Ukraine, My Love, Part II
Kyiv, Ukraine
(Continued from Part I)
Kyiv 2005
The first thing I noticed as I exited the airport in Kyiv was the relative size of everyone. No longer were the bodies narrow, hunched over. People moved around upright, with purpose and noise. Having studied Russian in college (Ukrainian wasn’t an option), the Ukrainian “i” in their alphabet really stood out to me as I tried to read this new language. It had been four years since my last visit in 2001 and I was anxious to find some of those places that haunted my memory. First was the orphanage, the smell of the building and food and soup, and the smell of children, but in the few years I was unable to visit, the orphanage had transformed partially into a day-school, as the government had shifted from large institutions to a smaller-scale foster-type system.
We visited and I ran into a few of the children—now teenagers—wandering the campus. We hugged the few we met, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with great sentiment. As my friend interpreted for us, these teenagers without much to look forward to as they approached graduating from the system. This would greatly affect my friend who had also visited Ukraine with me in 2001, and she would spend the next twelve years trying to help them.
It was time for our appointment. But as we walked up the steps of this gargantuan building, I was overcome with emotions and I worked hard to control my tears. Which I couldn’t. Where did the children all go? How are they?
We had a meeting with the director and although a staunch communist, he’s loved our support for his children all these years, and with his amazing ability to recall everyone that’s ever lived there, I showed him pictures of my orphan children and he told me one has been adopted by a family in Germany, another has gone home to her alcoholic mother, still another was adopted by a French family, and others are with relatives, or are in the very dangerous transition between orphanage and work as they age-out of the system. This is when these young adults get picked up by the mafia and the girls get trapped in prostitution rings. He was sad about this when we mentioned it to him, but he has done his best with the resources from the government, and that is true.
Finally I asked about a boy named Ulrah. I loved this boy, but could never say his name correctly. Instead, I called him Alf because he always wore an Alf sweatshirt. I flashed the picture to the director and my friend who has majored in Ukrainian studies at her Christian university, began to translate the story of his death. I sobbed as I heard this story of a beautiful boy full of vigor and life, jumping from a bridge with his friends in the summertime, hoping to feel the cool splash of water on his sticky-hot body but instead hitting a rock and breaking his neck. The tragedy broke me, and my friend had to usher me from the room, down the stairs and outside to the same benches that have stood there for decades, where he and I had spent time hanging out years ago, and I wept.
I wept uncontrollably on the bus we took back to our friend’s apartment, and by then I was spent, but the grief for this unloved, unwanted boy, so full of life will always remain with me. I think of him as my boy, though he is not. I like to think that if I had been older, I would have figured out how to adopt him.
I have learned since my mission trips that the kids have a hard time with us going and coming for only weeks at a time. They get attached and miss us, and in a world where connection is fleeting, it adds to their sense of loss and abandonment. But we didn’t know that then. We just came with mounds of toys and shoes and food and love to pass out to needy bodies and hearts.
Ukraine, with its catacombs and salo (raw pig fat, a delicacy), soccer fields and bandura musicians playing milky sweet sounds, its children dancing in costume and singing traditional songs with pride, Kyiv with its St Sofia and St Andrews and Khreschatk street, Ukraine with village bread and white cheese, and soup, oh the soup!
We traveled in the train to the Midwest of Ukraine to visit another friend, and we passed field after field of golden wheat and blue sky (hence the flag). Ukraine is majorly flat, resembling the rolling flatness of our great plains, but it is also exceptionally fertile, with deep, rich soil. This friend lives in a smaller village which means she lives in a house rather than a high-rise apartment. While we were there, she taught us to cook Ukrainian dishes and we played with her baby, eventually feasting on fish caught by her husband, fried, crispy, smelling delicious.
When I left Ukraine this time, I was heartbroken, but now I was used to leaving. The first three times I left were brutal. I was leaving those children behind and I would grieve for days afterwards, weeks, months even, faithfully writing letters as best I could, refusing to take of bracelets or necklaces I had been given. Ukraine was a passion of mine, a great love, but the four-year absence and Ukraine’s relatively noticeable progress eased my heart. I would not be able return again until 2010.
****
Ukraine 2010
My heart felt the difference immediately. Cars were everywhere, modern, fancy cars and there were thick bodied people. I was no longer a giant or heavy in my athletic frame. In fact, my body type fit right in. Jeans and flat shoes were everywhere. Before this trip, I hardly ever saw a woman that wasn’t in heals, but this trip was defined by flats. The Ukraine I knew and loved and remembered was gone. We drove by the orphanage now fully a day-school for local kids, and my friend, who never really left Ukraine took me to her apartment, up a narrow elevator to the nineteenth floor. It was surreal. This trip would be full of grown-up conversations and lots of driving in her car. My heart by then belonged to another just as exotic country, in the Middle East called Oman, where I worked and lived, and I felt like I was being reintroduced to an old flame, happy, yet weary of all the shadows of emotion.
Ukraine.
We traveled far to the river, and far to the lakes and around everywhere to the markets and churches, and although it wasn’t a long trip, I felt secure that the vibrant and green Ukraine was healthy and had moved on from me too. That friend never left Ukraine until the night of the invasion a few days ago. Oh, she’d go home for visits, but she’d return to her dogs, apartment and car, working closely with women’s shelters and orphans and hospitals, getting humanitarian aid to those who least could ask for it themselves. I was in the Air Force and of course was not free to do as I wished, and had been deeply jealous over her ability to live in and work for and speak Ukrainian. My Russian—(which I had learned in college) now such a despised language in the former Soviet bloc states (I learned this during an Olmstead trip to the Baltic when the youngsters spoke halting English with me rather than listen to my halting Russian), was terrible and now seven years since I’d studied, it was continually muddied with the little Arabic I had picked up from Oman. Needless to say, my friend did not allow me to speak in public.
Ukraine was modern, healthy, and different. I longed for a memory, but the traffic and the people loudly moving around with force showed me that Ukraine had finally come into its own.
The tragedy of Ukraine is its biggest strength: the black, fertile soil. Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s to steal their land and farms for ethnic Russians. Ukraine is a victim but there were perpetrators too. Things were violent back then, stuck between Nazis and Soviets. So many Ukrainians looked the other way and participated with many Nazi atrocities. Babi Yar is the worst massacres in Kyiv when an entire population of Jews were rounded up and shot behind the train tracks, giving off the impression they were loaded into trains and shipped off.
Strapped between the Soviets and the Nazis, many chose to embrace the Nazis as their rescuers. Many chose the Soviets as their saviors from the Nazis. It happened all throughout Soviet territories: families and towns split between the opposing factions but really, many of these people were caught between two wolves. They were going to lose either way.
Ukraine. My heart and my memory longs for you. I fear for you. I have loved you as long as I can remember, as a five-year-old and hearing about the kids in orphanages sick with Chernobyl radiation. Ukraine, I pray for you, as I remember your Orange Democratic Revolution, your strong desire for freedom, your desire to choose who you are. This threat is an existential crisis. You are a sovereign nation of proud peoples. Ukraine. I love you. Ukraine. I stand for you. Ukraine, I weep for you. Ukraine. I pray for you. Ya lublyu tebya.
(Continued from part I)
