Coming back to Dneprorudny

October 12, 2006
Dneprorudny, Ukraine

Dear Friends,

I began my lesson with the 10^th-A class by going over names. They had been my class for a year and a half, but I didn’t remember everyone.

The children gave their names by order of where they were sitting.

“Dasha.”

“Anya.”

“Sofia.”

“Vlad.”

“Mila.”

The sight of Mila set off a mental fire drill of sorts inside me. My body and my eyebrows jumped involuntarily as I tried to reconcile the Mila who had been my student when she was in the sixth form – a pleasant girl with blond hair who wore nice clothes and spoke English well. I tried not to look shocked at the sight of her, but now she had dyed her hair black, she wore a black shirt, black skirt, black boots and black stockings full of holes. Additionally, she had black fingernails, a leader dog collar with spikes and a leather belt – also with spikes.

As the lesson went on, I discovered that Mila hadn’t changed much in her personality. She still worked hard, helped her classmates and was very enjoyable to talk to. For more pictures, click here.

Arriving in a new country involves an awful amount of surprises for a Peace Corps volunteer, and the staff of the Peace Corps train the volunteers to avoid saying something too judgmental if they see something they don’t like. They call this managing culture shock. In the two weeks I’ve been here, a sweet little girl turned into a Goth gargoyle is the worst shock I’ve had to deal with. In general, it’s been a very nice visit.

Although I could find a couple of dozen Ukrainians to disagree with me, I think that things in this country have improved considerably since I left three years ago. In Dneprorudny, a town of 20,000 people, several dozen business have opened or gone through attractive remodels. The iron mine continues to work, and the miners get paid on time. The starting salary for a miner is $400 a month, up from $100 when I first got here. A beginning teacher earns $80 a month, up from $40 in 2001. To give some perspective on the spending power this involves, the Peace Corps gave its volunteers a stipend of $180 per month so that we could be “upper middle class,” even though we weren’t supposed to show it. I usually had money left over at the end of the month, and I’d been frugal, probably, I could’ve gotten by with only $80 per month.

Pay has gone up, and so have expenses. Natural gas and oil prices have caused the cost of train and bus tickets to go up 20 to 30 percent, and it’s getting more expensive to heat one’s apartment. I think the increase in pay is more than the increase in expenses, but more than a few people here have given me a very gloomy impression. This week, a group of students asked what I thought about Ukraine, and I said that the economic development was pretty encouraging. Their teacher interrupted me.

“But our lives are getting worse and worse. I am the most highly paid teacher at our school, and earn 600 greevnas (about $120). The cost of my four-room flat is 400 greevnas (about $80). Is it possible to live this way?” she asked.

I bit my tongue. There were a number of suggestions I could have made that she wouldn’t have found very helpful. I might have asked what a divorced woman with grown children needed with such a large flat. She could sell it and move into some place more manageable, an especially good idea since surging real estate prices mean that she could get more than $40,000 for the four-room flat. (Also, I should add that the $80 “cost” of her flat is maintenance and utilities, not rent.)

A number of people complained about the spike in real estate prices across the country, but most Ukrainians have some real estate. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the became the owners of the apartments and houses that the government had provided for them when everything was owned by the state. This is good in that it gives Ukrainians some added wealth, but it kind of stinks if you want to move to Kyiv, where housing is really expensive, and find a new job.

This particular teacher always gave me a gloomy appraisal of life in modern Ukraine when I lived here before. She’s Russian, and she has Ukrainian citizenship, something that annoys her. (Imagine a bunch of New Yorkers moving to Arkansas for work, then Arkansas declaring independence with the New Yorkers stuck there with Arkansas citizenship. That’s basically how Russians in Ukraine feel.) This teacher really mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite the doom and gloom I heard from the 40-plus crowd, I’m sticking to my opinion that life is improving. There is a certain portion of the population that will be complaining until bread again costs 16 kopeks per loaf. (Sixteen kopeks is three cents under the current exchange rate, although this doesn’t mean much . . . this desire has more to do with nostalgia for Soviet price controls.)

I did get to meet several of my former students in Kyiv and talk to them last week. They were enjoying their studies at the universities there, and they were a lot more optimistic than their parents’ generation. The University of Wisconson has opened a branch campus in Kyiv, and one of my students, Katya, is in her first year there, on a full scholarship! If she sticks with it and graduates, she’ll have a degree that’s accepted at any university in Western Europe or the United States. (There are only two universities in Ukraine that are internationally certified.)

STUFF THAT’S CHANGED

Cell phones

The cost of cell phone service has dropped, and now everybody’s got one. A lot of folks have several numbers because there are six or seven competing cell phone providers here, and if you call someone within your own service provider’s network, you only have to pay one-fifth of a cent per minute.

I noticed the explosion in cell-phone use when I lectured at the school where I’d worked before. At any given time, no fewer than three students were taking pictures of me with their cellphone cameras.

When I got here in 2001, 90 percent of the people I knew with cell phones were U.S. Embassy employees, and they cost $.50 per minute. The waiting list for a new plug-in-the-wall phone was 20 years long (yes, TWENTY) making it pretty obvious why mobile phones were so popular.

Politics

The political situation here took a funny turn at the end of the summer. You may recall Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 when there were two candidates, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovich, running for president. Yanukovich was the chosen son of the outgoing president’s mafia, and he tried to steal the election. Yushchenko cried foul and took to Independence Square in Kyiv with hundreds of thousands of protesters in the dead of winter. The Ukrainian Supreme Court overturned the election and ordered a second runoff. Yushchenko won the runoff, and appointed a prime minister, Tymoshenko, who, at one time or another has been wanted for prosecution by the governments of Ukraine, Russia and the United States. Tymoshenko got fired about a year ago, and Yushchenko tried a couple of times unsuccessfully to form a new government. Two months ago, Yushchenko asked Yanukovich to be the new prime minister. I have one friend who was out in the protests in 2004 who felt sold out by the new union between the opposing politicians.

“The crowd is amazing,” she said of the protests, “It’s nothing but power, but it doesn’t have a brain.”

I have another friend, in her early 50s who basically viewed Yushchenko as the anti-Christ at the time of the election. Now that the Rada (Parliament) is working again, it’s considering raising the retirement age for workers from 55 to 60 for women, and from 60 to 65 for men. Olga really wants to retire at 55, and is now hopping mad at both Yushchenko and Yanukovich over the fact that bill is being considered. Now, she’s writing letters, which is something of an improvement for her – when I first got here, she was such a Russian nationalist that she refused to acknowledge the existence of Ukraine as an independent country.

OTHER STUFF THAT’S HAPPENED

Hot summer

About 25 km to the southeast of Dneprorudny, there is this village, Novobogdanovka, which contained an army ordinance depot. This depot had a large number of bombs built during the Cold War. During the summer of 2004, the temperature exceeded 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and these bombs began spontaneously exploding. These were bombs were big, like as big as you can get without going nuclear.

The bombs destroyed houses in towns that were 15 km from the depot. Sometimes, when one bomb would go off, it would send the neighboring bomb flying several kilometers into someone’s front yard.

This depot happened to be near the major Moscow-Simferopil rail line, so it really disrupted the tourist travel of people going to and from the resort region of Crimea.

The Ukrainian sappers, or bomb disposal teams, used helicopters to hose down the bombs and keep them cool. Some of the bombs could be transported away and destroyed, others they had to destroy on site. It took the sappers a month to dispose of all the weapons.

When I saw the surrounding villages, my friends pointed out how everything there had been reconstructed with government money, and one village, Spaske, got a new church that cost $65,000 to build.

It would be tempting to call this the sign of country mired in post-Soviet decay, but I was very impressed with the reconstruction, and I should add that the Ukrainian sappers are the most experienced in the world – on a weekly basis, people dig find bombs and land mines left over from World War II, and they have to call the sappers to come take them away. To their credit, no one was killed, although 15 people were injured.

Cold winter

There was a small town in the Lugansk region where, last winter, the town’s heating system failed completely during a cold snap. The temperature hit -30 Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) and the town’s residents had no heat source. About 100 of them froze to death. The president sent out teams to fix the heating system, but they weren’t able to work very quickly in such cold conditions.

MY PROJECT

Some of you may remember a park restoration project that I helped direct when I was a volunteer. (Some of you even donated to pay for materials!)

I am happy to report that almost all of the improvements we made to the mineral-water springs park are still there. The gate, the sign, the bridge, the bath and the channels are still there, and vandals haven’t been able to do too much to the place.

If you join the Peace Corps, there’s this word that you’ll hear until your ears bleed – sustainability – your project has to continue after you leave. You need to start the ball rolling and you need to find local leaders who can keep it rolling.

The park project hasn’t seen any progress since I left, but it did turn out to be sustainable in the fact that we used a whole lot of cement to keep people from stealing the stuff we built. I found this pretty satisfying.

Anyway, that’s about as much as I’ve got to say from week two of my trip. Next, I want to write about Svatogorska, my favorite monastery!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Saying goodbye to a friend; re-meeting many others

October 5, 2006
Zhytomyr, Ukraine

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Ukraine! I hope this letter finds you well. I'm having a wonderful time visiting friends here, and I'm surprised by how comfortable I am meeting and talking with people here. The culture shock is minimal, and I've found the transportation system easy to navigate.

(For more photos, click here.)

I've been here a short time, and I'm reconnecting with so many old friends whom I met when I was in the Peace Corps. One of the first things I did was go to a memorial service for a priest whom I met three years ago, Fr. Seraphim.

I met him through random circumstances and he introduced me to a group of his choir members who decided to take me on a trip across Ukraine to the holiest sites that the Church has. I was one of the first Americans they'd ever met, and the only American who was an Orthodox Christian, which made me a celebrity, an oddity and a beloved brother. (Okay, I know that's a lot to ask readers to process in just three sentences. There is a longer version of what happened on that amazing trip, but it's 38 pages long.)

Father Seraphim was the fiestiest priest I've know. Within the first 15 minutes of meeting him, he was demanding to know my life's story while at the same time stuffing me full of strawberries and encouraging me to go with him to Pochaev, a monastery in Western Ukraine that is considered the country's spiritual center. (It is the only large monastery in the country that remained in the possession of the monks through the Communist years. I'm not sure, but the reason for this may be that the monastery's region was part of Poland between the World Wars.) He also gave me a beautiful icon that was too big to carry back to America, and a bunch of books that I couldn't read, given my bad English skills.

When you confessed a problem or a failing to him, he'd get all stirred up and tell you what your little bad habit could lead to, and would very enthusiastically tell you how much better things could be. He did this not to condemn or accuse -- rather, he was advertising aggressively for Heaven. He reminded me a great deal of his patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov because he greeted people with "Khristos Voskress!" (Christ is Risen), a greeting usually reserved for the first forty days after Easter. He did this at any time of the year. Also, he trimmed his beard the same way that St. Seraphim is shown in the icons.

The one other priest I knew who could get this fired up during Confession was Father Viktor Sokolov, and he did this near the end of his life with an oxygen tank in tow. He passed away on March 16, 2006.

Father Seraphim, a monk who'd been the priest at Holy Dormition Cathedral for 14 years, passed away after a long battle with an illness. He died on August 27 at the age of 43.

October 5 is the fortieth day after this passing, and the memorial service on that day equals the funeral itself in importance for Orthodox Christians. As Christians, we bear in our bodies the suffering of Christ so that we might also have his life manifest in our bodies. After Christ's death, burial and Resurrection, He remained with the Apostles for 40 days before He ascended. As such such, the fortieth day after a Christian's death is very important as we pray for his smooth entrance into the Eternal Kingdom.

In the case of Father Seraphim, he got about 1,000 people there at his Panikhida for that purpose, including a collection of friends whom I hadn't seen in three years. (I had kind of worried them back in 2003 when I abruptly disappeared from the Pochaev monastery after I'd gotten freaked out by some... stuff that happened. Again this is part of the 38 page version of that trip. All seemed to be forgiven, and they were very happy to see me.)

Before the actual memorial service could begin, the archbishop and eight priests and a deacon celebrated the Divine Liturgy. The archbishop was Father Seraphim's brother by birth, and another of his brothers, a priest, was service. The deacon was Fr. Seraphim's twin brother.

Given the manner in which they served Liturgy, I would not have guessed that anyone was dead. They didn't mope around, nor did they go around with fake smiles to conceal their grief. They served in the same steady tone that they would have if Fr. Seraphim had never left.

When I first became Orthodox, the sternness and solemnity of our church services kind of scared me (will I got to hell if I sneeze during the liturgy?) but now I'm glad that no one mood -- grief or joy -- is dominant in Orthodox worship. The Divine Liturgy is a re-entry both into the death and the Resurrection of Christ -- grief and joy. You can feel safe bringing whatever load of emotions you're carrying with you to church. The purpose of a church service isn't to pick you up when you've got the blues, but to give you a safe place to pray.

To tell the truth, I was in a very good mood at the service, delighted that I'd been able to make it. I bought my tickets to Ukraine only a few days after Fr. Seraphim's passing, but I hadn't know about it until the end of September, and the fortieth-day memorial was on a day that I could be there.

Father Lavr, a priest from Pochaev came out the Royal Doors with the Holy Gifts and people lined up for Holy Communion. I was glad to see him because we'd had some sharp words in 2003 when I last saw him. He solemnly recited the Old Church Slavonic prayer "The servant of God _____ received the Body and Blood of Christ for the remission of sins and unto life everlasting." When I came up, he stopped, smiled and said, "Do you speak English," which I think is one of the few phrases he knows in English

(If you're not Orthodox, the significance of this is a little difficult to explain. When it comes to getting funny while serving Communion, priests just . . . don't. In fact, I think it's the first time I've ever seen it.)

At the end of the liturgy, we went outside for the Panikhida. Father Seraphim is buried directly outside the church, and archbishop (whose name and see are completely unpronounceable) circled the grave censing and praying. The choir sang "Vechnaya Pomiat" again and again. (Memory Eternal).

On my way out, I passed a sign that was posted on the wall about the benefits of crossing yourself correctly. I thought it was a bit too strict, but I photographed it anyway. The top line shows a man crossing himself correctly. The middle line shows the effect of crossing yourself too quickly. The bottom shows what happens when you cross yourself slowly and correctly. If you want to see a larger image of this photo, click here.

At the end of the memorial service, one of the priests announced that everyone was encouraged to come to a memorial luncheon in the basement of the nearby Holy Transfiguration Cathedral. As he announced this, a little girl walked around distributing candy from a small basket she was carrying.

If there's one thing that you get from this lengthy e-mail, let it be this: If you get invited to a Slavic funeral, EAT! The meal after a funeral or Panikhida is always well-attended, signifcant and delicious.

So many people came to the meal that they had to do it in shifts. The small army of women who prepared the meal had no problem re-setting the talbes and getting the food out to eat (of which there was way too much). When I got to the meal, the first shift was already seated, so there was plenty of time to talk, and lots of people did want to talk. Now, I felt like a Peace Corps volunteer again. For many of them, I was the first real, live American they'd talked to. For all of them except Father Lavr, who once took a miracle-working icon to St. Tikhon's Monastery in Pennsylvania, I was the first Orthodox American they'd ever met.

There was a group of eighth graders who were the students of Svetlana Vaselievna, my friend. Svetlana is a choir member at the church where Fr. Seraphim served, and she invited Fr. Seraphim to the classroom several times. Also, she and Fr. Seraphim took the children on pilgrimages to Pochaev several times. They lined up three deep around me asking me questions in English about America and my life. I handed out small paper icons of St. Herman of Alaska and asked the children to translate his story into Russian for the adults, three words at a time. "St. Herman was a monk from Valaam who went to Alaska and brought the Christian faith to the native people. He served them and stopped a flood."

I also was found by a rather nervous English teacher at the local pedagogical university, Galina. I was the first native speaker she'd ever met, and she wanted to practice with me. She invited me to visit the university to talk with her students. She bemoaned the fact that the students never had the opportunity to talk with a native speaker. I explained that I used to be a teacher of English as a foreign language, and that the Peace Corps sent English teachers to universities such as hers to live and work for two years. That perked her up, and I gave her the address of the Peace Corps office in Kyiv.

I told the children about Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral in San Francisco, where the relics of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco rest. As I told the story, two old ladies began busily writing on paper.

The first shift of lunch ended, and we were able to go in to eat. On my way in, the ladies gave me the papers -- lists of names of the living and dead to be read over the relics of St. John. I promised to take them back with me.

The archbishop led us in the blessing of the food, and we sat down to a feast of meats, vegetables, bread, cakes, olives, fish, cutlets, candy and a few items I couldn't identify, but were tasty nonetheless. I sat next to Sergei, a cheerful fellow in his 50s who was very kind to me and asked me a bunch of tactless questions about America. That last sentence is something of a contradiction, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic. He was very nice, and he told me how we was delighted to see me and make my acquaintance and we talked about our respective families and jobs. And, he asked me a bunch of tactless questions about America. Any American who's lived here will tell you that this happens all the time. I think it's a national hobby to try to get foreigners riled up.

Five years ago, I'd have gotten mad, but having been through the experience a few times, I knew how to deflect the questions:

Sergei: "What do you like better? Here or Capitalism? Are you a Capitalist? Are your parents Capitalists?"

Me, singing: "Soyuz nerushimi, Respbulic Svobodykh..." (this is the Soviet National Anthem. It earned me some laughs.)

Sergei: Why does Bush make war everywhere?

Me: I take it by your question that you are the older brother of Vladimir Putin, and you can call him up any time and tell him what to do?

Sergei: Why is America causing the second coming of Christ by its destructive activities?

Me: How should I know? I'm a boy, not a prophet.

Three more ladies gave me slips of paper to take back to San Francisco.

We stood up to read the Thanksgiving prayers. Another lady, very insistent, urged me to visit a local monastery where a clairvoyant nun, Mother Raphael, had lived until she died a year ago. She wanted me to go with her right then, Also, there I could see the icon, "Joy Of All Who Sorrow."

I said that I might go later, but that I wanted to see more of my friends whom I had made three years ago. She urged me about five more times. (I'm sure that this monastery would open a whole new story better than this e-mail, but alas, I am only one person, and I had only one day in Zhytomyr.)

Another two ladies gave me memorial slips. I left the cathedral, and the eighth graders found me and asked me to the park with them to eat ice cream. They escorted me on to the trolleybus and continued to pepper me with questions.

Fr. Lavr soon showed up in a car and took out a bag full of ice cream and led the children in the "Our Father." He distributed the ice cream and brought out several bottles of champagne for the adults. (There were only four adults.) After the first glass, I tried to refuse the second by saying, "I am too big for you to carry home," which drew a burst of laughter. (Alcohol is central to Ukrainian humor.) After the fourth glass, I began singing "Oi, Moroz," a Russian drinking song in which a horseman sings to the frost, requesting that it spare him and his horse so that he can get hom to his beautiful, jealous wife. The final verse is, "I come home at the end of the day, hug my wife and water my horse." I revised it to: "hug my horse and water my wife," which earned me another burst of laughter.

Fr. Lavr suggested I lead the children in a nature lesson in English, telling them about the trees. I didn't know anything about the trees, but I took them on a history tour, going to the beach of the river and explaining, "This is where the Cossacks (Ukraninian national heroes) had their third Sich (council). They brought their wives, who invented a new dish they called vareniki. Don't you feel honored to be standing on the birthplace of the national dish of Ukraine? Over there in the river where Vladimir the Great tried to baptize his cat in 989. It didn't work. Am I right?"

"No!" They all shouted and laughed.

The party at the park ended, and the kids took me back to the trolleybus stop, and we went back to the city center. At Holy Dormition Cathedral, I found Fr. Seraphim's twin brother, who asked me to put the departed priest's name on the prayer list at the cathedral where the relics of St. John rested. And, then he added that it needed to be the _Canonical_ Orthodox Church, one of Metropolitan Herman's churches. I explained that St. John actually rested in a cathedral belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. He frowned and said that it wouldn't work -- that's a schismatic church. I tried to explain that ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate would be back in Communion by the end of the year, God willing, but he still didn't approve.

"For now, no. Father Seraphim was really, really against schisms. Please, one of Metropolitan Herman's churches."

I would add here that Metropolitan Herman has become a very popular guy here in recent years. His visit in 2003 to Kyiv and Pochaev was well-appreciated among the faithful. When I first came in 2001, it took quite a bit of explaining to make priests understand that there is an Orthodox Church in America. Now, often when I explain that I'm an Orthodox from America, they say "Metropolitan Herman!"

From there, I went to the bus station (another lady found me and gave me a list of names to take to San Francisco) and I got on a marshutka to Kyiv.

When I used to write travel journals when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I'd come up with some final summarizing paragraph explaining my amazement at everything that had occurred, at the strangeness of feeling like a celebrity, etc... and I don't mean to sound conceited, but this is pretty much what expected to happen.

A few final thoughts -- if you've gotten this far into this very lengthy missive, you're probably wondering what inspired me to fly all this way. No, I didn't bump my head and join the Peace Corps again – I still work for the Raphael House family shelter in San Francisco (and the people here are pretty amazed to hear that we have homeless people in America). I'm on vacation, and I'm just starting my three-week trip. (I've got two weeks remaining.)

Pray for me!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford