I began work very early on the last day of 2011, a little before eight, which was business as usual in Dec Camp.  We had a fairly normal day until the evening when the cooks laid out a Ukrainian new year's dinner with candles, wine (ok, alcohol-free wine), and a vast spread of traditional food.  I can't remember much of what we ate.  I can remember trying to enjoy it but not quite managing.  The atmosphere was really nice though, everybody was very gracious, talking quietly in English, Ukrainian and Russian.  After dinner, we took the children out onto the hill to make smores, which are an American camp tradition; chocolate, biscuits and marshmellows are all impaled on a stick and roasted over an open fire.  Then, we watched fireworks explode in bursts of colour above the village in the valley below while the clock struck midnight and everybody screamed and hugged each other.  Some children gave me new years' cards, which, actually, really touched me.  Inside they said things like: "I hope that you like Ukraine and that you'll visiti it again and again", "I wish you happiness, health, incredible life" and, slightly bafflingly, "I wish you to be the most adorable actor".
At half twelve it was lights out and once Vitalic and I had made sure the boys where in their rooms on the fourth floor we met up with the others in the downstairs hall where, with the children asleep, we started binge drinking.  Someone had brought bottles of shampanskoye from Odessa, a sweet, fizzy white wine that has been grown in the south of Ukraine since Soviet times.  At some point, I'm not sure when, we moved to Luda's cafe in the forest where we bought more champagne at £3 a bottle.  One of the teachers, Hillary, had brought of absinthe from Poland and we all tried some.  The first glass I drank I really liked but with the second, I let the flame last too long and it burned my throat as it went down.  By half four we were all very, very drunk and decided it would probably be for the best to head back as work began the next day in four hours.  When we got back to the camp building, Susanna told us that two of the children, Sasha and Dasha, had gone missing.  I thought about everything that could happen to them in the Carpathian mountains in winter; hyperthermia, bears, wolves, locals.  We headed down to the village hoping that that was the direction they had gone rather than wandering into the forest.  After we got down the hill, I tried some shitty disco bar which was so full of people that I didn't see Dasha until she was a foot from me, which was apparently when Dasha saw me too.  Her eyes widened and she jumped on the spot then ran to Sasha on the other side of the room and they both climbed under a table in some incredibly poor attempt to hide.  Now that I knew they were safe I wasn't concerned anymore, really I was just angry.  Well, angry and drunk.  "Get out", I roared "You are in so much shit!"  We took them outside and frogmarched them back to camp without further incident, then, finally, I went to bed.

On the Orthodox Christmas Day, January the 7^th, we took the children down into the village to sing carols.  We walked through town, the children sang english language Christmas songs in the houses we passed and, if the children didn't understand what they were saying or they couldn't really pronounce the words properly then it didn't really matter.  The people they sang to didn't and couldn't really either but the sentiment trancended languages.  Sometimes the kids would rugby tackle each other or, more often, me into the snow.  One child, a little girl from Donetsk who's daddy had apparently done time in the big house, ran after me screaming "chore, nychore", everything and nothing, then burst into laughter and ran away when I shouted them back to her.
On my final day in Transcarpathia I took another walk down by myself to take some photographs and say goodbye.  Every time we walked down the mountain towards the village our first exposure to outside life was shitty pop music; Britney Spears, the Black Eyed Peas or LMFAO blasted over the hills from a sky resort across the valley where rich Kyivites took their holidays in winter. They ruined my intrepid-adventurer-in-a-foreign-land vibe and I hated them for it.

We entered the village through the narrow strip of glazed cottages that catered to these great and good of Kyiv, who come for the snow, the skiing and the rare sighting of a hill in Ukraine. In garishly coloured waterproofs, the holiday makers stood out from the elderly locals who walked past them, smoking, in drab jackets and old, torn and repaired trousers.

As we walked deeper into the village, past the glitzy resort sector, the houses became distinctly more ramshackle. But for the city-slickers passing through on their way to the mountains in beaten down Aston Martins evidence that the twentieth century happened at all here was thin on the ground. Instead, log houses abutted wooden bridges running back and forth across an icy stream. Unlike elsewhere in the former Communist bloc there was really no concrete or brittle Socialist Realist architecture at all.  Stacks of wood and stone stood out in the street two or three metres high, presumably for repairs. Few people seemed to be able to afford a car; most people walked or flagged down one of the horse drawn carts which wound their way through the village.  We passed a woman pulling a blind man on a sleigh.  I wondered how many of the people here had ever been to their capital Kyiv, or how many had even left Transcarpathia. On the hillside bales of hay, covered in snow, had been left over winter, made in the same style as in Carpathian Romania to the west.

Ukraine has one of the most rapidly falling populations in the world and the problem is particularly acute in the country; one of the boys, Svjat, told me that since independence over four hundred villages have been abandoned as people no longer compelled to live in them by the state migrate to the cities or, further, to the West; Argentina, Canada and Portugal. Besides the tourists, I didn't see any young people in Transcarpathia.  Honestly, I don't think that the village we stayed in, seperated from the rest of the world by snow, mountains and shitty roads, had much to offer them.  Unfortunately, as Ukraine deteriorates further economically and politically the situation is likely to get worse rather than better. When the generation of shawled babushkas and surly, chain-smoking men in heavy coats, that I saw in my time here dies out all that will be left is the ski resorts and collapsing ghost towns. I'm glad that I saw the Hutsul culture before it disappears.