Moving to Ukraine: a personal narrative of a dream fulfilled
by Bohdan Hodiak
PART I
Returning to Ukraine has been the dream of many immigrants, but very few have actually done it. We did, and I hope some of our impressions and experiences will be of interest to others - especially the many baby boomers who will soon be retiring and wondering what to do next.
We had many reasons for moving to Ukraine. My wife was raised and educated there and missed Ukraine. After I retired, I became increasingly annoyed at the high cost of living in the Washington, D.C., area. Both of us wanted, also, to do our little bit toward the renaissance of Ukraine.
In the past 15 years I had made several trips to Ukraine and this time I was impressed with the efficiency at Boryspil International Airport. Our luggage arrived quickly; we were processed efficiently. One of our suitcases was missing, but a clerk took down all the information and the next day the suitcase was delivered to our residence.
In fact, during our first few weeks in Kyiv we saw that store clerks had actually been taught that their job is to serve customers, and bureaucrats taught that their job is to serve citizens. That was quite a change from a dozen years ago.
The first thing I wanted to do was to walk and ride all over Kyiv, to soak in the city and its people. I noticed that my reaction this time was quite different from my visits as a tourist. I was now a resident - someone who had burned his bridges and would most likely spend the rest of his life here. A tourist is more accepting; a resident is more possessive.
I was eager to see something Ukrainian in the people. I wanted to feel I was in Ukraine, not just any country. I wanted to see this away from the well-trod tourist circuit.
To my disappointment, this eluded me. I was being painfully weaned from my "diasporan" fantasies.
Now I realized that my wish was a little naïve. I had barely dipped my toe in Ukraine. Certainly I wasn't asking that people walk around in embroidered shirts or play the bandura on the street. My mind understood that, but my heart did not.
I did not grow up in Ukraine, and my parents came to America when I was 9. So, to me, Ukraine was a land of myths and dreams, of stories and songs. In the land of my forefathers, I wanted to see something Ukrainian. I wanted to connect with my myths.
It would have helped if I was surrounded by the Ukrainian language but I heard mostly Russian. It would have helped if my little part of Kyiv was more a "normal European city" as many Kyivans fervently hope it will become. As I walked through the shopping area near the Darnytsia metro stop - scores of little stalls selling things to eat, for the home and the kitchen, to wear and to enjoy - I was reminded of a poor Mexican village.
But that was deceiving because 50 meters away was City.Com, an electronics store that had the latest cellphones, digital cameras and computer equipment, and near that a dozen shops that sold everything a child might need or want, including loads of toys. Nearby was a busy McDonald's restaurant and not far from that was a large supermarket that was as good as the better supermarkets in the states. It had food items from all over Europe and, to my wife's delight, tofu and soy milk.
So someone visiting Kyiv for the first time since independence will be in shock. A dozen years ago I was unable to buy a light bulb or a shirt, but today you can buy almost everything.
The sad thing about all this bounty is that so many Ukrainians can't participate in it.
Throughout Kyiv you can find forlorn old ladies, hunched over with age, often holding out a paper cup and begging on the street. Just as sad are the old ladies who come to the city with a few meager vegetables or flowers to sell from their gardens and stand on the street waiting for customers. Their retirement pay is generally a couple of dollars a day. The mother of a friend of ours was a teacher all her life; now, in her old age, she gets a pension of $18 a week.
I still remember one of these ladies to whom I gave 2 hrv - about 40 cents. She blessed me and thanked me so warmly as I was walking away that I went back and gave her 5 hrv more. Readers of The Weekly know of the tens of thousands of orphans and runaway and abandoned children in Ukraine. This also is today's Ukraine.
My wife had made an exploratory trip to Ukraine two months before we moved, and her priority was to find a good school for our 10-year-old son and scout out possible rental apartments.
Since independence, more than a score of private schools have sprung up in Kyiv and this one, called Harmonia, seemed to have the best of old and modern teaching. It respected the children, respected the humanities (not just the "hard" subjects), taught most courses in Ukrainian, and had class sizes of about 17. Teachers were not restricted to set time periods. There were no bells in the school. If a class in a particular subject was going well and the children were excited, it could be prolonged. If it was going poorly, or everything had been covered, the class could be cut short. They even taught aikido in the school, my favorite martial art. We don't know yet if the school is as good as advertised, but we are hoping for the best.
After our son was accepted at the school we decided to look for an apartment near it. This restricted our options a lot, but it was also a benefit because rentals are highest in the center of Kyiv. It is now a seller's market in Kyiv, with more demand for decent apartments than supply.
The agencies that aim their advertising at foreigners seem to think that rentals for two-bedroom apartments in Kyiv begin at $2,500 a month. What you get is a "Euro-remont" apartment, meaning the owners redid the rooms, the toilet, bathroom and kitchen and then tripled the rent. I can't imagine an average Westerner, who plans to stay for years, willing to pay such prices. But the alternatives can be grim.
The problem is that most, though not all, of the apartment complexes in Kyiv have no maintenance. It was like that 20 years ago, and it is like that today. So you will walk by apartment buildings that have loads of green space, grassy fields, a lot of trees and shrubbery (it could be very pleasant), but the fields will have discarded bottles and litter, the grass will be uncut, the shrubbery untouched. The apartment entrances are generally crumbling, and filthy and dark. The elevators look 1930-ish and the hallways stink. As I was told, the residents consider everything outside their apartments as having nothing to do with them. You would think that 70 years of communism would have created some communal ethic, some "we're all in this together" kind of feeling. But it did just the opposite. So, when you go apartment hunting to the more reasonably priced places, you feel like an archeologist entering ruined and abandoned territory. Yet, with care and love and community effort, these could be decent places to live. Currently there are many condominium buildings under construction in Kyiv, and I think the residents here will demand maintenance.
Two of the apartments we went to turned our stomachs, but we were in luck with the third. The owner told us the building had been constructed for high government officials and, because her husband worked for one of these officials, they were able to become owners of the apartment during the privatization period. The entrance, the hallways and the elevator looked like those in a poor low-rent building in the States. The toilet and bathroom was the usual sorry Soviet model. Half the electric outlets didn't work.
But there were major differences. The rooms were large and there were four of them, nicely furnished - the equivalent of a three-bedroom apartment, which is a rarity in Kyiv. The ceilings were high, and the floors were of parquet. The windows were large, and there were large balconies. There were even two large closets. Most Kyiv apartments have no closets. And, it also had something that made my wife jump up and down: a washing machine. Laundromats in Kyiv are rare.
The building was by the lovely and huge Victory Park. At the entrance to the park are seven plaques commemorating the "Great Patriotic War." This busy park was well maintained, perhaps because it was built to honor the sacrifice and struggle of World War II. In a number of park areas there were beautiful flower patterns consisting of thousands of flowers. What pleased me most was that the people who used the park did not steal these flowers but left them for everyone to enjoy. In one section of the park was an artesian underground fountain and people came from all over to fill their jugs with good-tasting water.
Our apartment was a few minutes walk to the metro and a few minutes walk to our son's school. Because there was no "Euro-remont" and the apartment was miles from Kyiv's center, the rent was $1,000 a month. I had asked a native Kyivian who works for a Japanese company, and is the No. 2 man in his office, what would be considered a really really good salary in Kyiv and he said $1,000 a month. So, I guess you have to do a lot better than that to afford a decent apartment.
Our general impression of Kyiv was that things have become better in almost every way, if you put the political situation into a separate category. Although my wife is fluent in Russian, she always talks to everyone in Ukrainian, even when addressed in Russian. Ten years ago, she said, she would sometimes get angry or indignant looks, but not today. Ukrainian is accepted even though most people in Kyiv speak Russian.
Making Ukrainian the official language of Ukraine was a godsend, for it legitimized the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. Just after Viktor Yanukovych was named prime minister he addressed Parliament in Ukrainian. That means it must be politically advantageous for a national politician to speak in Ukrainian, at least part of the time.
During my many encounters with people in Kyiv more than three-quarters of the Russian speakers switched to Ukrainian once they understood I wouldn't or couldn't speak Russian. Ukrainian was the language of their childhood, their mother tongue. I still remember a clerk in an appliance store who switched to Ukrainian with us and said somewhat shamefaced: "Why did I give up Ukrainian? I'm glad you are willing to speak my language."
For myself, I cannot imagine that the soul of Ukraine can survive if the Ukrainian language dies. Vitaly Korotych, the former editor of the important journal "Ogonyok," could write Russian as well as anyone. Yet, he confessed that he could write poetry only in Ukrainian.
Bohdan Hodiak was born in Slovakia and arrived in the United States with his parents when he was a pre-teen. He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City and the City College of New York. For most of his professional life Mr. Hodiak was a reporter and an editor at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Pennsylvania. He also worked for the Associated Press; was the editor-in-chief of two weeklies in Miami and was senior editor at a boating magazine in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
PART I
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 22, 2006, No. 43, Vol. LXXIV
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