Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Hospital Visit

Valentina Vasilovna Chernova is the director of the Good Shepherd Children’s Center, and one of the people responsible for the formation of the Good Shepherd organization. A while back she was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and thyroid with inconclusive test results as to whether it was malignant or not. A few weeks ago she went to a hospital in Zaporozhye, which is supposedly one of the best cancer treatment facilities in Eastern Ukraine. She had surgery two weeks ago today, and then began the recovery process.

The day after the basketball tournament I traveled to Zaporozhye for the annual MCC Economic Development conference. I brought pictures from the tournament as well as notes from almost all the kids and workers at the Good Shepherd center. I was excited to see her, but a bit nervous as to what I would see. The whole situation—no one really knowing whether the cancer was malignant or not or what the prognosis is and therefore assuming the worst—made me rather uncomfortable. It had all seemed very reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward and I feared that the hospital conditions would also seem eerily familiar.

We went to visit her on Thursday night in her room, which she shared with five other women, all of which I assumed had some form of cancer. They all appeared to be at different stages in the process. Some were rather cheerful and optimistic while others were quite grave. All were willing to participate in Valentina’s conversations with her visitors.

Being the selfish person that I am, I began to feel sorry for myself during this, the most difficult 30 minutes of my time in Ukraine up till now. While Wednesday had been a good day for her—with her being able to get up and walk to the washroom and clean up—Thursday had been difficult—she lacked the strength to get up and her fever had returned. It was really hard to see her like that, the optimistic woman who I constantly hear in my mind, reminding me: “Of course there are many difficulties in dealing with the kids, but we will not get discouraged.” Here she was saying: “I know everything is going to turn out well,” but her eyes and voice were lacking that reassuring quality that they always seemed to have.

Yesterday I was told that Valentina will be coming back to Makeevka on Friday, and I was so excited. Maybe her stay in “the cancer ward” will not be as indefinite as my reading of Solzhenitsyn had led me to believe. I know that I am excited to see her outside the confines of such a depressing place.

P.S. Sorry to those of you who haven’t read Solzhenitsyn. To find out what hospitals are like in this part of the world, read The Cancer Ward.

Dave

Basketball Tournament

Last week the kids from Good Shepherd participated in the annual basketball tournament. All the orphanages from Makeevka had been invited and eight teams (four girls, four boys) showed up. A family from St. Louis had come earlier this year and paid for the replacement of windows as well as some remodeling in the gymnasium. The administration was so proud that they recommended that the basketball tournament be held there. Seventy-two children participated.

It is not the type of coaching that I was used to in North America, with many of the kids not knowing where to stand during a free throw or even how/where to play defense, but Good Shepherd represented well. Each game consisted of two, 10-minute halves (running clock), making the games go rather quickly. It was exciting. The boys advanced to the championship with a 32-2 win over the team that ended up taking third place. Then the girls came back from a 10-4 second half deficit to win the championship 18-14 (in a five-minute overtime period). The boys also played well in the championship, but could not get their shots to fall. They ended up in second place.

It was exciting to see how much better both teams played when compared to how they played last year. It was also interesting to compare the behavior of the Good Shepherd kids to that of the kids from the government-run orphanages. Such comparisons always make me realize how great of thing is being done by the people at Good Shepherd.

Dave

Alexander Doroshenko

Alexander (Sasha) Doroshenko is a member of the church we attend here in Ukraine. He owns a small auto parts store and serves as a member of the board of the MCC-sponsored loan fund in our congregation. He never misses an opportunity to sing and play his guitar in church; rarely a Sunday goes by when he is in attendance and does not have a song to sing.

He is also an avid sports enthusiast, and loves hockey and soccer. He often tells me what’s happening in the NHL. Looking at him, however, I never expected boxing to be a part of his story. He looks nothing like Dolph Lundgren’s character “Ivan Drago” in Rocky IV (in my opinion the only Rocky movie worth watching).

From the ages of 13-20, Sasha was an amateur boxer in the former Soviet Union. In his own, disjointed storytelling style, he told me about living in trains, planes, and hotels for the majority of these years. He began boxing in the lowest weight category, 47 kilograms, but spent most of his career in the next class up, 51 kg. This is also where he experienced his success. In 1978, he participated in the USSR junior boxing championship in Riga, Latvia, losing the championship by decision to a Russian who would go on to become the champion of Europe. The following year, he again participated in the junior championship, this time winning the 51 kg division.

I could not get him to tell me his amateur record, but he was quick to point out that he never really liked boxing. His real love was soccer, but the region where he grew up in Western Ukraine did not have a serious coach. He became a boxer by default.

He spent his two mandatory years in the army in the sports academy, but upon release decided to hang up his gloves. He went to music school and learned to play the guitar. He joined a band and played, mainly at wedding ceremonies, while attending business school. He talks about these two degrees with a bit of pride, since he never really finished high school. He now has a grown daughter and is an active participant in our church.

Dave

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Trout in the Shape of a Squirrel

Throughout my eating-out experiences in Ukraine, the one thing I have particularly enjoyed is the English menu. Many restaurants don’t have it, but some do. And when they do, they are quite likely to be a source of entertainment. It seems that almost every restaurant that we’ve visited here with an English menu hasn’t bothered to have it translated by a professional – generally it seems to be translated by any Joe who has had a little English training, or maybe has purchased a Russian/English dictionary. Thus, the translations of food items and their descriptions on the English menu are generally accurate, but sometimes quite funny. I do understand that there is a special kind of language used on a menu that we don’t usually use in everyday speech. I say fried fish, the menu says pan-seared haddock. I say garlic potatoes, the menu says fire-roasted fingerling potatoes, seasoned with tender garlic scapes. So I do want to cut the menu translators some slack. But sometimes, rather than entice us to order their food, the English menu food descriptions make us laugh, or look for the simplest, most familiar food. Some favorites we’ve encountered: crabby salad, granny’s pickled products, tunny filets, chicken with fungus, salad from sea products, and the most memorable: Trout in the Shape of a Squirrel. The trout was found on the menu at a local Chinese restaurant. Perhaps serving trout in the shape of a squirrel in Ukraine (or in China) is an especially exotic or appealing way to eat it. Maybe it has some significance. Or maybe it’s just a bad translation. Anyway, a friend of a friend was inspired by the trout and wrote a poem about it, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Little do they know: not only are those menu translators providing us Anglophones with a general idea of what we’re ordering, they’re also inspiring art.

Trout In the Shape Of A Squirrel (A Poem)

“Do I eat nuts? Do I look like I eat nuts?”
I used to slalom to and fro
To flick in the air, a silver rainbow
Where the rivers bend. The world all seemed to flow
My way. I was king of the day.
(Do I eat nuts? Do I look like I eat nuts?)
As the evening fell, my luck did end
For a friend of a restaurateur‘s best friend
Dropped a net my tail could not defend
Away. Now I sadly say:
(I eat nuts. I must eat nuts)
I'm the trout they shaped like a beast of the bough
Don’t ask me where or why or how
One gets a feel for mixed-up chow
These parsnips in the form of a cow
Giraffe cakes, kangaroo pilau
A haddock which I swear meowed
To a lemon sponge who howled ‘bow wow.’
(It is nuts. Now I bid you Ciao).

Laura

Friday, November 10, 2006

Bug in the oatmeal

Today at breakfast Dave saw two tiny, black, pointy things sticking out of his spoonful of oatmeal. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be a pair of pinchers from a black bug. It wasn’t the small weevil-type bug that sometimes gets into oatmeal if you forget about it in the back of the cupboard. It was a fierce-looking bug. Actually it was just the pinchers from what we imagined was a fierce black bug. Thankfully, the bug was nowhere to be seen. After that, neither of us has much of an appetite for our oatmeal. But although this was a particularly gross example, this type of thing goes on frequently here – finding foreign objects that should not be in our food. Pieces of shell in the walnuts, rocks in the beans, sticks in the raisins, hulls (and apparently black bugs) in the oatmeal. When we first arrived, I bought lots of groceries, especially fresh fruit and vegetables, at the outdoor markets here. That included raisins and nuts, which are sold from various containers or bins. Either could’ve been raised, harvested and shelled or dried by the babushka selling them to you. I liked this idea of freshness and that my purchases were helping the producer directly. But after finding small sticks and rocks in the raisins I bought several times, I felt that babushka should’ve been a little more careful with her sorting, and decided to buy them in packaged, labeled and sealed bags at the grocery store. Surely these would be packaged by someone who was paid to pay attention at the factory, and thus my bag would contain only raisins and no other surprises. After my first raisin purchase, I was surprised to find that my reasoning had been faulty. I found the same sticks and rubbish in my packaged, store-bought raisins that I’d seen in my market-bought ones. Apparently quality control hadn’t branched into the raisin department yet. Or maybe they’re picking out the big rocks and sticks and just leaving the little ones. So I resigned myself to sorting the raisins before using them. It was either that or buy imported German raisins, which would entail spending my entire weekly grocery budget on just raisins.

So I’ve adjusted to the little ritual of checking certain foods before you eat them. Other foreigners have adjusted in other ways. I know of a person who brings a suitcase full of groceries back from the States whenever she’s there. Not exotic, hard-to-find-in-Ukraine things like peanut butter or brown sugar, but ordinary things like cheese and oatmeal. I admit that I found myself snickering about this in the past (Just eat it! All the Ukrainians do!) but maybe she’s had a “black bug” experience, or worse. Everyone is entitled to be comfortable with the food they eat.

I’ve decided that eating a stick, rock or bug, especially cooked, will probably not harm be a bit. I know fellow MCCers who are eating bugs on purpose in other parts of the world where that sort of thing is acceptable. And that makes me thankful that I’m in Ukraine. There might be bugs in the oatmeal or sticks in the raisins, but at least it’s not on purpose and it's culturally acceptable for me to pick them out.

Laura