MoldovAnn

I’m off this weekend to Dubrovitsa, in Rivenenska oblast, about 400 km northwest of Kyiv. This is about the same distance as to Odessa, only the the roads are lot crappier to get there and the town at the end of the trip is not nearly as fun and interesting as Odessa. Oh well. I’ll be attending a community organization meeting in Udritsk, and youth center openings in Zalyuzha and Nenkovichi. If I survive a weekend of the accompanying “furshets” (parties/banquets), it will be quite an achievement.

I had the delightful opportunity to spend the evening of the 21st anniversary of the Chornobyl accident with Sergii Miryni, a writer, scientist, and commander of radiation reconnaissance platoon in Chornobyl in 1986.

I first met Sergii at the opening of a photo exhibition at the Chornobyl museum in March. Last week I attended a reading of his screenplay about Chornobyl. Michael and Dave both took some great photos of the event.

Sergii’s dissertation is titled “Chernobyl Liquidators’ Health as a Psycho-Social Trauma”, and excerpts of it (in fact, most of it) are available on his website. I was fascinated to listen as he retold the process that brought him to writing about Chornobyl, about the struggle to deal with everything he had seen, the work he had done. We discussed numerous books about Chornobyl, and he highly recommended “Chernobyl: A Documentary Story” by Yuri Shcherbak, which unfortunately seems to be out of print. It was this author who expressed what Sergii had noticed himself, too - that there just is not a way, there is not the right language, to adequately describe or discuss Chornobyl. Yet Sergii found writing about Chornobyl to be the only way he could comes to terms with it. His prose (also available in the original Russian and some of it in English translation on his website) is fascinating to read. His latest unpublished book, “Живая сила” (”Live forces”), is, as he describes it, a comedic novel, which he recognizes will be controversial. He explained, though, that it is important to start talking about Chornobyl in a new way. Just as World War I created a whole new genre in literature, so, he feels, will Chornobyl.

Sergii said the most relevant book about Chornobyl contains neither the word “Chornobyl” nor the word “radiation”. The book is Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman. I can’t wait to read it.

As we were about to walk out of the internat after filming, Peter remembered that his girlfriend had asked him to find out if there are any volunteer opportunities with the kids. One of the teachers pointed us to the director’s office, and we were pleased to find a very kind and welcoming man. He told us that the school is for mentally disabled children from all over the city of Kyiv. Because the commute for some children could be as much 2 hours in each direction, the pupils are given the option to live in the boarding school all week long. Some other children live there because of bad home situations - alcoholic or drug abusing parents, for example. And some children live there because their disabilities are too difficult for their parents to handle well. In all, about 1/3 of the 180-some children live in the boarding school.

The director told us that the students take “regular” academic classes, such as mathematics, history and language arts, although the courses are taught at a lower level than in other schools. The students also receive specialized vocational and social adaptation training, as the goal is that every young person will be independent, employable, and self-sufficient upon graduation.

The school also serves home-bound children, those who’s disabilities are so severe they cannot travel to or live in the school, such as children with severe epilepsy or anti-social issues. A special teacher visits such a child at his/her home, conducting academic lessons and socialization exercises. If/when the teacher feels the student is ready to participate in the group learning, the young person can start attending classes at the school and/or live there, depending on the various needs discussed above.

The director told us the overarching goal for the school is to make the kids feel “normal”, to help them feel not like they are outsiders but rather that they are just like other kids. He invited us to attend a concert the students were putting on that evening for their parents (unfortunately, both of us already had plans and we had to decline). He said they regular put on plays and concerts, they take lots of excursions around the city, and I had seen a bulletin board in the hallway with photos of a trip a summer camp in the Carpathian mountains. He told us how parents can be afraid to bring their children to the school, fearful , so he and the staff try to make the school as open and welcoming as possible. “It can be devastating,” he said, “when parents find out that their child is not like others. So it’s important that we help them feel comfortable, normal, and safe.”

During my Ukrainian lesson today, I was telling my teacher about the filming, and we started discussing adoption. By coincidence, there was a one-paragraph article in the newspaper we were using for the lesson about 37 children being adopted recently from one Ukrainian town, and something like 25 of them had been adopted by foreigners. She asked me why I thought Ukrainians so rarely adopt children themselves. This is certainly a sensitive topic, and I have some pretty strong feelings about it, but I opted for the more delicate approach. “It seems to me that it’s just not a part of the culture here,” I said. I told her a bit about my own experiences, that there were several adopted kids in my grade, that I know parents who adopted children, and, most significantly, my nephew was adopted by a lovely couple when my teenage brother and his girlfriend decided they were not ready for parenthood. I told her that for me it’s not the blood that makes someone family, but it’s the relationship.

And then she pretty much shut me down with the brilliant response “You just can’t understand, Ann, because you don’t have children.” Whatever.

Peter and I had our second, and final, day of filming yesterday. We spent about 6 hours at a “shkola-internat” in the Podil neighborhood of central Kyiv. An “internat” is an orphanage, and I wasn’t sure what the difference was about a “shkola-internat” or “school-orphanage”. More on that in a separate post.

As for filming, it was MUCH easier this time, partially because we had more realistic expectations for the day, and also because there was only one scene Peter and I were in. We arrived a little bit earlier than the requested 12 noon, and we wanted until almost 2:30 before anyone was ready to use us. We got our make-up, which was a lot more than last time. I would have taken a picture of myself in all that make-up except for the fact that I think she made my lips ridiculous huge and I thought they looked stupid. We’d been told in advance the general request for what to wear, but my selection didn’t much fit the liking of the wardrobe girl. She searched through a couple piles of mostly kids’ clothes and finally pulled out a little yellow t-shirt and asked me if I could wear size small. “It’s very po-ukrainiski,” I joked, secretly horrified that she might make me put on this ridiculously tight shirt. She acquiesced and told me to button up my cardigan all the way to the top so my shirt underneath would not be visible. Geez, I didn’t think my shirt was that horrible!

During these preparations, we had the opportunity to meet Elena (who’s last name I forgot to write down, dammit!), the Russian actress playing the lead female role in the film. We also met Ira, a local Kyiv actress who is playing the role of the orphanage director in the film. Our scene was with Ira, so while we were waiting to be called to the set, we rehearsed our scene with her in the crew room. To be honest, I hadn’t read yet the 2-page script I had been given a few days before shooting, and when I looked through it, I learned that my “husband” now has a name, Jack Brown, and he’s a tanned man in glasses, with a gold Rolex. I also read that Donna (i.e., me) is big, clumsy, with a lot of hair in a braid, with a purse with a peace dove symbol on it, and she looks like an aging hippie. I guess she did pretty well for herself - a fat, hairy, aging hippie who married a guy with a gold Rolex. Only in the movies, eh? (I think/hope this was all written before they actually asked me to be Donna in the film, and that they just didn’t bother to change the descriptions to be closer to reality.)

In our scene, Peter and I are led by the orphanage director into a room adjacent to a classroom where a bunch of girls are having a “social adaptation” lesson, which to me looked like my high school home economics class - learning to iron, sew, cook, etc. Through a large window, we watch the girls at work, and the orphanage director tells us about a couple of the girls, including Lada, the star of the film. I translate some descriptions of the girls to my husband, we look horrified when we hear Lada’s story, then we discuss who we want to adopt, and finally we happily announce that we want Lada. Those 45 seconds of the movie took over 2 hours to film, from various angles and numerous slight alterations in dialog and movement.

So, my film debut should be ready in the fall. Director Sasha Kirienko kindly agreed to a photo with us, and then rearranged the composition for a second photo, and again for a third photo, which I think was the best one. Don’t mess with the director, he knows what he’s doing!

And thus ends my brief but illustrious film career - or has it?

I was in the field again Tuesday and Wednesday, visiting some CRDP youth centers. American photographer Michael Forster Rothbart tagged along for the trip, as he is working on a documentary photo project on people affected by radiation in the former Soviet Union, and as such is particularly interested in meeting and talking with re-settled people from Chornobyl-affected areas. We were able to include a number of interesting stops in our trip, not just interesting for him, but for me as well.

For our drive to Korosten, I opted to take a longer route that goes through a little “bubble” of the Exclusion Zone, an area not originally designated as Exclusion Zone but which was recognized as pretty damn contaminated about a year or two after the accident. Unfortunately, before they realized it was unsafe for human settlements, the authorities had already built a new village for people resettled out of the original Exclusion Zone. People moved into the brand new apartments, and a few months later were evacuated a second time. You can drive through this area on the road from Ivankiv to Ovruch, with checkpoints as you go in and out of the area, and some monitoring of the road inside. It’s interesting to drive through the village, as I’ve done several time, but Michael was disappointed to learn that you aren’t allowed to stop or get out of your car while in the Zone.

His sharp eyes noticed an abandoned village just outside the Exclusion Zone, though. Although I’ve driven on that road several times, I never noticed the empty buildings hidden behind the overgrowth, just a few yards from the road. We stopped and spent about 45 minutes wandering through the village. We both commented how it was kind of eerie, especially the farther you got from the main road. Just a few hundred feet down the former road into the village, you already can’t see the main road through the thick bushes and tall grasses. I felt very sad walking around, looking at the crumbling walls, thinking of everything that people lost after Chornobyl. Not just their material possessions, but their homes, their communities, their relationships with neighbors, their classmates, their pets, their gardens, the night sky over their backyards, the parks, the sense of belonging somewhere.

At first I felt only the loss of the place, sensed the absence of life. But then I started to notice the beautiful songs of the birds. And I saw the green shoots sprouting up through the soil, the buds on the trees, and the flowers about to bloom. I was startled when I heard something rustling in the leaves at my feet, and I saw a tiny bright green frog. Later I saw another one in another part of the village. Life was all around me. Maybe there is even more life in that empty village today preciously because there are no humans.

Wednesday morning we went to Korosten School No. 13 to see and photograph some trainings conducted by the staff from the Korosten Center for Social-Psychological Rehabilitation of the Population Affected by Chornobyl (a mouthful of a name, I know). There are five of these centers in Chornobyl-affected areas of Ukraine - Slavutych, Borodyanka, Ivankiv, Korosten, and Boyarka. The Korosten staff were conducting healthy-lifestyle trainings in many of the town schools with support from a grant from Friends of Chernobyl Centers, U.S. (FOCCUS). For third and fourth graders, the topic was anti-smoking; for sixth and seventh graders, anti-drugs; and for tenth and eleventh grade girls, sex education, including a discussion about abortion. I half-jokingly made a comment that the girls don’t get pregnant without the boys, but they didn’t follow my suggestion of including the boys in the sex ed discussion. The 45-minute sessions were pretty interesting (to me at least, although the kids seemed fairly engaged, too).

After the school, we stopped by the Stalin-era bunkers that I had first toured last October. We didn’t have much time so our tour was rather brief, but I could definitely see they’ve been working hard at renovating the bunker and are expanding the collection it contains of various war and Stalin-era memorabilia. It is well on its way to being an excellent museum.

Our next stop was at the local Radiation Control Laboratory. There wasn’t really anything for Michael to photograph, but we had a very interesting conversation with the lab director. He told us that there used to be a radiation check-point right at the town market, as well as separate laboratories for the town of Korosten and one for the rest of the raiyon. Funding has decreased, though, along with public interest in checking radiation levels in food, and the number of checkpoints has been reduced. Now this one laboratory serves the entire raiyon as well as the town. However, most of the food production places, like the bread bakeries and the dairies, still have their own on-site radiation control personnel. He told us that mostly the contaminated foodstuffs today are forest mushrooms and berries, milk from privately-owned cows, and game meat. Hunters sometimes bring in their catch to be checked, and it can be clean or terribly terribly contaminated. The milk from dairies is safe, he assured us, as it is carefully controlled, but cows kept by villagers still tend to have contaminated milk.

From Korosten we headed to Brusyliv, a town and raiyon that is considered “clean” but CRDP operates there because of the very high percentage of re-settled people in the raiyon. We met the head of the local chapter of the Chornobyl Union, a national organization of people affected by Chornobyl. She told us about the upcoming march and rally in Kyiv, an annual event held on the weekend before the Chornobyl anniversary (April 26), and that this year they would again be protesting the decrease in funding for Chornobylites and Chornobyl issues. She rattled off statistics of how many people are designated Chornobyl-affected in her raiyon, how many invalids of the different categories there are, etc. She described a 14-year old girl in a nearby village as having some kind of debilitating mental and physical disability. I tried to gently inquire why this girl, born 7 years after the Chornobyl accident in a “clean” village has official “Chornobyl-affected” status. Because every child born to a resettled parent, anywhere in the country, receives the designation until they are 18 years old, I was told. This girl’s parents had been evacuated from inside the Exclusion Zone.

What is the benefit of designating every single child of Chornobylites as Chornobyl-affected, regardless of whether or not they have any kind of illness at all? And if the kid really does have some illness or disease that is related to Chornobyl, why are they Chornobyl-invalids only until they are 18? For how many generations will this go on? And why is a person Chornobyl-affected if they were re-located but don’t have any Chornobyl-related illness? Yes, having to move was traumatic and difficult, but who’s to say that without Chornobyl some of those people wouldn’t have moved anyway? The break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic depression has pushed people to leave rural villages in droves, many even to leave the country, yet the millions of people resettled after the Chornobyl accident receive various social benefits in perpetuity. The policies of social benefits for Chornobylites, if they were actually implemented as they were intended to be, would bankrupt this country. But if they’re not going to really implement the policies honestly, what’s the point in having them at all? As usual, the more I learn about Chornobyl, the more questions I have.

We next visited the village of Privorotye, about 20 minutes from Brusyliv, and met with a group of resettlers and their children who were rehearsing for a Chornobyl anniversary concert. We spoke with a woman who had been mayor of her village in Narodychi raiyon, one of the most affected parts of Ukraine. She described how her entire village was relocated together, all 400-some people were moved to Privorotye in 1989. She told us how warmly they were received by the local residents, and how over the past 17 years her village has completely integrated into their new community - people have intermarried, they’ve had children, and no one anymore thinks of people as “re-settled” or “native”. She told us, with justifiable pride, that not a single person who relocated with them has moved away. This really struck me, as I have read many accounts of people being so homesick or feeling so out-of-place in their new town that they want to move back to their abandoned village - which several hundred people have done, choosing to live in the Exclusion Zone instead of trying to adapt to life in a different, safe, place. I suspect the fact that the entire village moved together was a key factor in the resettlers’ acceptance of their new life and being able to adapt and integrate. Instead of being isolated as the only resettler, or one of just a few resettlers, in a new village, this group of people had everyone familiar around them, even if they lost everything familiar.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Chornobyl. Also I’ve been talking about it a lot with some friends who are living and working temporarily in Kyiv, all of whom are very interested to know more about Chornobyl. One friend, Michael, is “working on a documentary photo project on people affected by radiation in the former Soviet Union.” He and I have talked a lot about Chornobyl, swapped resources and contacts, and he will travel with me next week on some site visits to interview and photograph resettled people from the Exclusion Zone.

Something I have noticed is that in all the books and reports I have read, there is never a consistent story of what actually happened, or even of how many people died. One book will say one person died in the initial explosion, another will say three. If a fact as simple as how many people died in the first few minutes can’t be confirmed, how can you believe anything else that is reported about the accident, much less the lasting consequences?

As luck would have it, Andriy Arkhipov stopped by our office today. Andriy is the scientist who guided us through the Exclusion Zone last year. I trust him, and I thought he might be able to provide me with some straight answers, or at least some better insight.

“Why,” I asked him, “do the reports differ all the time about the facts of the accident? How many people actually died in the explosion?”

“The only people who know exactly what happened that night are the people who were there,” he said to me. “No one else knows for sure. What I can tell you is that definitely one man died in the explosion, and he was trapped under rubble and his body was never recovered.” (This fact is consistently reported in everything I’ve read, so I already knew that this was at least true.)

“We also know,” he continued, “that 28 firemen died in the immediate aftermath as a result of extreme radiation exposure (in the first week, two weeks, month).” This was a figure I hadn’t heard before, although I’ve read numerous accounts of the first responders’ heroic efforts and horrific deaths.

All this “activity” lately in my own life about Chornobyl has gotten me thinking about my own safety and how I might be able to take more control of the situation, have more first-hand knowledge about the levels of radiation I may be exposed to. I decided to find out about dosimeters. I found some websites selling dosimeters and other radiation-detection equipment, but quickly realized I have no idea what exactly I’d need. I again took advantage of the chance meeting with Andriy today to ask his advice. I told him I want to be able to measure radiation in foodstuffs at the market. “Impossible,” he said. You need very specific, very advanced, and very big equipment to be able to do that. In other words, not portable, and way out of my price range. He did offer, though, that I could buy a radiation detector device for use at home; it’s about the size of a desktop laser printer, with a hole in the front where you insert the food item in question. Andriy made a quick call, and before I knew it, we had a fax with a price list of radiometers and dosimeters, the least expensive being 897 hrivna (a little under $200) - yikes! And here I’d been thinking I could get something small to carry around with me, thinking to spend something like 50 bucks. Think again!

“So how can people protect themselves? How can we know what’s safe and what’s not?”

“Everything sold in the markets is supposed to be checked by the official radiation detection control point. In theory. In practice, well, not everyone does it.”

So, again, I ask, how are we supposed to protect ourselves? No wonder the general population long ago stopped actively worrying about radiation in their food - whether it’s there or not, you basically have no way of finding out.

Everyone talks about corruption in Ukraine - it’s prevalent, it’s endemic, and there’s not much you can do about it.

I’ve witnessed a few corrupt transactions in my day, both in Ukraine and in Moldova. Mostly, I’ve seen incidences with the local police. One of their favorite games in Ukraine is to stop cars for some kind of violation or just a “document check”. These are simply opportunities to shake down a driver. Once, riding in a taxi to the airport, the police standing by the road signaled for our car to pull over. They asked to see the driver’s documents and claimed something was out of order - some stamp missing or god-knows-what. It’s perfectly possible that his documents weren’t completely in order, I have no idea. But instead of writing him a ticket and sending him on his way, they hemmed and hawed, putzed around, and eventually just stood there staring at him until he offered a “solution”, in the form of some cash. Then we were allowed to proceed on our way.

Cars with foreign license plates are especially easy targets for the police. My Polish colleague has his car here, and for the first few months he was stopped EVERY SINGLE time he drove his car and harassed by the police. He finally managed to get his car registered in Ukraine and got Ukrainian license plates, which reduced significantly the number of times he gets pulled over.

Once, while riding with a car load of Polish politicians in a car with Polish license plates, we were stopped outside Kyiv by the police. They Poles didn’t speak much Ukrainian or Russian, but could get by generally due to some similarities with their own language. We decided I would wouldn’t say anything and would stay out of the matter. The police produced some bizarre instrument and claimed to be checking emissions from the car. They told the Polish driver that his car met the standards, and that he needed to pay 50 hrivna ($10) for a document stating the car had passed inspection. They did actually give him some kind of document, although the whole thing seemed rather fishy to me. They cracked it up to a good story and a good laugh.

Yesterday, I heard one of the more shocking instances of corruption. A UN colleague of mine lives here with his wife and newborn child. They have been here over a year, and a couple months ago it was time to renew their registration documents (as in the U.S., all foreigners must have visas and proper registration to live and work in Ukraine). My friend’s visa and registration were renewed without question and without problem. His wife’s, on the other hand, was delayed and delayed and delayed, and finally, just a few days before her current visa expired, she was denied renewal of her visa, without any explanation or justification. My friend and his wife were getting desperate, and had no idea how to proceed. He finally asked for help from someone in the United Nations office, and the Resident Representative (highest UN official in the country) told his own secretary, Tetiana, to take care of it.

Tetiana called someone at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find out what was going on. That person, not particularly high up in the bureaucracy, responded “Well, if you want us to do this for you, we’ll expect something in return.” This lackey, clearly unconcerned and unafraid of ANY consequences, blatantly demanded a bribe from a United Nations official in exchange for a visa and registration that they had absolutely no legal right to deny in the first place!

Many friends have been asking me this week for more details about what exactly is going on here in Ukraine. I decided to put as much as I can all together here, with the disclaimer that I will try specify what I have seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and what I have been told by others.

As I mentioned in a post last week, President Yushenko has dissolved the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) in response to Prime Minister Yanukovych’s attempts to literally buy deputies (members of parliament) so his Party of Regions (PoR) can get a super-majority which would allow them to override Presidential vetoes. The PM and his party’s deputies refuse to accept the presidential order and are continuing to “work” or whatever it is they do there. Since most of what they seem to have done this past year is just block anything and everything from happening, it’s hard to believe they are doing anything more productive right now.

The PM and his party bussed in thousands of people to Kyiv to participate in demonstrations and to camp out around the main government buildings, purportedly to show the President how much they disagree with his decision to dissolve the Rada as well as to show their support for the PM. Rumors have abounded from the beginning that they were all being paid as much as 100 hrivnas (about $20) a day. Looking at the people, it seems like a strange mix to me - young men and women in their 20’s, and old men and women in their 50s and 60s. I can more or less understand the elderly population’s support for the PoR since many of them are nostalgic for Soviet-era stability and the pro-Russian stance PoR claims to stand for. But the teenagers and 20-somethings? Hell, they certainly have no first-hand memories of the so-called “stability” of the Soviet Union. What the heck are they doing out there? Wednesday night, I watched the news and myself saw a man admit that “all of us are being paid to be here.” It’s one thing to hear the rumors, it’s another to hear one of these “supporters” blatantly and almost proudly admit this. He smiled, and seemed not the least bit embarrassed or ashamed to share this fact on national television.

I myself have noticed what I can only call a lack of passion among these so-called protesters that further convinces me they are all paid lackeys. They just don’t look engaged - they are sitting around eating, drinking, drinking, drinking, talking, drinking. I don’t hear them talking about politics at all.

My Ukrainian teacher told me she has noticed this, as well, and she recalled for me at length the differences between the current situation and the Orange Revolution. In 2004, people spontaneously gathered in Kyiv, she told me. They organized themselves, orchestrated their own demonstrations. They were civil and peaceful and purposeful in their acts of peaceful demonstrations. They lived 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in their tents on Independence Square and other areas of central Kyiv. Many Kyiv residents spontaneously prepared food and brought it and hot tea to feed and warm those living in the Square. There was a feeling of unity, of brotherhood, and of the importance of the actions being taken.

Now, she told me, is completely different. As she exited the metro station near Marinskiy Park, where many protesters gather each day, she walked through an unusually large crowd. As she listened to the chatter around her, she realized most of them were from out of town, and many where in the capital for the first time. “Did you see that building”, one young man said to another. She understood that they were in awe of being in Kyiv, not of being a part of history. As she walked by Marinskiy Park, she saw a man with a clipboard checking off names - making sure everyone showed up for work today? On the news the night before, she had watched a report from one of the PM’s rallies. The camera spanned the crowd of thousands, and the journalist worked through the masses trying to interview people. The young people were dancing - dancing to the music on their MP3 players. They weren’t even listening to the speeches. The journalist got a couple people to take out their earphones, and they all recited the same exact words of support for Yanukovych, as if they all had been coached in what to say. One man seemed to forget what he was supposed to say - “We’re for, uh, we’re for, uh uh uh. We’ll, we’re not for Yushenko.” That was the best he could come up with on his own.

My friend Michael witnessed the unloading of dozens of new sleeping bags and pads from a Toyota Land Cruiser, not exactly the kind of vehicle your typical underpaid Ukrainian villager drives. How much money has the Party of Regions pumped into this action? And where, exactly, is that money coming from? My teacher told me about an interview she watched on TV with the director of the Party of Regions during which he swore that all the financing for these events is coming from the Party. “Can you show me the budget and other financial documents that prove this money was raised by PoR alone and in no way comes from the state coffers?” the journalist asked him. He couldn’t respond.

The question of the legitimacy of the dissolution of the Rada has been sent to the Constitutional Court. Five judges have already publicly expressed their fear about the pressure being put on them regarding this case. Twelve judges are needed for a quorum, so with these 5 afraid to participate, that leaves a just-barely enough thirteen who will make a decision. My teacher told me that she heard on the news that PM Yanukovych called the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. What they discussed, we can only imagine. But the impropriety of the PM calling the Chief Justice about anything right now, with such an important and controversial case in front of the court, is beyond belief.

The Speaker of the Rada, Oleksandr Moroz, has made public and not-very-veiled threats against the Head of the Elections Commission warning that the Commission is not to go ahead with election planning. In response, the youth party Pora is camping out in front of the Elections Commission’s office building.

Pora was a very popular and very instrumental organization during the 2004 Orange Revolution. Pora members were die-hard supporters of Yushenko and his “Our Ukraine” party, they were a large percentage of those camping out on Independence Square, and they were very effective in getting out the youth vote. By 2006, they had officially registered as a political party and they ran for the Vekhova Rada; however, they did not receive the minimum percentage of votes needed to actually gain seats.

In response to Pora’s members setting up camp to protect the Elections Commission, the Party of Regions sent a delegation to camp out there as well. The numbers from either side are not particularly large, but the contrast is noticeable. The Pora members stand quietly and attentively all day long in front of the entrance gate to the territory of the EC’s building, holding their flags and wearing their party’s colors. The PoR members mill about, drinking beer and vodka, playing cards, kicking a football around, eating, drinking more, and just hanging out. Young couples line the benches making out. They don’t give any appearance of having a purpose there. Last Saturday morning about 10:00 am, a friend and I walked past the EC building on our way to the swimming pool. A young man with PoR threw some litter on the ground as we walked past him, and my friend politely informed him that he had dropped something. He turned towards her, with some of the blurriest eyes I’ve seen in ages, and slurred “oh, it’s nothing, don’t worry.” She gave him a dirty look, and he clumsily bent down to pick it up (nearly falling over in the process). He was completely sloshed at 10 o’clock in the morning. And he wasn’t alone. The shops in the center of Kyiv have been selling out of alcohol every day. Now there is a moratorium on the sale of alcohol in the center of the city - although I still see a plethora of empty beer and vodka bottles on the streets - where are they getting it from?

The president held a press conference yesterday and was uncharacteristically firm, clear, and decisive. He reasserted his determination to hold elections in May, per the timeline required by the Constitution in the event of the dissolution of the Rada.

Opposition to the PM and his Party of Regions, namely supporters of the President’s “Our Ukraine” party and Yulia Tymoshenko’s party (cleverly named “Party of Yulia Tymoshenko”), have been noticeably absent from Independence Square and other sites of the PoR’s mass gatherings. I’ve been told that Tymoshenko specifically instructed her party’s members to NOT engage in the demonstrations. She has held some rallies, but has not wanted her supporters camping out in the city.

More demonstrations are expected this weekend. An American friend yesterday expressed his concern that as tensions continue to rise, the likelihood of violence breaking out increases. I assured him that it seems highly unlikely, as the first side to throw stones (or punches) will destroy the legacy of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when absolutely no one was injured or killed - a legacy Ukrainians are rightfully proud of.
I am hopeful that the Ukrainian population will maintain its record of peaceful opposition and non-violent demonstrations, whatever other outcomes may occur.

Our day started about 8:30 a.m. in a small administrative office at Boryspil airport, the room being “on loan” to the film crew as a type of green room. I met my “husband” for the day, Peter, who is a British businessman living in Kyiv for 3 or 4 years. He happens to be friends with the producer’s wife, which is how he landed his part.

We met the 12-year Russian actress Liza who plays one of the lead roles. Liza and her mother had just flown in from Moscow, literally just, having arrived on a 7:00 flight (and they’d been up since 3:00 am). We met some of the film crew, like Margo (who was the woman who took my picture on Tuesday), who seems to be a jack-of-all-trades and the person responsible for finding and hiring the extras as well as making sure everyone is well taken care of. Oksana was introduced as the administrative, although I didn’t quite catch exactly what she did. Galya was the make-up person, who got to work on us pretty quickly. Although the make-up felt like a lot on my skin, it was actually much less than I had expected - no eye makeup, no lipstick, just foundation and powder. Poor Peter, who is bald, had his entire head covered with make-up, and a couple times during the day Galya did “touch ups” on him, calling it “anti-shine”.

We met the first and second directors, but I only remember the name of the first director, Aleksander (aka Sasha) Kirienko. He directed the film “Orange Sky“, which is quite well known here, often called the first modern Ukrainian film. However, most of the actors were from Russia, and most of the dialog is in Russian, which turned off most of the Ukrainians I know (and I have yet to meet a Ukrainian who has actually seen the film). Kirienko teamed up with Igor Volkov, a young Ukrainian producer, on both Orange Sky and this new movie, called “Our Own Children”.

We also met the main actor, Aleksei Serebryakov, a pretty famous Russian actor. He didn’t really “mix with the masses” much during the day.

The story revolves a young Ukrainian couple and an orphaned girl. The woman had been fostering the girl before she met and married the man. To make a long story short, he turns out to be very prejudiced about kids from orphanages, and rejects the girl. She goes back to the orphanage, and the couple try to have their “own” children. Only to discover that he is infertile and can’t father children. He and the woman separate, and she tries to get the girl back from the orphanage. We discover the girl has been so traumatized by all that’s happened, she’s become an “invalid” - wheelchair-bound, mute and unresponsive. The orphanage director won’t give her back to the woman since she’s “rejected” her already one time, and she doesn’t want to risk another devastating change of heart. The man, though, finally comes to his senses, gets back together with his wife and they want to try together to get the girl back. He goes to the orphanage to beg the director, only to discover that he’s just minutes too late - an American couple has adopted her and they are literally driving to the airport at that moment. He rushes after them, sees them checking in at the gate, crashes through all manner of security, and runs out onto the tarmac to talk to the girl.

Enter Peter and Ann, aka American Couple. We are seen taking the girl, Lada, in her wheelchair out of the bus and starting towards the plane. The Ukrainian man runs up to us, grabs the wheelchair and tries to take her away from us. Here is our moment to shine, as we act our pants off like we are scared, confused, and upset. We struggle with him for a few seconds, and then back off as he pushes Lada a few feet away to talk to her. He begs her forgiveness, pleads with her, but she is unresponsive. He is heartbroken, but realizes it’s too late. He starts to walk away. Peter and I rush to Lada and protectively start wheeling her again towards the plane. Lada suddenly jumps from her wheelchair, we look shocked senseless (we had no idea she could walk), and she runs after the Ukrainian man yelling “papochka, papochka!” (daddy, daddy!). She jumps into his arms. End of film.

So, our part is literally in the last two minutes of the film, and we are far from the focus of any scene. But hell, we’ll be in the credits!

To get those 2 minutes of film, we spent 12 hours at the airport yesterday. The shot each scene so many times! From this angle, from that angle, with the bus in the background, without the bus. Loading girl and wheelchair into the bus, unloading them. Over and over and over and over. Because we were out on the tarmac, in the secure area of the airport, we couldn’t just come and go as we were needed, and they weren’t allowed to bring out food or drink, and, of course, there were no toilets. About 40 extras and crew members were out there for about 7 hours - it was not a pretty site by the end. Everyone was tired, hungry, and REALLY cranky. When we finally went back to the terminal, the directors wanted to film a couple more scenes inside, but grudgingly agreed to let us eat some dinner first. Thank goodness!

They want Peter and me for one more day’s work in two weeks, when we’ll film the scene at the orphanage when we are picking up Lada. They say it will be a shorter day, but I’ll be prepared for another long one, just in case. I’ll bring a bottle of water and my own snacks this time!

I don’t know when the film will be released, but I’ll ask what the tentative plan is during our next shoot. And I’ll keep you posted about my film debut!

I got home at 9:30 tonight, after nearly 12 hours at Boryspil airport filming the last few minutes of the film. I’m exhausted, but man was it interesting! I’ll write more about it tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep.

I got a really weird phone call today. An American woman I only vaguely know (I think we’ve met once) called me on my cell phone and asked if I would be interested in being in a Ukrainian movie. “Depends on what kind of movie,” I said. She laughed, and proceeded to tell me what little she knew about the deal. It seems she’d been contacted by a scout looking for an American woman to play a small role in a movie currently being filmed in Kyiv. This American woman had first called a friend of her’s, who declined but suggested they contact me. I thought, what the hell?

So a young Ukrainian woman came to my office this afternoon to take a couple pictures of me, which she said she would show to the director. If he liked me for the part, she would call me around 6:30 or 7 with more details. She asked if I could be available to be on site all day tomorrow (Wednesday), and she gave me a very brief overview of the project. It seems this is the latest project of Aleksandr Kirienko, who directed Orange Sky, a love story set during the 2004 Orange Revoluion in Kyiv. This new story involves an American couple adopting a child from Ukraine. The young woman mentioned the name of one of the stars of the film, but of course I have no clue who she is, so unfortunately, the “wow” effect was completely lost on me. She gave me two pages of the script, which include the very impressive four words I would have in the film as the American woman adopting the child. Clearly, the adopting parents are not the focus of the film!

Well, 7:00 came and went, and I figured they must have picked someone else for the role. Lo and behold, the phone rings about 9:15 tonight and it’s the young woman from this afternoon. She said the director wants me! I’m to report to a certain metro station at 8:15 in the morning, where she’ll meet me and take me out to the airport where shooting is taking place for the day. She asked me if I have jeans - ha! I’m an American, I said, of course I’ve got jeans! I’m to wear jeans, tennis shoes, a jacket that is not black or white (the camera doesn’t like those colors, she said), but I didn’t quite understand what she said about the shirt. I asked her to repeat it, and in the jumble of words I heard “t-shirt”. I hope I got it right!

I may not be the star of the movie, but who knows? Maybe this will be the start to a whole new career.

Back in Kyiv today, I had a Ukrainian lesson this morning. I started working with a different tutor in February, and these lessons are going much better than the course I took last year with some colleagues.

I have 2 one-hour lessons a week, and today was our thirteenth lesson. It’s hard, and my tutor really challenges me and she gives me a lot of homework. I will be the first to admit that I get kind of lazy, and I’m not studying on my own as much as I should. Nonetheless, Igor mentioned earlier this week that he really noticed progress; he said my pronunciation and comprehension is much improved. I still struggle to get beyond the opening sentences of a conversations, though.

I noticed the difference during my trip this week to the field. The colleagues I met prefer to speak Ukrainian, it’s their day-to-day language and they just naturally and unconsciously speak in Ukrainian. They all are fluent Russian speakers, too, but they have to be a bit more attentive when speaking it, and have to make a distinct effort to speak only Russian. When we met on Wednesday, we greeted each other in Ukrainian, and Volodya started to continue in Ukrainian, but then paused, apologized, and said he’d speak in Russian. “No, it’s OK,” I said, “go ahead in Ukrainian. I’m studying it and I think I can understand most of what you say. But please don’t be upset if I respond in Russian!” No problem, he said, smiling.

Most of the 2 days I was with them they conversed in Ukrainian. There were a few times when I just didn’t follow, and sometimes I just got tired from concentrating so much and my mind wandered. But I was pleasantly surprised how much I did understand! I proudly reported to my tutor this morning that I really noticed an improvement in my comprehension, although I still have a lot of trouble speaking Ukrainian myself. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you’ll be jabbering away in Ukrainian soon, I promise.” I hope so!

Volodya asked me a ton of questions about myself and about the U.S. during our two days together. I always find it a bit frustrating when Ukrainians want me to compare prices in Ukraine to prices in the U.S. I try to explain that it really depends on where you live - that for the price of a small apartment in New York City you could buy a nice-sized house in Columbus, Ohio. But he wanted to know how much houses cost, how much cars cost, how much groceries cost, etc. I finally just started giving him generalized numbers so we could move off the topic.

He also asked me about my language studies, and one question really got me thinking. He asked me if I translate everything in my head to English, or if I think in Russian now. I hadn’t thought about that much before, and it was neat to realize that I do think in Russian a lot of the time now, and not just when I’m talking with Russian-speakers. I find myself talking to my cat in Russian, laying in bed thinking in Russian about the day, and sometimes I even think in Russian simply because I can’t express the same thought with English words. In the office we almost always speak Russian, but for some reason one day a colleague asked me something in English, and I automatically answered in Russian. That was kind of weird.

I remember last year when I started studying Ukrainian about a year ago, I remember saying “I don’t expect to every really be able to speak Ukrainian, but I’ll be happy if I can at least understand more of what is being said.” Now, it’s starting to seem like actual communication is attainable. I love this whole new world of people and experiences that has been opened up to me through speaking Russian, and I am looking forward to further opening the Ukrainian world as I continue my studies.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday visiting seven youth centers that have been funded by CRDP in the Ivankivsky and Polissky raiyons. Sasha, one of our drivers, helped me with my Ukrainian homework on the drive up to Ivankiv, and we had some funny moments. Sasha has lived in Ukraine all his life, but was raised in a Russian-speaking household. Although he totally understands Ukrainian, and he can speak it pretty fluently, he nonetheless says that Russian is just easier for him. A couple of times, neither of us was quite sure how to conjugate a verb, as we both the words mixed up with the Russian conjugation. After about an hour, I told him my mouth was tired from moving in such unusual ways, trying to make so many new sounds. He thought that was pretty funny.

We started from the town of Ivankiv, about 90 minutes north and a bit west of Kyiv, where we picked two of our regional coordinators, Vladimir (aka Volodya) and Valentina (aka Valya). I adore Valya, she’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And she’s amazingly talented - she writes poetry, paints, draws - and her real specialty is floristics. She grows a huge variety of flowers and other plants on her yard, she dries the petals and leaves, and she makes incredibly beautiful pictures out by gluing the delicate petals onto paper. Here are two examples of her work.

The big topic for everyone was, of course, the political situation right now. Sasha, Volodya and Valya spent hours throughout our 2 days together hashing and re-hashing everything that’s happened this week and everything that could happen in the near and far future.

As we drove through the rural villages, fields, and forests, we saw the burning grasses that is the spring and autumn tradition here - villages burn the fields to make them better for farming, and burn the brush along the sides of the roads and underbrush in the forests to clean it up. I’ve been told by western farmers that burning twice a year is excessive, but it’s a centuries-old practice here and no one, I’m sure, will convince the farmers to do it differently, even though it’s an especially stupid thing to do in the Chornobyl-contaminated areas. I dislike it mostly because it smells bad, and the air is full of acrid black smoke everywhere. There was one point, though, when we were driving through an area with no burning going on, and there was a gentle spring rain for a couple minutes. The air smelled so sweet, so clean. I realized I haven’t smelled that in quite a long time - the air in Kyiv is so polluted from cars and industry, and the countryside air is so often spoiled by the disgusting smoke of burning fields, burning leaves, or burning trash. What a rare and precious moment it was to smell the clean spring rain!

Spring cleaning is also in full swing, as communities prepare for Easter. Painting fences, curbs, and the base of trees is a spring tradition, as is cleaning up flower beds, parks and public areas. Orthodox Easter is early this year, and happens to fall on the same Sunday as Latin Easter. It’s a national holiday, as well, so we’ll have Monday off of work.

As you drive through rural Ukraine, you also can’t help but notice the abandoned buildings - empty, collapsing houses; collective farms and factories that have closed. We saw firemen working on a burning house in a tiny village. Valya said there are fires all the time now, so many houses are empty and no one is taking care of them. I suspect that burning the fields with so much wooden houses in the same area is also not a very smart thing to do, but again, that doesn’t seem to stop them.

We saw storks everywhere. Their huge nests sit on top of electricity posts, water towers, lamp posts, and other tall structures. Storks are considered good luck, and disturbing one of their nests is an unthinkable act. It doesn’t matter how much their nest might interfere with or even damage a structure, if a pair of storks decide to nest somewhere, it’s their spot now.

In the village of Obukhovichib, I noticed a sign for a Fabric Museum hanging in the second floor window of the building being renovated for a Youth Center. I can never pass up an opportunity to see a museum, and I have especially come to love the little museums in rural villages. Sometimes they are bizarre, sometimes a bit sad, always a bit quirky, and never dull. I asked if I could see their’s, and they were only too happy to oblige. This museum is dedicated to the traditional craft of weaving beautiful Ukrainian fabrics - rugs, tablecloths, special “towels” used during traditional ceremonies and on holidays, and clothes. The colors are brilliant, the intricate and complicated patterns breathtaking. Gosh, I love finding these gems of places in villages!

I also had the opportunity to visit the Arts and Crafts Center in Ivankiv. Children learn to sew, weave, make papier-mache, embroidery, ceramics, and, of course, the famous Ukrainian pysanki (intricately painted Easter eggs). Sasha couldn’t quite grasp the concept of weaving, and the center director tried hard to explain to him the process. He was speechless as he tried to comprehend how much time it takes to weave one 5-foot long table runner.

Valya also took me for a short walk through the Ivankiv park, with the usual WWII memorial, as well as a Chornobyl monument in memory of a young Ivankiv firefighter, who was at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant the day of the accident, and who died at just 23 years old. Valya told me some more of her own memories about that time, as she is a life-long resident of this town located less than 60 kilometers (<40 miles) from the nuclear station. She had given birth to her first child just one month before the accident, and was out for a walk with him on April 26. She had a bad headache, and she noticed that her son was unusually fussy that day, and she thought maybe they had gotten too much sun during their walk. No one had said anything at all about what had happened at Chornobyl. Only after three days did they hear any official news, and she and her newborn son went to stay with her parents-in-law in a Moldovan village for the next 3 months. But she had a really hard time living with them, and she came back to Ivankiv with her baby. She got pregnant again the next year, and gave birth to another son. She was always worrying about what kinds of medical problems they could have. Her first son’s ribcage did not grow normally, and she says it’s like there’s a hole in his chest where his breastbone should be. Her second son has never had any unusual health problems, she says, but her first son was always sickly. She says the only explanation she can think of is that it was because of Chornobyl and the fact that she took him outside those first days after the accident, not knowing any better.

As we walked through the small park and along the river, she pointed out the spot where the trucks coming from Chornobyl had been washed down, where the contaminated water flowed into the river. “How could they do that?” she wondered aloud. “Valya, what other choice did they have?” I lamely said. “That’s true, they had to do it somewhere, I suppose.”

Valya also showed me a relatively new monument in the park, dedicated to the memory of 360 of Ivankiv’s Jews who were massacred by the Nazi’s in September 1941. Sadly, someone has already vandalized it, breaking off part of the marker.

While all my NPR and BBC podcasts are focused on Iran, we are in the midst of our own little political mess in Ukraine. Prime Minister Yanukovych has been wooing Parliamentarians to leave their coalition with the President’s party and join his own in an attempt to get a kind of “super majority” that would allow his coalition to override any Presidential vetoes. It is widely rumored that he has actually been paying people to join his coalition, and figures like $10 million (yes, that’s ten million U.S. dollars) have been bandied about as the going price. This is very clearly an unconstitutional maneuver, as the constitution requires a Parliamentarian to remain with his/her party with which he/she was elected throughout his/her term in office.

There were big rallies over the weekend by both camps, with some Yulia Timoshenko thrown into to really get folks riled up. Thousands of people have been bussed into the city, and most seem to be living in Markinsky Park, next to the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council). It is rumored that the PM’s party, called the Party of Regions, is paying people to demonstrate and “show their support” for the PM.

Monday night, President Yushenko dissolved Parliament on the grounds that the PM’s actions are unconstitutional. My colleagues tell me the constitution spells a few very specific cases when the President can actually dissolve Parliament, and the current situation doesn’t seem to fall under any of those categories. The Prime Minister has refused to acknowledge the dissolution, and Parliament claims to be going about its usual merry business of not doing much at all. However, it will be interesting to see how the Constitutional Court decides this case, given the unconstitutional actions of the PM.

On Sunday Igor and I walked by Marinskiy Park, where tents were set up and hundreds (maybe even thousands) of people were milling about. My office is about 1 block from Marinsky Park, 2 blocks from the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), 3 blocks from the President’s office, and a 7-minute walk from Independence Square. We’ve been watching the crowds, listening to the rallies, and getting stuck in the traffic jams. Monday afternoon I went for a walk through the expansive park, mostly because I wanted to enjoy the wonderful weather, but also to do some rubber-necking and see what’s going on. People looked tired. Many were setting up picnics. Lots of police were milling about, and at the back of the park were parked lots of buses - some full of sleeping soldiers and policemen. They are working ’round the clock. In my typical pragmatic fashion, I was wondering where all those people were, well, you know, going. Then I saw 2 rows of Port-o-Potties behind a building. Actually, I smelled them, and then I saw them.

I had a chuckle when a friend of mine working in Afghanistan IM’d me on Monday to check if I am OK. I had to chuckle at the irony. The worst thing that seems to have happened so far is that all the shops around here are completely sold out of everything. These are Ukrainians, I told her, generally pretty nice people. Except for in stores, or the post office, or in any kind of service job. Besides, why get violent on the streets when you can just take someone out, in front of the courthouse, in broad daylight.