Comments

It seems the comment function has not been working on my blog lately, so I thought I would post some emails I received from people who wanted to comment on my post about Chornobyl aid organizations.

“thank you so much for writing this post: an eye-opening look into something that many people take for granted…”

and – thank you for your blog.

warmest wishes,
veronica

Ann, thanks for your very insightful comments on this subject. Our organization (Chernobyl Children’s Project International) recently started investing significantly in “in-country” rehabilitation for these kids. While an opportunity to summer abroad is very attractive for many families, there are many other Belarusian families who would not even consider sending their kids to a stranger’s home. (If the situation were reversed, I would feel the same!) Also, we work with many ill or handicapped children from home a vacation abroad would not be realistic — for example, children recovering from cancer or heart operations.

Your point is quite valid however . . . it is really hard for people to get excited about programs in which they are directly involved, thus the appeal of these summer programs. Real change requires the long view. Charities have to do their best to ride both horses in order to both keep their funding stream alive, and to affect real change in the regions. For our part, we are moving more and more toward in-country programs. People have to help themselves, and be supported in that, and not always be left beholden to the charity of others.

All the best to you,

Kathy Ryan
Executive Director/USA
Chernobyl Children’s Project International
Visit: http://chernobyl.typepad.com

Chornobyl legacy

Since my BBC debut last week, I have received several emails that have sparked some very interesting email conversations. One discussion has been about the so-called “children of Chornobyl” and the multitude of charities in western Europe and the U.S. who provide aid to children living in Chornobly-affected territories. One of the very popular programs some charities offer is a “rehabilitative” trip abroad – kids spend a few weeks or a few months, usually in the summer, living in, for example, the United States with a host family. I’ve heard of children spending summers in Italy, Portugal, France, and Ireland, as well as the U.S.

I have very mixed feelings about these programs. First of all, for how long are people going to continue being labeled “Chornobyl affected”? Twenty-one years after the accident, most of the Ukrainian territory designated as Chornobyl-affected is fine for human habitation, with radiation levels lower than natural background radiation is some parts of the world (northern Finland, for example), or even completely dissipated. What makes a child “Chornobyl affected” today? His zip code? Because his parents listed his permanent address as being in the 4th zone, even though he was born hundreds of kilometers away and grew up in a different region of Ukraine?

I certainly think the chance to spend a summer in another country is a fantastic opportunity for any kid, no matter where they are from. And the more Ukrainians, especially young Ukrainians, who can travel abroad and see examples of life in other countries, the better. At the least, they will see what other people expect and receive from their governments – good roads, clean water, gas lines. Maybe they will learn about how people in those countries actually pay their taxes, and actually receive government services back from them. They can learn that it is not normal to expect to give or receive bribes for every little transaction. They can see that in some countries laws are serious things, followed by your average citizen and enforced by your average police officer. They will also see that most people in those countries work pretty hard, too, and money doesn’t grow on trees there and your average person does not own a Bentley. In other words, exchange opportunities generally break myths about foreign countries, as well as about your own country.

On the other hand, the hundreds of thousands of dollars these organizations spend to bring a few children every year to the US, Italy, France, etc., could make a HUGE difference in the lives of thousands of people living in Chornobyl-affected villages: build or renovate the gas lines so there is gas heat in every home, school, hospital, and other building in the village so they don’t have to burn wood for fuel (which causes a whole set of respiratory and other problems from the smoke); clean wells and build sanitary systems so every household has access to clean water, and with the gas heat, hot water for more sanitary washing; renovate roads, repair decrepit schools, install quality windows for better insulation. Invest in small business development to create jobs. The list could go on and on.

Richard D North, author of the website Chernobyllegacy.com, writing about the so-called “rehabilitative summers abroad”, points out a fatal flaw in most of the humanitarian efforts surrounding the Chornobyl accident, “one of the bad things about it is that the kids have to buy into the ‘horror story’ to get on the ride – or rather, they learn that victim hood is profitable.”

This is certainly the great dilemma for programs like UNDP’s Chornobyl Recovery and Development Programme. They work hard to to destroy the myths, to help people move beyond the victim syndrome and take control of their lives again. The slow, plodding work of economic development, social mobilization, and community development does not produce dramatic results quickly; instead, it takes years of steady support and maybe you’ll see a measurable change in society.

But international donor agencies and charities want to give money and support in response to a tragedy. And if you don’t play up the “tragic lasting effects” of Chornobyl (which may or may not even be real), you don’t get aid. It’s a real conundrum.

I do believe aid organizations want to help people have better lives. But when I hear them talking about “we’re going to support this community because it’s not too far from Kyiv and we can easily visit it in a day during our short visit to Ukraine”, it’s hard for me to take them seriously. If they really want to help the most needy, the most affected, the most at-risk people, then they should go to the far away, isolated, hard-to-get-to places – precisely because no one goes there. And if they want to make a difference in a child’s life, help make her home town better. A “rehabilitative” summer in the Ireland is fantastic and I’m sure lots of fun, but when you send that child back to her village with poor heat, unclean water, and little access to the outside world due to terrible roads (not to mention no computers or internet), have you really made that child healthier? Have you really improved her life?

I wish aid organizations would stop doing what is easy for them to do, and what makes them feel good, and would start doing the hard work that helps disadvantaged people have better lives.

I’m on the BBC!

A couple months ago I was contacted by the BBC Radio program “Woman’s Hour”. They were preparing a broadcast about women bloggers, they liked my blog, and they asked me to record one of my essays for the segment. They selected a few excerpts from this essay about one of my trips in the Chornobyl-affected area of Ukraine.

I went to the BBC Radio office in Kyiv, had a recording session (which was kind of cool), and pretty much forgot about it.

Well, thankfully Woman’s Hour didn’t forget! The feature will broadcast on 9 October 2007 at 10 am GMT. You can listen to the broadcast via the Woman’s Hour website.

Update: the program segment is archived at the link above, so if you missed the live broadcast, you can still listen to my segment over and over and over.

Notes from an election observer

My friend Ivanna and I were volunteer election observers Sunday for the Parliamentary elections.

There are something like 33,000 polling stations across Ukraine. The “hot spots” were considered to be in eastern Ukraine, in the areas more traditionally considered Russian-leaning, and where the most significant and more obvious incidents of fraud have been detected in recent elections (like a party receiving 103% of votes in some districts). The international delegations of election observers where smaller this year, though – about 2500 international observers. Almost 5000 Ukrainian observers were registered, representing various watchdog groups and NGOs. There were also representatives of the political parties observing at polling stations.

There were 20 parties running for the 450 seats in the Verhovna Rada. Each party who wins at least 3% of votes can sit in Parliament, with their proportion of seats equivalent to their proportion of votes. Citizens vote for a party, not individual candidates. The party has a list of their members, and depending on how many seats the party wins in Parliament, that number of their party list then become Members of Parliament. For example, let’s say Party X wins 20% of the vote, which grants them 90 seats in the Verhovna Rada. So, the first 90 people on their party list become Members of Parliament.

I suppose there are pluses for someone in this system, but for the average voter, it seems to me to have a lot of disadvantages. For one thing, the parties are not required to have any kind of regional distribution of their MPs. In theory, parties could have all of their candidates from one part of the country, thus leaving another part without any local person representing them at the national level. I hear often that people don’t know who they should contact in government about their concerns and issues, and this, I would say, is at least partly a result of not having direct election of candidates from one’s region.

On Sunday, every voter all across the country (and around the world at voting stations in Ukrainian consulates and embassies in foreign countries) received the exact same ballot listing 20 parties. Every voter made one check mark, selecting one party. And thus 450 parliamentary seats are decided, with one check mark.

But I digress from my original intention to post about my experiences as an election observer…

We opted to observe polling stations in our neighborhood, the Pechersk area of Kyiv. No one was predicting or expecting any problems in the center of the capital, and I certainly wouldn’t say that we witnessed anything resembling serious attempts to falsify the vote. But we did see some interesting and curious things, and talked to a lot of people about what they thought of the day.

Saturday afternoon we made short visits to 3 nearby polling stations to see how the preparations were going. Since my observing partner Ivanna is an experienced election observer, it was also a good opportunity for her to share some pointers and tips with me, as this was my first time. She explained how the polling station is supposed to be set up: only one way in and out of the voting room; the parties’ lists all displayed; the rules for properly voting on display; no police in the actual voting room.

Sunday we started the day at 6:00 am, attending the opening meeting of a polling station committee on my street. 20 hours later I stumbled home exhausted, having visited a total of 14 polling stations all less than one kilometer from my apartment.

The ballots had been delivered to the polling station on Thursday, where they remained locked in a safe until the opening meeting Sunday morning. We watched the committee members seal the ballot boxes and then insert into each box a signed control slip.

They distributed the ballots amongst themselves and manned their stations.

At about 6:45, 15 minutes before polls were scheduled to open, a group of 4 men (3 in suits, one in jeans and a t-shirt) entered the station and walked up to the group of committee members as they were sealing one of the ballot boxes. Ivanna and I couldn’t hear what they said to the committee chair, but we watched closely as they quietly discussed something. The men then walked to the back of the hall and stood around. We noticed one guy wearing a communication device in his ear, the kind the secret service use. Since no one except committee members and registered observers are allowed in a polling station before opening, we were quite curious to find out exactly who these guys were and what they were doing.

We approached them in the back of the room – one short man who seemed to be the “leader” (he had the earpiece), a medium-sized man, and one gorilla stuffed into a suit (the guy in jeans had gone outside). They said they were from the Secret Service, here to check the site before the Minister of Foreign Affairs Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a strapping young man with a shockingly fast-paced career (he’s a whopping 32 years old), came to vote. Although as observers we technically are just supposed to observe what goes on and report on it later, Ivanna couldn’t restrain herself from pointing out that they were not supposed to be in the polling room (the law is explicit that no police, militia, etc can be inside the voting room). With a tone of condescension as if he was talking to total idiots, the short guy started to tell us that everything was OK, they were allowed to be there. Ivanna went back and forth with him for a few minutes, finally just telling them she would note in her report that they had been illegally in the station. They shrugged at us, but I did notice a minute later they walked out of the room.

Shortly after the polls officially opened at 7:00 am, the thug crew returned. The short guy and his side-kick returned and started looking through voter lists. They spent a few minutes at one table, then moved on to another, and then another. In the end, they looked through the lists at 3 of the 4 tables, where the committee members were apparently only happy to oblige.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a clear picture of them.

One of the suits accompanying the short guy saw me take the photo above and said something to his boss. They made a beeline for me, at which point I got nervous. The short guy told me it was illegal to take photos of state security personnel. I didn’t know what to say, but it’s a good thing Ivanna did.

Ivanna: “We have no idea who you are, and besides it is absolutely allowed to take photographs inside the polling station of anyone and everyone.”
Suit: “We already told you we are with the Secret Service.”
Ivanna: “You can say anything you want, I can say I’m from the Secret Service, too. You didn’t show us any identification.”

The suit flashed his ID at us quickly. (I later regreted that I didn’t ask to inspect it closer and write down his name.) He started in again about how it’s not permitted to take photos of State Security. Ivanna started in again about how they are not permitted to be in the polling station, and certainly not permitted to be looking through voter lists. They went round and round again for a minute or so, and then the thug crew left. We asked a committee member what they had been doing, and she said she thought they had been checking which list FM Yatsenyuk was on so he would know where to vote. Since the lists were organized by address, we didn’t understand why they had to look through 3 lists to find his name. The committee member just shrugged her shoulders, seemingly unconcerned by what was seriously concerning to us.

We discussed the matter with some of the other Ukrainian observers, and everyone agreed that (a) I had the right to take photos of them inside the polling station and (b) the thugs shouldn’t have been inside. But only Ivanna actually confronted them.

We left about 15 minutes later, and the 4 thugs were standing outside talking and smoking. A couple hours later we passed by that polling station again, and they were still there. They were gone when we passed by again in the afternoon.

Many “bigwigs” live in the Pechersk area, and after the incident with the Secret Service thugs, we were curious to know if others were sending advance crews to supposedly prepare for them. No other station that we visited reported any such incidents to us. We saw the head of the National Bank voting, accompanied only by his wife and son. We stopped in the evening at the station where Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych had voted earlier in the day. The committee chair told us that some security personnel had arrived about 15 minutes before the PM, took a quick look around, and then waited outside until Yanukovych arrived promptly at 10:30. His guards posted themselves around the room, but never talked to anyone, looked through any lists, or interfered in any way.

Why did the foreign minister need a thug brigade to scout out the station and the lists before he voted? The whole thing was very strange, and maybe we should have stayed at that station until he showed up.

We noticed a few of the challenges faced by certain segments of the population. Absolutely no accommodation had been prepared for the visually impaired – the ballots were only in typeprint format, and thus not privately accessible for blind voters. We saw at least 4 visually impaired people throughout the day who were accompanied into the voting booth by their spouse or other person who assisted them to vote. Before entering the voting booth, the committee chairs made sure the rest of the committee members and the official observers knew what was going on, and in some cases even asked for everyone, observers included, to indicate their consent. I would like to think the spouses and helpers were honest, but that is clearly one easy way to commit voting fraud.

Another problem, and not just on election day, is the utter lack of accommodations for the physically handicapped in Ukrainian buildings. I once heard that it was a Soviet policy that only in buildings of 6 or more stories was it considered necessary to have an elevator; my own 5 story apartment building does not have one. Of the 14 different polling stations we visited on Saturday and Sunday, only 2 were located on the first floor (and they happened to be on different sides of the same school building). In the maternity hospital, of all places, the station was on the 4th, and we nearly got lost trying to navigate the maze of corridors to finally find the right room.

One of the more controversial election rules is actually an attempt to accommodate the disabled, elderly and others who for whatever reason are homebound. They can submit an application to the election board to vote at home, otherwise known as mobile voting. In past elections, mobile voting proved a fantastic way to cheat. There is, of course, a specific protocol established for home voting – a special box is used; 3 members of the precinct’s election committee, each from a different political party, are to accompany the box to the individual’s residences and wait in a separate room while the citizen votes. Some people who are eligible for home voting nonetheless choose to vote in person. Like this woman:

She came to the polling station with another woman (I think her daughter), but walked in with the assistance of a stool. She was lucky enough to be voting in the only building we visited that had an elevator (of course the voting room was on the second floor). If I had known where I could buy a walker or a cane on a Sunday evening, I would have gone out and bought her one right then and there. I felt so bad for her, shuffling along with that stool.

Ivanna and I decided to end the day at a small polling station where only students at the nearby military academy had voted. There were 406 votes cast there (out of 596 registered voters for the station).

This young man was the last voter of the day – he ran in at 9:59 pm, just making it before the polls closed at 10:00. The small group of 13 committee members applauded him. They had had a long and pretty boring day, although I suspect those 409 young men aged 18-20 got some nice attention from the almost entirely female and middle-aged committee.

Ivanna and I chose this station to observe the counting for several reasons, one of which was that we thought it would be an interesting sample population. All male, aged 18-20 years old, from various regions of the country. On the one hand, you could expect the younger generation to lean more towards the reformist and European-focused parties. But on the other hand, being in the military academy (and probably many of them coming from military families), you might expect them to be more conservative. We were curious to see how this particular constituency would vote.

We were pleasantly surprised when the final tabulations had the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc winning the precinct – by a small margin, but nonetheless, her party won the precinct. And these young men turned out to vote pretty darn close to the voting profile of the overall country.

Party
Yulia Timoshenko Bloc – 34% (Precinct), 30.75% (Country)
Party of Regions – 31% (Precinct), 34.33% (Country)
Our Ukraine/PSD – 12% (Precinct), 14.17% (Country)
Lytvyn Bloc – 5.7% (Precinct), 3.96% (Country)
Communist Party – 4.7% (Precinct), 5.38% (Country)
Socialist Party – 2.22% (Precinct), 2.86% (Country)

Interestingly, “none of the above” actually came in 4th place in the precinct, with 6.7% (compared to 2.73% nationwide).

We had not expected a particularly late night given the small number of votes in the precinct, but luck was not with us for getting a good night’s sleep. The committee members got very confused when completing the official vote tabulation form and it took them over an hour to finally decide how to properly complete one part of the form. It was a particularly unclear question on page 2.

The page reads something like this:

11. Number of ballots cast at the voting station: 406
12. Number of ballots in each voting box:
Number 1: 252
Number 2: 154
13. Number of ballots not included in the count: 0
14. Number of ballots cast in premises of the voting station: 406
15. Number of ballots cast in the premises of the voter: 0
16. Number of ballots cast in the voting precinct: 406
17. Number of ballots not valid: 2

The problem arose between #13 and #17. There were two ballots declared invalid by the committee because the voter marked more than one party. Those seem to clearly fall under line #17. But they couldn’t decide what #13 meant – should they include the invalid ballots as “not included in the count” or not? But since technically no ballot is supposed to go uncounted, and considering there is a line for invalid ballots, what exactly is an uncounted ballot? They took over an hour to finally decide to complete the form in the way indicated above, listing no “uncounted” ballots and two “invalid” ballots. Makes me wonder if other committees were similarly confused and how they completed those lines.

We left the polling station around 2:00 am, our work for the day completed.

Thirsty?

This came out of my kitchen faucet on Sunday (the stuff on the left).

Ah, that fabulous Kyiv water.