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Goodbye, Transcarpathia

DEC Camp is very quiet today. All the children and most of the staff left yesterday. This evening, I shall catch the train north to Lviv. For lunch, I ate a local speciality in Luda's cafe; melted cheese in breadcrumbs with pickled gherkins. I would like my last memory of this place to be what a man I passed walking back to camp said to me; “I come from the East of Ukraine where we have no snow, no mountains. I come with my family to sled. Here there is snow, there is mountains, there is mineral water in the rivers. It is very beautiful. I am very positive”.

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.

Transcarpathia

Transcarpathia is a jumble of wooded valleys running beneath bare mountains. DEC Camp is based in a former Soviet youth lodge on the hillside at the tail end of a dishevelled old road that leads down into a village that's name nobody seemed to know.  The camp was modern, well lit and, in the frigid Carpathian winter, wonderfully, wonderfully warm.  A pipe channelling hot water ran beside my bed on the fourth floor which was often so warm that I had to leave my window open.  The views through that window where predictably fantastic, particularly when the sunrise broke in an orange glow above the hills.  I shared my room with Nick and a Ukrainian Vitalic and we shared the camp with teachers, counsellors, psychiatrists, doctors, a small horde of adolescents and an army of hard-as-nails babushkas who kept the place clean and served us food of an almost unbelievably low calibre.  My favourite thing about DEC Camp was the secret hut down an icy pathway beyond the prying eyes of children that contained a wooden panelled sauna and a tiled pool exposed to the freezing winter air; it was a place where shit went down.

In my spare time I would take walks down to the village or out in the forest.  The village was the sort of place that's either gorgeously rustic or desperately poor depending on your perspective.  Unlike elsewhere in Ukraine, the USSR's grip had always been weak in these hills and the ugly high rises that scarred towns out on the steppe had never been built here.  Instead, ramshackle cottages and hoarded stocks of timber roofed with pine beams or aluminium clung to an icy stream that wound its way between two high ridges.  From time to time I would walk past some sign of the modern world like a rusty old generator - collapsed but still just about functional - or a tractor half buried in snow.  Some people travelled around the village in beaten down Skodas, relics from the 1980s.  Most though rode tobogans or carriages pulled by horses whose breath hung white in the chilly air.  On the hillside bales of hay, made by hand like they do in Romania, stood beneath powdery shawls of snow.  It was poverty, but it was so, so pretty.

The people who lived there in the lawless western most extremity of the former Soviet Union are called the Hutsuls and, unlike the city slicking Russian speakers that I met in Kyiv, they are fiercely proud of their Ukrainian language.   Often, they considering Russian the language of a foreign oppressor; I never made anyone so angry as the waitress who I thanked with Spasiba rather than the Ukrainian Diakuju. Historically a Habsburg dominion, many people here still set their clocks to +1 time, rather than the Kyivite +2, in accordance with the old Austro-Hungarian empire.

Past the village and our camp, the road roughened and then faded into snow beneath thick pine trees.   The air out in the forest was nearly always still and hardly anything moved.  I'd hoped to see a bear or some wolves but I never found any animals.  I liked the atmosphere out there though; it was peaceful.  I passed streams and I wondered where they led.  The Danube?  The Dnipro?  The Dnister?  If I followed this one would it lead down through Moldova, past the breakaway Republic of Transdnister where the USSR has never fallen, down into the Black Sea?

I took the overnight train from Kyiv to Transcarpathia after meeting my co-workers at the station.  The train was an agreeably old-school affair; leather beds, wooden carriages and black tea served by frosty Soviet waitresses.  Nick and I shared our compartment with two great Russian bears.  I began unpacking whilst Nick and one of our room mates ducked out for a smoke.  I was left alone with the man in the bed opposite mine who, rather alarmingly, began to strip.   He somehow managed to inhabit all of the space beside the door and, unable to push past him, I saw it all.  His body was huge and hairy and the sandblasted mountains of the Hindu Kush were writ large across his great sagging mass.  When this burly Cossack had finally squeezed into his pyjamas I breathed a terrible sigh of relief.
After escaping, I was anctious to find the others, having seen quite enough of my own cabin, so I ducked into the room where my co-workers were staying.  We drank tea and chatted for a while and then I headed off to go to sleep.  Unfortunately I confused my mattress with a duvet and passed a sleepless night lying on the bare leather of my bed under its suffocating bulk.
That morning the sun rose upon the startling beauty of the Carpathian Mountains.  It had been dark when we left Kyiv and my first sight of the Ukrainian countryside was of rolling snow covered hills, icy mountain streams and thick pine forest fading into the distance towards Romania.  We left our train in Volovets, a pretty provincial town nestled within a gentle valley. From the station we rode in one of those minibuses that are ubiquitous to mountain-regions across the world.  From time to time we passed small villages but mostly the road, and the valleys, were empty.  This stretch of our journey was my first experience of the sort of frantic folksy accordion music with drunkenly shouted lyrics that is played everywhere in Ukraine and sounds like the blueprint for every Gogol Bordello song.

Steppeing In

My journey to Ukraine began at the godless hour of three A.M. when I woke in Glasgow after two hours sleep, the shattered husk of a man. I ate a quick breakfast and left my hotel room. Deciding that I probably wasn't up to anything as mind-bogglingly complex and potentially lethal as stairs I took the lift down to the foyer where I handed in my keys and tried my best to ask for directions to the airport. “Which terminal are you flying from?” “Dunno; one of them. Where are they all?” In the early morning Glasgow's outskirts were utterly dark and silent but for the harsh strip-illumination of street lamps and the coursing, throbbing motorway. Fortunately, the first terminal I tried turned out to be the right one and I arrived for my six o'clock flight.

My first flight, from Glasgow to Amsterdam, arrived in plenty of time for me to wait for four hours for my second. This is the first time I have been in the Netherlands and departures has done very little to sell the country to me. For one thing, most of the horizontal escalators have been turned off. For me, these are one of the few highlights of airports and, in my fragile condition, I found their inactivity very distressing.

All flight paths lead to Amsterdam so it's surprising that there is only one shop in departures which mostly sold t-shirts. Amsterdam is doubtless a city of many and varied charms but one would be hard pressed to guess this from these which almost all concerned weed and hookers. I can sort of understand the rationale for a person buying a t-shirt as a memento of that golden summer long ago when, flush in the blossom of youth, they sacrificed time and money to travel to a country with relaxed narcotics legislation in order to consume soft drugs legally rather than risk a caution back home; maybe a scrupulous respect for the letter of British common law? Well, at least it's a story for the grandchildren. However, I am genuinely baffled why anybody would want to wear a t-shirt indicating that they have paid for sex.

When my plane did eventually take off it was into a clear blue sky. Across Europe, we soared above and below the cloud line until a dense fog enveloped our plane outside Kyiv. The winds, which had been calm, began to buffet us to and fro as the lights went down in the cabin.  All I could see through the fog was a red flickering from the wings.  We sailed down until our descent was interrupted by a sudden lurch upwards as our first landing was aborted. After circling the airport for twenty minutes the pilot decided to make another attempt and this time the plane ran aground to the sound of passengers clapping.