training in the Macedonian language.

In an e-mail sent Sunday, April 5, Ray said spring had arrived there with a lot less mud than back home in Maine. Temperatures are warmer, too, with residents telling her the heat will rise to 105 degrees and above during the summer.

She teaches a wide variety of ability levels, but is somewhat surprised to learn that senior students in Macedonia are similar to those back home.

“The seniors are itching to graduate, the girls are giggly. Students for the most part have gotten used to me. They thought I was strange at first – I dressed weird, talked weird and always wanted them to do weird activities. But now they’ve begun to understand my accent and get excited about my weird activities (but still think I need a few lessons on European fashions),” she wrote.

One of those “weird” activities involves creative writing, something that the students don’t usually get a chance to do.

“Sometimes, I’ll have the students yell up to me any random English words they can think of and then ask them to write a story, essay or play using at least 10 of those words within the text. I always laugh at the random English words they come up with – my favorite was a class who, by virtue of the words they chose, ended up writing about vultures, ghosts and black mamba snakes,” she wrote.

The people of Vinica either know her or know of her, she wrote.

During a part of the upcoming summer, she will coordinate a leadership camp for high school girls from all over the country.

Other than that, she hopes to travel and entertain visitors, including her sister, Molly, and friends from back home.

Ray graduated from the Maine School of Science and Math in Limestone after attending the first two years of high school at Dirigo, and is the daughter of Elizabeth Maddaus and Malcolm Ray.