The Countdown Continues/I Am “дембель”

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a café in Kiev waiting for my train. Across the table was a friend named Oleg (not the sauna Oleg, a different Oleg). I met him last October when he came to visit his grandmother who lives in Razdol’noye and when he was looking for the internet center in the library, stumbled upon our English Club. He lives in Kiev and we have been able to keep in touch and I contact him when I am in his neck of the woods. He is a nice guy with remarkably good English and we get along very well.

Oleg and I at a cafe in Kiev the last time I was passing through

As the minutes wound down on what we both assumed could very well be our last face to face meeting, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic case and set it on the table. It was filled with a blue coil, but I needed some explanation. He asked me if I knew what the word “дембель” (dyem-bell) meant. I admitted, not surprisingly, that I did not. He explained that when someone in Ukraine is fulfilling their mandatory military service, soldiers go through a series of unofficial ranks. I understood the first of these levels is called “душа” (soul). These are the newest/lowest-on-the-totem soldiers who are tapped to perform the grunt work for those senior members. There are several of these designations which lead up to “дембель” which is reserved for those who are preparing to complete their service. It is a shortened term for “demobilize”. These are the most senior/respected soldiers- at least in theory, I suppose. As Oleg explained these terms to me I opened the case and began to unfurl the blue coil. It unraveled as a measuring tape, not the self-retracting metal kind, but the cloth/nylon soft kind used by a tailor or seamstress. It looked exactly as an ordinary blue measuring tape with centimeter (and millimeter) markings on it. At this point I wasn’t exactly making the connection between his story of Ukrainian military ranks and this tape and what they had to do with me. Oleg took a moment to collect his thoughts and explained it another way. He said that when someone has been in prison for a long time and their release date is within sight, they use some method to mark down the days to freedom. “Imagine the numbers on this coil represent days until release, either from the military, from prison, or in your case- The Peace Corps.” This is demobilization.
As I listened and the concept sank in, the metaphor struck me as all too perfect. It was such a poignant moment and the one I can pinpoint when my service began to wind down. The fact that my two years here are coming to an end and I will count them down, not so much to freedom as a prisoner, but to the next phase in my life as a soldier.
This was the first “going away” gift I was given and in so many ways it couldn’t have been more befitting since one of the reasons I have cited for joining the Peace Corps was an opportunity to serve my country in some way in lieu of military service. Oleg says that some people cut one increment off every day, but since I want to keep this memento, I have chosen to use a felt marker to cross off the numbers down to June 14 represented  here by “1”.

 My first days of decrementation

Where I was last Friday