I Won’t Take Credit Just Yet. But, Still...

I may have mentioned that several months ago I asked Lenara to tell me what the single most useful as well as the single most useless thing I have done since arriving to Razdol’noye last summer, and both answers surprised me a little. She said that the most significant contribution has been the creation of the HIV/AIDS Resource Center that has been installed in the library. And while it is certainly an important installation from a community health standpoint, I can’t help but think that, in retrospect, there are other places that may have benefited from the literature being placed closer to the people who need the information, like the school or the hospital. However, the library, and the Information Department that I work in have taken ownership and at least one person cites it as a significant accomplishment. Of course it made me feel good that something I have done has been appreciated by someone. Conversely, as some people may remember, I organized a park cleanup last summer where I solicited my own donations of the tools, gloves, and garbage bags. I recruited my own people to help and for a couple of hours we collected 13 trash bags of garbage from the local park…and I also arranged for the collected trash to be disposed of. This was five weeks after arriving to my site. I was so proud of myself. I had identified a “community need”, I had made enough connections to get people to come and help me, I was able to demonstrate a new method of fundraising (soliciting donations from local businesses), and I made a positive impact in my new community. I will admit that five weeks after arriving at site I was a little bit disappointed that of the people that came to help, neither my counterpart nor anyone from the library where I work came out to help me. I wasn’t going to let it discourage me, but this made it a bittersweet project for me and now this was the contribution that is considered “most useless”. I know I have written several times about the garbage/litter situation in Ukraine and in my town specifically and thought to myself, “how can it be that we stand on two sides of this issue?” It is an eyesore and cleaning it up has to be a positive thing right? I asked Lenara why she felt the way she does and I was told that there were actually two reasons. One was that the people who litter the ground in the park will not stop littering the park. Therefore, cleaning up after people who will continue to litter makes no sense. The other reason was that there are businesses in the proximity of the park that she (and many other people) feel should take the sole responsibility for the beautification and upkeep of the park and that doing the work that should rightfully be done by others also seemed to make no sense. I maintain that I am a community member and should do something to show I have some sort of pride in where I live. As for the responsibility of the local businesses, the four closest businesses to the park all donated to my project. As for cleaning up after slobs, I figure that even if we could have a few days where families could stroll through the park with their kids, that is positive and maybe someone could see long term potential in a rejuvenation project. Eventually agreeing to disagree, I figured that some minds can’t be changed even when the benefits are obvious to others, like me.

Fast forward to this week. Lenara was involved in a project at the local school this week where kids were invited to a workshop about law and public policy. There were 12 kids divided into 2 groups and there were six sectors that they had to learn about. For example, there was a representative from the Department of Justice who discussed the legal system with one group, while a police inspector discussed the polices' role in public policy, and then the groups switched stations until each group had heard from 6 presenters about their topic. My Russian is not yet to the point that I could understand what each station discussed, but I do know that Lenara presented on elections and voting. I was mostly there to take pictures and some video of the workshops. After getting footage of other presenters doing their thing, I went to shoot Lenara doing her thing. I couldn’t understand all of the words, but at one point I understood that the students were taking turns pretending that they were running to be the mayor of the town and that they were giving a press conference and fielding questions from the audience. One young lady named Nastya got up, holding her pen microphone style and the questions began. Honestly, I didn’t understand most of them. Until I started hearing some words and terms that I was very familiar with from my own experience. I knew from the voice that it was Lenara jumping in on the action to ask a question. As I held the video steady watching Nastya carefully consider her answer I couldn’t help but smile that the question that had just been asked was “if you are elected, what would you do to solve the garbage/litter problem in this town?”
I don’t even know what Nastya’s response was, but I had waited 8 months to see a little more eye to eye on this issue with Lenara and the first step, as far as I am concerned, is admitting we have a problem.