October 12, 2006
Dear Friends,
I began my lesson with the 10th-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.”
“
“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
“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
This particular teacher always gave me a gloomy appraisal of life in modern
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
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
“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
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
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
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