Staff Blog

Ukraine: A Land of Courage, Resilience and Trust in God

I have just returned from a two week visit to western Ukraine, a place I have been many times over the past seven years. This summer we have two Intercordia students in Lviv who are living with host families and working in the L’Arche Workshops for people with special needs.
Looking back over the many visits I have a host of images that portray both the beauty and the hardship of life in a country that is struggling to claim an independent identity and way of life after more than 800 years of oppression and domination by foreigners, in particular, last century’s years of Soviet communism.
Here are but a few:
• A cold, winter Sunday evening in the downtown square in Lviv where a group of older Ukrainians, wearing fur hats, regularly gather in a circle and sing traditional Ukrainian folksongs in robust, passionate voices with their faces raised to the sky;
• The young women strolling on the arms of their lovers on a warm summer evening dressed in impossibly tight fitting clothes and spectacular high heeled boots over the bumpy, cobblestone streets ;
• Elderly women, dressed in heavy wool coats and scarves tied over their heads shoveling wet, heavy snow off the city’s main roads using squares of plywood nailed to a pole as cars and trucks roar by seemingly unconcerned for their safety;
• More elderly woman sweeping those same streets in the summer bent over at the waist and using branches tied together with wire;
• The stoic looks on the faces of people who have endured hardship for generations breaking into gold toothed smiles, which is a precursor to a friendly exclamation of “Glory to Jesus Christ” to which the expected answer is “Glory indeed!”
• The endless rows of six to eight story grey apartment blocks that make up a majority of the living accommodation of urban Ukrainians. They are in varying states of disrepair and from every balcony hangs the laundry of the 3 generations who cohabitate the two room apartments;
• The brightly coloured kiosks that line the main streets selling cigarettes, candy, small household goods, magazines and groceries. The transactions take place through a small window about 18” X 18” slightly above waist height allowing little opportunity for any personal contact between seller and buyer;
• The numerous small yellow buses called “marshukas,” which are always overcrowded, that ferry the people from home to work and back and the crowds that stand on every corner waiting for their arrival in the cold and snow;
• The gold domed churches and bell towers of the Ukrainian Catholic Churches with their Byzantine architecture and old world, mystical liturgies celebrated behind simple or ornate iconostasis depicting the saints of the church;
• The deep toned, rhythmic voices of the priest and the congregation intoning the prayers of praise and mercy of a liturgy kept alive in the underground churches despite the risk of torture, imprisonment and death during the years of religious persecution;
• The old soviet cars and trucks belching black exhaust and rattling over the potholed city streets sharing the road with the latest model BMW’s;
• The beautiful, crooked, grateful smiles of the people with disabilities who are experiencing a measure of freedom and opportunity as they are given the prospect of becoming active participants in the emerging society after years of being hidden away;
• The dismal, cold and barren rooms of the institutions where thousands of people with disabilities and mental health needs are still locked away somehow surviving each long day of idleness, deprivation and abandonment;
• Simple women, old and young sitting in a market selling one basketful of potatoes or two rabbits or a brightly coloured bouquet of flowers for a few “hryivnas;”
• The cafes and bars of downtown Lviv where the patrons can enjoy good food and boisterous conversation that gets louder as the evening unfolds and the vodka glasses are emptied;
• The determination on the face of an elderly man describing the years of forced labour in a Siberian camp and his present life of living with his wife and elderly, disabled daughter in one room in a poorly maintained apartment block with sporadic heat and water…. And the courageous smile when he says, “We survived!”
• Old men and women standing in the black earth of a country garden, hoeing the rows by hand as they have for hundreds of years while in the background the church bell tolls and a horse drawn wagon rolls noisily by;
• The taxi driver who, when asked to wait while we run an errand, replies with ease, “For the sake of God, I will”;
• The courage, warmth, resilience, determination, beauty, stoicism, joy, heroics and welcome of the Ukrainian people who, behind their folded arms and sometimes unreadable expressions, have beautiful, warm, giving hearts.

Peace, Joe