Memories and Prayers for the Ukraine
In June 1999, I had the privilege of visiting the Ukraine as part of a community collaborative training exchange. Watching the horrifying images on the news sent me to the back of my closet to search through my journals, trying to remember where I was. (I've kept them since Mr. Hemmert's creative writing class, sophomore year of high school.) We visited Lviv, in western Ukraine.
Lviv, Ukraine
Our first night in Lviv we stayed in a lovely old hotel in the city center and walked to an outdoor cafe for dinner: We drank beer, ate miniature pancakes (Oladyi) served with sour cream and caviar, and spooned up delicious borscht soup. It was scrumptious and I fell asleep to the voices of pedestrians and a few musicians strolling through the city's picturesque streets.
In the mornings, I rose early and walked the quiet streets as the city came to life. I even found a work out center where I could swim. Our hosts were gracious, giving much of themselves, sharing food, and showering us with local crafts. During our off hours we toured some of the beautiful Eastern Orthodox churches, wandered in an Italian-style garden and I was fascinated by a graffiti park. It had been thirteen years since the Chernobyl disaster. They had moved on once they got past the initial uncertainty of waiting and wondering about the nuclear repercussions.
I was invited to join the collaborative project managed by the non-profit Connect Minnesota-Russia in Minneapolis (Thank you Susan Hartman) because of my work training physicians and nurses to respond to families living with violence in the health care setting. Susan had received a grant from a US agency under the Clinton administration to train former Soviet Union communities about responding to domestic violence. Over several years, the Minnesota group traveled to six different communities with members including police, advocates, psychologist, judge, lawyer, social worker and me, the physician. We conducted trainings and discussions with our local counterparts and colleagues.
"It is a gift to be here," I wrote in my journal and described the assistant director of the women's crisis center as encountering the "Russian soul." Susan, the project director, used to talk about the Russian soul as the experience of someone who had lived, suffered and thrived, a passionate commitment to their cause or work. Based on that understanding, I later realized that some of the Chechen physicians I worked alongside during my time with Doctors Without Borders in 2000 had the same intensity--a sincere commitment to bettering the lives of their communities and patients in the face of tremendous strife.
At the time, I learned that Russians had many different words for evil, similar to Eskimos and descriptors for snow. True or not--Russian speakers please weigh in--Russian writers like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky have grappled with the darkness of the empire's history and leaders in a way that we have just begun to confront more openly here in the US, the blood and sweat and bones on which the US was founded and grown enormously wealthy.
To give you perspective, Ukraine is a little smaller than Texas. Chernobyl is in the north, 93 km (59 miles) as the crow flies from Kyiv, the capital which has been the recent heart of the war. Lviv is nearly 300 miles to the west. However, with an ache in my chest, I worry about the future of Lviv as I watch the bombed buildings, fleeing families, and extermination of lives in eastern Ukraine. I hope and pray for Igor, Oxana, Lana, and all the Ukrainians I met. They must watch the news, social media and worry for their country and hope and pray that they are spared such destruction.
I often feel that I receive more from my international work than I give. At the time, just 8 years since the Ukraine's independence from Russia, there were many innovative thinkers. They were worried about trafficking, sex and economic, which has only recently become a more publicized issue here in the US. From the Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans and Russians we visited during those trips I learned to think differently about domestic violence. They were more concerned about the family and how to preserve the family unit, than we were in the US. In the US, domestic violence activism was founded by the women's movement--kick out the bum and she'll be fine--which oversimplifies the issue. As a family physician, the broader perspective made sense because I cared for the entire family and many perpetrators were victims as children, watching their parents fight and trying or helplessly wishing they could stop it.
I end this post with heaviness in my heart about Putin's War and worries about what it might become, the wreckage of lives and hopes. I worry that we can keep moving our discussion about the real history of the US forward and not return to a white washed version. Perhaps, all we can do is hope and pray and find our own ways of making a little difference in this broken world.