Anya

I’m missing Anya. She was my student last year, and a dedicated one. Every Saturday, even when the freezing temperatures kept most other students home, she would come to class. Her English was already quite good, but it improved because she worked hard. She had a goal in mind. I don’t remember when we became friends, but eventually I was introduced to her boyfriend and we started spending time together. She was in the process of applying for a visa to work in the States. She had a good job in Donetsk, but wanted to improve her English and get more work experience in the service industry. She had a Ukrainian friend who was already living there, and she set her up with a job and a place to live. The job was waitressing at Outback Steakhouse. One night Anya came over with several pages of colorful pictures and food descriptions – the restaurant’s menu, which she printed from the Internet. Things like “vine-ripened tomatoes” and “a twist of lemon” and “Bloomin’ Onion” were highlighted in yellow, and we went through the menu, I explaining what each one meant while she took notes. Then it was the visa application and interview questions. She filled out forms and I checked them, and over and over we practiced the questions that might be asked during the visa interview at the American Embassy in Kiev. Meanwhile, we also did other things, besides filling out forms. A highlight was a trip to a nearby village where the parents of her boyfriend’s best friend lived. They treated us like kings and we stuffed ourselves with Ukrainian delicacies to the point of illness. We also tossed a Frisbee on a grassy hill, standing in a circle around a tethered goat, wandered through a nearby marsh and listened to Sergei’s endless music collection. And then she had her interview, got her visa, bought a plane ticket, said goodbye and left. For the first few weeks, we talked on Skype, but now that her documents are in order, she’s working two jobs – the steakhouse, plus a department store job, and has little time to do anything but eat, sleep and work. We’ll be back in the States before she comes back to Ukraine, and if she had the choice, I think she might stay. I’m happy for her, but am sad that she’s gone. Meanwhile, her boyfriend has taken a new job that involves a lot of travel, and is working like mad to fill up his time, so we rarely see him. He studies English in the leftover minutes of every day and hopes to join her as soon as his English is good enough.

Laura

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

Parents' visit

Last week we said goodbye to my parents. They spent two weeks with us, traveling, sightseeing and seeing Donetsk, Makeevka and DCU.

We started the trip by meeting in Warsaw, Poland, and immediately took the train to Krakow, where we spent several days taking in the sights of Krakow’s historic Old Town. We also visited the WWII Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, not far from Krakow. We haven’t spent much time in Eastern Europe beyond the Ukrainian borders, so it was interesting to see another Eastern European country, and enjoyed the variety and change of pace from Ukraine. Poland joined the EU not long ago, and is significantly ahead of Ukraine economically, at least in the areas we visited. We enjoyed the comforts of produced by Poland’s economic stability, without having to pay Western European prices – a nice combination.

After Krakow, an overnight train took us across the border to Lvov, Ukraine, in search of some remnants of our Mennonite heritage there. We ended up touring the village of Odinoke, formerly inhabited by Mennonites in the 1800s. Lvov is famed for its beautiful buildings and variety of architecture, and we took in some of that on the one day that it didn’t rain.

Mom and Dad got a true taste of train travel, Ukranian-style, on the 25-hour ride from Lvov to Donetsk, the last three without air conditioning on a hot afternoon. We then spent several swelteringly hot days in Donetsk,
showing my parents the city, our work, friends, church, etc. The rest of the time we sat inside, in front of the fans, drinking black currant juice (Dad’s new favorite).

For the last part of our trip we headed to Kiev and saw the main sights there, including Orthodox churches and the long and winding cobblestone street, Andrevsky Spust, which satisfied our souvenir needs. While in Kiev we discovered Puzata Hata, (which means “fat house” in Ukrainian) a cafeteria-style Ukrainian restaurant, the best way to try as many different kinds of Ukrainian cuisine as you can eat, all in one meal. Dave and I returned to sample more the day Mom and Dad left. The name is appropriate, because if you ate there too often, I’m afraid you would become as fat as a house.

So now we’re back in Donetsk and getting ready for the school year. It’s the season of meetings, so they takes a lot of my time, but my classes don’t start until Sept. 9, so summer’s not quite over quite yet!

PHOTOS: In Krakow's main square, Dave and Dad with a Mennonite-built village well near Lvov

Laura

Kiliya Trip

A while back I took a trip to Kiliya (Ukraine) to visit the loan fund there, and to see several of the projects that the fund has lent money to. The board of the fund there consists of the pastors of three Baptist churches in that area. Kiliya is in the somewhat disconnected southwest corner of Ukraine. Just across the river to the east is Romania and Moldova is a short drive to the north. Even though it has a moderate-sized shipbuilding factory, statistically it is located in one of the most impoverished regions of Ukraine.

Wages from the factory are very minimal and those who are not employed there are hard-pressed to find another source of income. One member of the fund’s board told me that both his son and son-in-law are long-haul truck drivers, based 800 km away in Chernivtsy. Both of them have young families who live in Kiliya and had last seen their fathers/husbands about two months ago.

Needless to say, most people are looking for a way to earn/save money. One way that is currently very popular, especially among the Baptist community, is to purchase small plots of land to raise strawberries. These plots of land are usually around 250m² and a poorly kept one will sell for around $100. I was told that, with work, one of these plots will produce enough strawberries to earn $50-250 per year.

I was shown around 20 plots of land that have all been purchased in the past five years using loans from the loan fund. I was also shown several plots that the Baptists hope to purchase in the future. Based on what I saw, it requires a lot of work. First they have to clean up the brush and till the plot the first time. They then plant small, healthy offshoots of their own or their neighbors strawberry plants. In the picture, Stas and Pavel (sons of one of the aforementioned truck drivers) are working to replant a freshly cleared patch. These are not the traditional strawberries that produce for 3-4 years, but instead are dug up every summer after production has ceased. The small, healthy offshoots are then replanted and will produce again the following year.

So many people there have taken out small loans ($100-350) and put in a lot of labor to receive significant returns (especially by their standards). It is an exciting process to hear stories about their projects and even more interesting to see them in person.

Dave

Economic Development

The majority of my responsibilities of my relatively new job in economic development involve taking trips to visit our 14 “partners” (groups of people who operate loan funds and credit unions) throughout Ukraine and one in Russia. Each year we have “projects” with (which means we give small grants to) 5-6 of these partners, so the number of trips is manageable. During these visits we talk about questions and concerns that MCC and/or the partners have. These conversations are usually about 2 things.

First, they are about the operation of the funds. This is a difficult discussion for me to participate in because I am not a specialist in running loan funds or credit unions or economics in general. However, I am trying to be helpful by learning as much as I can, especially about what seems to be standard here. I am also responsible for networking partners. Often a partner has questions and finds it helpful to talk to other partners who may have more experience and be able to advise the next step of development. This networking is also done at an annual economic conference, this year scheduled for November 17-18. MCC covers the bus/train fares of two people from each of the funds to get together (in Zaporozhye) and talk about issues with their funds.

Second, we talk about MCC’s strategic planning process. This is a relatively new process for them (and us) and has proven to be a bit difficult for many. I have not yet had the privilege of writing the original project “plans” (for the 5-6 projects mentioned above) with the partners, but I have my first round of this to look forward to in December. After that, twice during the year the partners are asked to submit “progress reports” which let us know how they are doing with their plans. It takes a lot of time and encouragement to get reports back, especially clear and open ones that provide sufficient answers to all of the questions. It has been my experience that many partners have a fear that MCC is looking for reasons to sever the partnerships and therefore documentation of struggles/failures with the plan will be punished. So another responsibility of mine is to encourage them. My feeling is that we look at things realistically and, as long as they are deliberately trying to make their funds function better, we will continue to work with them. The final step of the planning process takes place at the end of November. We sit down and write an “end of project report.” Reading this terminology also frightens many of the partners and they need reassurance that even though the “project” is ending, the “partnership” will continue.

During my visits, the partners and I travel around to the different loan fund recipients. I take pictures and talk to the people to try to document what is going on. This has been a great experience for me, even though I feel like kind of a tag-along. It is so interesting to see how far they can stretch such a small loan (usually between $200 and $1,500) and how helpful these loans are. These people have had little to no access to capital in the past and they are so incredibly thankful for this opportunity. I am by no means an expert in the area of economic development, but I am learning a lot and meeting some great people. The job has its difficulties but, after almost half a year, I am enjoying it.

Dave