Temporarily Off the Air

Blogging with be intermittant for the next couple of weeks as I am off to a series of meetings which will hopefully lead to a project or two.

Ukraine went off daylight saving time last Sunday. I switched all clocks and watches except my mobile phone. It doubles as an alarm when I need one, so this morning we got up at 5:00 instead of 6:00. Tanya just shakes her head and says "It's my husband".

Happy Hallowe'en, Everyone

A Woman to Spend a Lifetime With*

What kind of woman would I want to spend the rest of my life with?

• Well, she would have to be very special as she would also want to spend the rest of her life with me, not an easy thing to ask of any woman.
• She will be a strong independent woman, but not so strong or independent that she doesn't need me for the something that I bring to her life that makes her feel complete. I do not know what that something is but she (whoever she is) will know. Maybe it is humour, maybe gentleness, kindness, shelter from the world that she can come to when the world is too much for her to bear. Maybe it is firmness, someone who will stand up to her and not be pushed around by her.
• She needs to be someone strong enough not to let me push her around either. Temper is OK as long as we can yell at each other then forget it when the storm is over. Passionate, emotional, alive.
• Well read in subjects which interest her. Curious and interested in what is going on in the world - politics, current events - and who wants to travel and learn about other places and people.
• Cynical yet wishing and hoping the world could be perfect. Someone driven by a desire to leave the world a better place than she found it by doing something that helps others grow strong and learn to help themselves.
• A "people person", generous with her time and as finances allow, with money too. A home that is open to any and all. Lots of visitors around the table. Spare beds for adults, and kids sleep on the floor.
• Someone who loves kids, dogs and me. Expects the best from all of us and helps kids, dogs and me to be better than we are. Patient and forgiving with my weaknesses but expecting me to grow stronger with her help.
• An organizer who will keep me organized; who believes in me when I don’t believe in myself; who can balance encouragement with butt-kicking and knows when to apply each.
• Someone who will accept 40 “I love you”’s a day and 40 hugs too. Someone who will give them back without prompting, who will reach over and take my hand for no reason, because I need the reassurance and the touch of one I love who loves me.
• Someone I am proud to be with and who is proud to be with me.
  
  *When Tanya and I first started talking about possibilities for the two of us, she asked me to tell her what I was looking for in a wife. She wrote what she was looking for in a husband. We had the documents professionally translated by her friend Natalie and exchanged them by email. After almost two years, I have to say, I found what I was looking for. And much much more.

Ticket to Ride

I need to buy a train ticket to Kyiv as it is far cheaper than driving and furthermore I have no intention of EVER driving in Kyiv. Tanya and I drove to P’yatikhatki today to get my passport stamped for another three months and to buy my ticket for Saturday morning.

P’yatikhatki is a railroad town. It has a lovely little railway station with several other buildings (administration etc.) located on a well maintained landscaped yard. There are about 24 tracks in the rail yard where the station is located. The problem of course is that the station and related buildings are all in the middle i.e. there are 12 tracks on each side. Up 50 steps to a pedestrian walkway and then down to the station yard/platform. And of course the walkway is as far from the station as it is possible to put it. A brisk 15 minute walk from parking lot to station. Younger folks can do it in 10 minutes.

I will take the Saturday morning Express train to Kyiv, arriving at 12:30. Kostia, our taxi driver, will pick me up and we’ll drive to Boryspil Airport to collect Berny at 2:00 assuming he clears customs and immigration. One problem. The Express does not stop in P’yatikhatki.

BUT it stops for 20 minutes at a non-station about 5 km out of town for crew change, technical matters and to let another train go by. The platform serves as a stuffed toy market with several stalls serving customers who hop off the train, make their purchase and hop back on. Legally, it is not a “stop” so new passengers cannot get on nor existing passengers leave the train at that location. However this is Ukraine. Andrei will get me onto the train.

My ticket is from Dnipropetrovs'k to Kyiv and cost 96 hrivnas or about $22 CAD at today’s ATM exchange rate for a 5 hour train ride in a comfortable coach.

Canada Ukraine Agrarian Development

My friend and colleague, Berny, arrives in Kyiv on Saturday. He and I are members of a small loose knit Saskatchewan-based NGO called Canada Ukraine Agrarian Development (CUAD).

CUAD’s goals are

1. To support, foster, promote and develop patterns of sustainable agricultural production in Ukraine.
2. To jointly pursue the development of appropriate structures for agricultural management and marketing
3. To pursue the achievement of empowerment with people involved in the ownership and operation of their farms
4. To mutually enhance the quality of farm operations in Ukraine
5. To encourage farmer leadership
6. To foster hope and enhance the lives of Ukrainian people through social development.

Berny is coming to follow up on a previous project, sound out a number of people for ideas and needs for new projects and introduce me as a CUAD member living in Ukraine to all his contacts. Our hope is that I can prove to be a useful contact for Canadians and Ukrainians in needs assessment, development and implementation of new projects. We have 10 days of meetings beginning in Kyiv, then in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Zaporizhzhia is where the Mennonites settled in Russia at the invitation of Empress Catherine in about 1770 and from whence a large number emigrated to Canada beginning in about 1870, with the last major group, including Berny’s parents in 1924. There have been and still are a number of projects in Zaporizhzhia sponsored by people with Mennonite roots. CUAD is not limited to working in only one oblast but began in Zaporizhzhia as that was where their contacts were.

Dogs Like Vacant Lots, Too, Just Like Kids

Fall days have been sunny and mild, +10º, great for working outside. Now that my back is better, Tanya is in her make-work mode again, cleaning the yard, raking leaves, digging, burning, etc. etc. etc. Bleah! But if I don’t help, she does it all herself, which is not conducive to keeping her a happy camper.

We let the pups out of their yard to play whenever someone is outside. They range about a block in all directions returning home every so often to check in. Chicken hunting is no longer a problem as long as the chickens don’t get so close they are irresistible. The marsh is east of us, there is a vacant garden lot grown high with weeds to the west of us, beside our garden. The road and pipeline make a boundary to the south. Down the road to the north live a number of dogs, a couple of which also run free on occasion and hang out with ours.

One of them is a little golden haired dog who has become Bobik’s girlfriend. Volk hangs around them but is mainly ignored. The other night when I went out to shut them in their pen, Bobik had decided to bring his girlfriend home for the night. Much as I am pro romance, I was afraid the old Babushka who owns her might worry. Bobik walked her home like a true gentleman and then came back to our yard for the night.

They love hunting in the reeds by the marsh and to their everlasting satisfaction, flushed a couple of pheasants one day. They get all wet, then walk home through the fresh ploughed garden and arrive looking like pigs. And the weeds in the vacant garden lot are home to many mice which keep the dogs hunting for hours. Doubt they ever catch any but it amuses them to no end.

I’m sure my missing slipper is out there somewhere, too. Volk loves to steal slippers. Not shoes. Too heavy. He doesn’t chew them, just carries them around, playing keep-away with Bobik until he gets bored and then drops it. I found it once but not this time.

They are now almost 10 months old, well furred out for winter and pretty well behaved, all things considered. They are no guard dogs but good dogs never the less.

ABANDONED FARMS

ABANDONED FARMS

Photographers and painters seem to like abandoned farms:
Weather-beaten grain bins, gray houses and stone barns,
Wagon wheels and rusted trucks, discarded farm machines.
Can’t people see the sadness of someone’s broken dreams?

What farmer hasn’t dreamed his farm would always carry on;
Or children planned to farm the land, when it became their own?
But quarrels, death or markets; hail, drought or early frost,
A dozen things take farm or farmer and the dream is lost.

Where people once planned next year’s crops with hopeful smile or laugh,
Another empty farm house stands, to paint or photograph.


Abandoned farms have always bothered me because they once were somebody's dreams now gone. Yet they are glorified in paintings and photographs as something beautiful. Maybe they are but it is a dark beauty if you take into account the human factor. My Toronto brother or his then girl-friend took the picture of our old house in 2005 and I wrote the poem the next year.