Friday, August 17, 2007

Wrapping up with number 200

Well, our time in Ukraine has come and gone. This will probably be my last blog from Donetsk. How nice to end on such a nice round number. We leave town on the train on Sunday and leave Kiev crazy-early on Tuesday morning. The last weeks have been peppered with invitations for meals and good-byes with so many people who have cumulatively added up to our life here these past years. And this "good-bye schedule" has been turned up a notch these last days. We still have two more days of this, so I can't really wrap it up, but I don't think that I will be able to find much time to update again from here out.

In the course of these gatherings, the questions always come up: are we "ready to leave and are we leaving "in general" or "forever." I want to respond with an emphatic "No, I'm not ready to leave" or "No, not for good" but it is hard for me. In all honesty I am pretty much ready to start the next chapter in life and therefore I am ready to leave by default. And these good-byes have been especially difficult because we don't know if/when we will be coming back to see these people again. We would like to come back, but with 3-4 years of study in the immediate future and without a specific trip date in mind it is difficult to say anything for certain.

But to not respond with one of these "emphatic responses" seems to belittle the experience; to say it wasn't great and we didn't appreciate these people and the part of their lives they have shown us. And that isn't the case at all. We have been stretched in ways that we never knew we would bend. To say it has all been great and enjoyable would be stretching the truth in that same way. But overall it has been, as I find myself oftentimes saying in Russian, a "miraculous experience" (somehow it doesn't sound as cheese as it does in English).

I have gotten to meet and talk with people whose stories I had only read about in North America. Through these conversations these stories and heroes became real to me. I have grown from the faith and values of the many people I have worked/traveled/played with in ways I will never really be able to put my finger on. I have felt like I have been on a MCC scholarship these past years and I could summarize the education I have received in a long, boring blog (maybe I already have).

Have I had a positive effect on these people? I hope so, probably not as much as they have affected me, but nonetheless I think that I have been honest, flexible, and willing to help in any way I have been able. I have tried to be both real and optimistic, even if this was oftentimes a struggle. And I have provided them with plenty of laughs, with my "ease of speaking/lack of attentiveness to grammar" combo.

The optimist in me wants to say that I/we will be back. This would help to emphasize the many "thank you's" that I find myself saying. We both hope to come back, one option might be to teach at the Summer English Intensive that Laura has spent so much time and effort planning. And maybe come early or stay late and help out with some camps for the Good Shepherd kids. So, I guess the only question really is when.

Dave

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Training

I met the Prytup family today. Pavel is going to spend 50% time at Good Shepherd and 50% time with the MCC Income Generation projects. Betsy is going to spend 50% time at Good Shpeherd and 50% time at home with their two small children.

I printed some documents to help in the discussion, especially in regards to the income generation responsibilities and have also had some time for informal discussion. Talking to them, even though they have a lot of epxerience in this part of the world (Pavel grew up in the USSR and former-USSR and they have visited many times in the past years) and are also more qualified to do what I have been trying to do these past years (Pavel has a Masters in International development and Betsy worked in a children's home in Ohio), reminds me a lot of what it was like for me almost three years ago.

Countless questions were swimming around in my head.. What was I going to DO for three years here? Who are these people and will I ever get to know any of them? What's the difference between all the different types of Baptists here? What is Orthodoxy? How will I work with these people and would my job description evolve? And also little things like will our electronic items work on 220-volt curent? Would we have to buy all our water? And the list went on and on.

And now, here we are getting ready to go home and here are these people in shoes similar to the ones we were in not that long ago. And they have questions too. Questions about things I mostly take for granted. How many of these questions have I really found answers accurate enough to give them a decent response, and how many un-understood things have I just grown accustomed to not knowing the answer to or the reason for?

I remember the people I appreciated the most in those first weeks/months. I won't name names, but they were the ones patient enough to answer my oftentimes ridiculous-seeming questions, empathetic enough to realize I woundn't understand everything at once so simple answers were necessary (even if they didn't always give the entire picture), and honest enough to say "I have no idea" when that was clearly or even not so clearly the case.

Helping these new people in their transition will probably be a great way to process and bring closure to my own time here. And I hope that I will be as patient, empathetic, and honest enough to follow the examples of those who I so greatly appreciated about three years ago. I probably won't, but maybe these new coworkers will be forgiving. I'll probably learn more from them than they will from me. And they only have to put up with me for a week-and-a-half. Unfortunately, sometimes it will be in large doses. Poor newcomers.

Dave

Moving Day

Yesterday we were able to move all our furniture from our apartment on the fourth floor to an apartment in Makeevka, not far from Good Shepherd, where the Prytups are going to live. It was a full day that turned out to be a bit more than I had personally bargained for.

Of course our building doesn't have an elevator, and I won't complain about that. Seven flights of stairs is not too difficult when there are six kids who are just starting work for the day and are also looking to show each other how tough they are and how fast they can move things out the front door. The trouble came when we arrived at the other apartment building, or shortly thereafter. These coworkers will live on the eighth floor of a 9-storey building. All such buildings were built standard with elevators, small but functional.

We took up the first three loads via elevator and all was going well. Andre arrived at the first floor, the door opened and the light went out in the elevator-car. Fortunately the door remained open (for the rest of the afternoon) so he could get out and the lights in the corridor were also still on. We began to take the bigger items (that wouldn't have fit in the elevator anyway) up the stairs, while one of the locals went to call someone and "see if he could get it turned on again."

This is where the story gets strange (at least in my opinion). Apparently there is an "operator" for each block of elevators, whose job it is to monitor the electric meters and shut off the elevators if they are getting used "too much." Fortunate for whoever pays the electric bill, this person was on his/her game yesterday and shut it down just in time. I was also told that it was also possible that someone from the building called the operator to "inform" on us. Why someone would do this, I don't know. And why the operator would shut it off, also a mystery. I guess that if this is the person's job and he/she has the power then he/she is more than happy to use it every once in a while.

We were told that the operator would turn the elevator back on shortly and most people wanted to wait it out. I am not sure what sort of past experiences those who preferred to wait have had, but apparently their understanding of the word "shortly" is not the same as the meaning that I have come to these past years here.

A couple of us continued the carrying and I also began to investigate this idea of an "elevator operator." One of the guys there had moved into his apartment 25 years ago and told me that these elevators were not "cargo elevators" (like the ones that were standard in 16-floor apartments) and therefore were not to be used "so often." We never even got close to the 325 kg. maximum, but apparently it is more a problem of the elevator being forced to repeatedly do what it was made to do or something. Anyway, way back when, when this guy was moving he had tracked down the operator and given her a little money to keep the elevator on. I wished he knew where to find the operator yesterday and "grease his/her palm."

We finished our 20 or so trips up the seemingly endless number of flights of stairs and as we left I checked--the elevator door was still open with the light off. For all I know it's still that way today; at least I can "feel the burn" in my arms, back and legs.

Dave