Canning

This summer I learned to conserve vegetables, Ukrainian style. With the help of my friend Olga Fyodrovna and a couple others we canned over 30 liters of pickles and over 35 liters of tomatoes. Hopefully that will last Laura and I through the winter. I was also told that, using cucumbers from the greenhouse, the DCU cafeteria canned over 500 liters of pickles this summer. In the last couple of weeks they have also been canning a lot of tomatoes and salads (from the garden).

Canning here is very common because produce is so incredibly cheap in season and very expensive in the off-season. For example, tomatoes sell for around $0.05 per pound now and were around $1.35 per pound last winter. Therefore, fruits and vegetables (of the non-root variety) are not in the typical Ukrainian’s winter diet. By canning some fruits and vegetables they are able to supplement their diets a bit and save a little money.

Dave

Conservation and Recycling

Something that has bothered me ever since we’ve been here has been the attitudes toward conservation here. Every time I throw away a glass jar, tin can or a 1-liter foil-and-cardboard milk box, something inside of me cringes. I can’t pinpoint the time or place, but the recycling habit took hold of me a long time ago, and it doesn’t want to be broken. But there are virtually no recycling options available here, save turning in empty pop and beer bottles so they can be washed and refilled.

I understand that Ukraine is an economically struggling country, with an infrastructure permeated with corruption and a government prone to infighting. There are seemingly bigger things to worry about than whether or not average joe can recycle his plastic pop bottles. And I think the attitudes created by a communist framework die hard. Why conserve water or electricity when you pay pennies a month (or nothing at all) for unlimited amounts? Even now, most people don’t pay much for electricity or water. I think our monthly electricity bill is about $5. Most people here wash dishes by turning on the faucet and letting it run while washing each dish. Kitchen sink plugs are hard to find, and having dishwater that sits in the sink through a whole batch of dishes is just too dirty – why not constantly replace it with clean water, fresh from the tap?

Ukraine is just behind. Like so many other things here – education, technology, medicine, innovation, Ukraine seems to be about 30 years behind the modern world. In some areas, more. So hopefully it’ll be just a question of how long it takes until things catch up here. And I guess that depends on if the country can work through its current difficulties and move forward.

In the meantime, I was feeling powerless to change my lack of recycling existence in Ukraine, and I remembered a conversation that took place several years ago at an extended family holiday celebration. It was about how big of a “footprint” you make on the earth. This relates to how much carbon your existence on earth produces. Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about it – high gas prices seem to be making being “green” cool in the U.S. So I went searching for a website to take the test. There are many, but my favorite was at www.myfootprint.org. My quiz made me feel somewhat better about my wayward recycling here in Ukraine. I took the quiz twice – once based on my Ukraine lifestyle and once based on my lifestyle in Phoenix before we came here. The results of the quiz give you a number of acres of biologically productive land (and ocean) needed to sustain your lifestyle. My results in case you’re curious: to support my current lifestyle in Ukraine, I need 8.15 acres of land. That’s very close to what an average Ukrainian uses: 8.40. In the States, even with recycling, I would need 13 acres. The average American needs 24. In the world, there are 4.5 biologically productive acres per person. From what I can tell, the biggest difference is transport. Here I always use public transport, and in Phoenix I never used it. Even though we had a fuel-efficient car, it still makes a big difference when you drive yourself. So the quiz made me feel a little better, but still frustrated that recycling in Ukraine still means using your plastic grocery bags for garbage bags, or reusing that glass jam jar as a pencil holder.

Laura

Communications

Earlier this week we were graced by a visit from MCC communications. A writer and photographer made the trip to Ukraine from Winnipeg and Akron respectively. They are here for around 10 days and will be traveling around Ukraine to interview people and see a part of what MCC is doing here.

After spending their first couple of days in Zaporozhye they traveled to Kharkov (in the Northeast corner of Ukraine) to meet with some of the partners; the goal being to interview them and write an article on economic development and loan funds for The Common Place, the MCC news magazine. There were three interviews there: one with the manager of the loan fund and two with loan recipients. The two recipients were a family that is farming around 11 hectares of land and another family that is growing tomatoes in a greenhouse.

We then traveled to Donetsk/Makeevka and spent another half-day interviewing another loan fund manager and three more recipients. These recipients were a guy who raises roses in a greenhouse, two ladies that have a large garden and raise ducks and a guy who runs an auto parts store. This was especially interesting for me because MCC didn’t give a grant to this fund this year, and since I have been mainly working with those who were given grants, I did not have much first-hand experience with this loan fund.

We spent the second half of the day talking to people at Good Shepherd. It was very interesting to participate in these interviews because I was given a forum to find out some answers to a lot of my own questions.

I think the experience was generally positive for “communications” and was also interesting for me. We wanted these people to see and hear the best of what is going on here and I found myself reflecting on that a bit. One can make direct correlations between communications and fund raising, and we want our supporters to hear about all the good things that are happening here. But most things are more complicated than the “Wow, look at all the great things your contributions have done.”

I’m glad to show mainly positive things, but sometimes it upsets me that that is all we talk about. Focusing just on the positive results and thinking that if we don’t see them, the negatives aren’t there, results in an oversimplification of many situations. I am sure this will continue to be a difficulty in the future for me. In thinking back on time in Ukraine, I will probably glaze over the complications and remember only the positives, which is natural. And that is most likely a good thing.

Dave