Life still hasn’t exactly settled down much, but I can see that some calm and routine are not so far off in the future anymore. I had some time on the weekend to do some shopping and to work on arranging my apartment more to my liking. I managed to get the immediate necessities (like silverware and sheets) and decided to take my time looking for some of the other items, like a coffee maker. There’s no rush, and I still don’t know the best places to buy decent things at a reasonable price.
Monday afternoon we headed to Chernihiv for the Chernobyl economic conference. All three of us new UNVs felt rather frustrated to not have any information beforehand about the conference, and really felt at a loss during the program. I just hate it when I don’t know the schedule, where to go or when. We asked numerous times and just couldn’t get satisfactory answers, or we’d get conflicting answers from different people. Overall, though, the conference was successful, and I found it very informtive on a number of different levels, not the least of which was just watching how my new colleagues operate, who does what, etc.
For the 2 hour drive to Chernihiv on Monday, I sat in the front of the mini-van with one of the CRDP drivers, Oleg. He’s 35, and Sunday celebrated his 1 month anniversary with his wife. In Eastern Europe, the honeymoon period is literally “honey month”, although newlyweds don’t usually take a honeymoon trip the way we usually do in the U.S. Oleg and I passed the time during the drive talking about all kinds of things, from his memories of the weeks and months following the Chernobyl accident to the post-Soviet changes in Ukraine. Oleg was about 16 years old in April 1986, living in Kiev with his parents. That spring and summer all the children in Kiev were sent to the countryside, to relatives or to summer camps, to keep them far away from the radiation. Oleg recalls those months as some of the best in his life, a kind of adventure; months spent away from his parents at camp, days full of games, and freedom from his usual household chores. His parents remember those months as surreal – a huge city completely devoid of children.
I also got a bit of a Ukrainian lesson from Oleg. All advertisements are, by law, only in Ukrainian. Most of the time, Ukrainian is close enough to Russian that I can figure out the content. But days and months are very different, so I asked him to help me learn those. He explained to me that the Ukrainian name of every month reflects something happening in nature during that period. For example, the word for July is based on a particular kind of tree that blooms in that month, and from which you can make a delicious tea. And the word for “November” literally means “Falling Leaves.” Isn’t that beautiful?
At dinner Tuesday night I had the chance to get to know Nikolai better, one of the 9 Ukrainians on the CRDP staff. He is absolutely brillant and originally had plans to join the diplomatic corps. He is fluent in 7 languages (Russian, Ukrainian, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish), and has studied in both Germany and France. He facilitated a press conference Tuesday afternoon with awesome ability. He actually reminds me a bit of Rob Lowe’s character from West Wing, that kind of super smart, super talented, “you know he’s going to do important things in his life” kind of young man. I told him I had visited Frankfurt for the weekend right before I arrived in Kiev, and he began to tell me all about the wonderful sites to see there, including all the important historical references for just about everything there!
I’m looking forward to getting to know the rest of the CRDP staff. They are obviously an impressive group of very talented people!
Anka in Kyiv 