Ukraine, My Love, Part I
Saint Andrews, Kyiv, Ukraine
Seattle 1987
I sat on the gym floor, legs criss-cross-apple-sauced and fingers interlaced, as quiet as can be. I was five and spellbound. The guest speaker at our chapel was telling us stories of a place called Chernobyl, and about these orphans which are kids with no families, with knees the size of basketballs. Sick. And in need of help. These American nurses were allowed into a place called the Ukraine (they seemed surprised yet pleased) because they were doing (humanitarian) work to help the victims of the explosion. This will stay with me for the rest of my life and start a life-long love-affair with Ukraine.
Seattle 1989
The Cold War was over. I remember speeches by President Reagan and a huge sense of relief and a vague notion that now people can go help those poor orphans with basketball-sized knees. My school raised funds for missions, passing the bag once a week for young children to give their pennies for the house they were building in Mexico. I horded my pennies in a jar labeled, “Ukran.”
Seattle 1991
The high-school choir performed at chapel, practicing because they would leave the next week for the streets of Kiev (then called Kiev, now Kyiv) where they performed and shared the love of Jesus with a culture that had been oppressed by a regime that suppressed any form of religion. They also talked about an orphanage and my heart fluttered. I made the decision that I too would go to that orphanage and help those kids.
****
Ukraine 1998
The first time I traveled to Ukraine was in 1998, when the country still struggled to find its feet after the fall of the USSR. The people were thin, haggard, driving ancient cars and wearing faded polyester clothes with rubber soled shoes. Those fancy Land Cruisers speeding by were rumored to belong to the mafia. My dollar stretched far, and I felt guilty for being a tall, broad, healthy teenager, while these people were grateful for the poorly bargained oversale of their street wares. In fact, I stopped haggling all together as the thick-finger rheumy-eyed woodworker smiled sadly at me, his wife sitting on a plastic bag near the curb of Saint Andrew's Slop in Kiev (Kyiv), her leg diseased and sore and bloated three times the size with what disease I didn't know.
We were told to never ever give money to the street children, for they would then swarm you and try to pick-pocket you. These grubby children, hair shaved, high from glue sniffing, ragged and dirty broke my heart. They were children who needed parents and a home. But these nearly feral children would escape the warmth and safety, AND FOOD of the local children's shelter to risk the abuse of adults and older kids in the streets for freedom and their addictions.
There were scars in the old soviet buildings where statues or reliefs of Stalin were gouged or scratched out, but still, in many places Lenin and the Soviet star looked down from ten or fifteen stories, shadowing the street with the shadow of the past.
Despite all this, there was quiet hope in the people now able to determine for themselves who or what they will be. The ancient streets and babushkas that swept those streets, heads knotted with the proverbial scarves, the tiny broom swishing crisply in the cool morning, represented the deep history of the place, the roots of the city going all the way back to the ninth century.
Ukraine in its raw, glorious poignant beauty, its smells of woodsmoke and sweat was an altogether foreign yet wonderful place, raw with life, raw with wanting, raw with the hope of freedom.
*****
Orphanage, 1998, 2000, 2001
With the smell of woodsmoke and body odor, trash, and exhaust from the 1960s bus, we drove through this foreign, yet vaguely familiar city to the outskirts, foreign because the soviet style block-long apartment buildings and the playgrounds uniform in soviet turquoise, now aged and faded, remind me nothing of Seattle—yet there’s vague memories of Sesame Street with similar type playgrounds and similarly aged cars, and the reality of the mom and her pram, the children waving from their school-playgrounds, the people walking hunched over in the cold is life, just like ours. It’s foreign, but beautiful and my cheek remains glued to the window until we reach the orphanage.
Children swarmed us, touching us, reaching for us as we descended the bus. We were celebrities and immediately each of us fifteen or twenty Americans held a child by each hand and walked with our arms around at least another two or three. Children hugged our legs. We would remain similarly for the next ten days, alternating our time between the younger children and the teens. Nothing mattered but those kids and typing this brings tears to my eyes. There were hundreds of kids in that orphanage. Some were true orphans, but others were children of alcoholics or were unwanted by their families. These kids with beautiful hungry smiles and sad eyes would draw us pictures and write us poems and rhymes that were silly, the translators refusing to even recreate them in English. Never-the-less, we played epic games of Red Rover and Quack-didly-oh-so and braided hair, painted fingernails, played soccer and flyers-up.
The children performed their cultural dances and I broke down when they sang their last song in halting English, “Every baby, has a mother, has a father to hold their hands.” (Sounding like, “Evry ba-bee has a mod’r, has a fod’r, to hold deir handes.”) I felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body. I gave every part of my heart and soul to those children, and I would be such a jumble of emotion for days afterwards I would just sob, randomly, as I grieved them. It didn’t seem that anyone else was as affected, and that felt lonely as I toured the capital city with a heavy heart.
For some reason I was not picked to go one year and that nearly broke my heart. I cried for weeks. I still ache with the loss of that trip. But I still wrote letters to my kids and saved money so I could return the next two years. I keep this section short about the orphans because even know it evokes great depths of grief.
The kids were lonely but full of life and joy. They were kids who just needed to be safe and loved. We all gave what we could, each American pouring out love, clothes, toys shoes, nail-polish, laughs, hugs, anything, really, to show the love we felt, the children responding with laughter and drawings and smiles.
Where are you today? How has your life gone? I still think of you. I still pray.
****
Ukraine 2000/2001
Tracksuits. Adidas or knock off, leg-stripe, matching arm stripe, pants and jacket tracksuits. They were all the rage. Few carefully ironed jeans passed us, but mostly dark probably polyester pants, and the older ladies in skirts and dresses and heals. But it was the tracksuits that hung on every kiosk corner, every open-aired market, that covered the youths, that were the bud on the tree of progress. Colors dotted the sidewalks. I bought a pair of who knows, knock-off or Adidas shoes from a street market because it just seemed the thing to do. The movie, “Everything is Illuminated” with Elijah Wood will capture the essence of this period a few years later. In it a young American Jewish man visits Ukraine to unravel the history of his grandfather while trying to navigate an emerging and somewhat baffling culture with his translator, a tracksuit-clad disco-tech dancing “cool guy.”
It’s as if this country finally realized the west can be integrated into society without repercussion and English words showed up as a thing, rap became popular sounding vastly different in Russian, and Ukrainian letters which are different than Russian, began to show up on billboard signs. Ukraine was awake and ready to become itself.
(Continued in Part II)
