In 2013 we visited this farmer in Ukraine.  Sometimes what I write gets summed up in fewer words than what were spoken.  Sometimes it’s several different conversations merged into one.  In my blog, this particular farmer, Kees Huizinga, is the one who makes the comment on Ukrainian villagers and what they read.

Kees is immediately likeable. He talks with a passion and energy that is infectious. If there was any momentary barrier in language, it didn’t matter. Who he is translated perfectly.

His respect for the Ukrainians shone through.  He talked about what a pleasure it was to share homemade vodka in their homes. How they made him feel welcomed, and what a rush it was to have a conversation with a people so engaged on the really big questions of life.

Watching these people fight for their country. I think of how our own must have been once, before it is like it is now.

The village near him was remote. Livestock roamed in people’s yards. A huge community garden was just outside. We would think of them as poor. At the time some were survining on a little more than $600 a year.

Were you or I passing by, we wouldn’t have said two words to the people we found there, but the conversations Kees was having were changing his life.

Today we have this western notion, that everything is going to work out, because usually it does, I guess. We find comfort in the hope that maybe everything is happening for a reason yet to be revealed. Maybe were we in their shoes, because of those thoughts, we would rise to the occasion and fight.

I don’t think the folks you are seeing on TV have those thoughts, however. In the last hundred years alone, Ukraine has no doubt witnessed millions of people killed worse than cattle. From the Holomador, to their Jews in the Holocaust, their soldiers in WWII, and Stalins whims and Nazi incursions. I don’t know if that’s much of a departure from the rest of their history.

I don’t believe the Ukrainians are comforted by the belief it’s all going to work out. At this point, I don’t suppose they think someday there’s going to be a reason big enough to soak up all the blood thats be spilled in the last century. I would guess many do know God is with them, and they probably feel like He’s the only one at times.

I lost count the number of times I heard people express, ‘God’s in control’ during the last two years. I don’t know how I feel about that. If He’s in control, He’s letting a lot of shitty stuff happen. Maybe He’s just expecting you and I to do a little of His work.

There are some Ukrainians and Dutch working their asses off. They might not expect a thing, but they do know you sure as hell better try. It’s hard not to notice that, thanks to Kees.

Towards the end of our journey through Ukraine, we finally settled down into the port of Odessa.  Gone now were the rough and winding roads that occasionally ended in dead ends not yet mapped.  Gone as well were the mass of people traveling with us along them, by horse cart or motorcycle, in old communist cars or over-crowded city buses, or on foot in high heels in areas so remote there only purpose could have been to garner interest for a ride out.

Gone were the rural villages with their houses guarded by concrete walls, which held livestock in and the West seemingly out. Gone were the crumbling concrete edifices of old communist apartment buildings, with walls covered in air conditiong units, latticed with random wires, and balcaconies enclosed in plywood. Gone were abandoned factories.

It seemed the only rural fingers which made their way into this port town were grain and stray dogs.

Here in Odessa, there were tree-lined streets and mowed grass and even lovers on occasion.  Communist party members had vacationed here, one of us observed, and they were wise enough not to shit where they slept. This they had in common with the stray dogs, but commonality ended here.  The dogs were indifferent about where they vacationed.

At the port we found the Black Sea, and it lay open ahead of us.  At its shore were tied up cruise ships, barges, dinghies and yachts with names like “Lady Luck.”  Towering above them in the nearby shipyards and were massive cranes, yet even at the great sea’s shore they could not reach its bottom and busied themselves instead with what floated on top of it.

Above the boats and below the cranes, at the furthest point of our pier, was an Orthodox church. From its far end against the sea, rose a bell tower.  It was Sunday morning.  At this tower every 15 minutes or so, a boy appeared, darkly tanned, dressed in jean shorts and a t-shirt.  Among the collection of bells within the tower he would hammer.  He hammered well.  Were Odessa silent, the bells would ring as far inland as they did out to sea.  This boy straddled the coast, and with his ringing I began to reflect on what I had seen.

We had seen American farmers in Ukraine. We had seen the Dutch. We also saw the Russians. After viewing the Dutch run farms it was difficult to sleep at night, thinking about all the low hanging fruit, and how quickly they would become competitors to us. After viewing the Russian farms, with modern tractors abandoned and varying modern implements being raided for parts, we slept better.

At the beginning of the journey one farmer gave us his take on the Ukrainian condition.  “Years and years of communist rule has left the average Ukrainian unable to think for themselves.  They don’t want responsibility.  They can’t handle it.”  His long time Ukrainian right hand man was present for this.  So may have been our Ukrainian guide.  I don’t recall where the bus driver was, but he spoke no English so it didn’t matter.

He fed us a large lunch of traditional Ukrainian staples, as well as beer and vodka.  I ate to my heart’s content, as his Ukrainian cooks, both markedly attractive, brought out course after course.  In the end I wound up with indigestion, but the cooks were not to blame.  I suspect my conscience had done it.  I plyed my conscience with the booze, and it worked nicely.  Writing about it now cleared it up entirely.

It is easier to go with the flow than take the responsibility of raising an objection; especially when the flow is feeding you.  This is as American as it is Ukrainian.

“If you want to get a handle on what these people have faced, read The Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder,” he said. When the Soviets came to power they sort of laid the law down in each village and moved on. They came back in a month, and if you weren’t doing what they told you, they lined you up against the wall and shot you. After a couple rounds of that, those left understood not to do anything unless someone told you to. It’s still like that today,” he opined.

Another farmer offered a different take. “The Ukrainian villager may not have a satellite dish, we might view them as surviving only on subsistence farming, but they are highly literate, much more so than we are.  I don’t mean a higher percentage of the population can read.  I have no idea about that.  What I mean is that a higher percentage does read.  All the houses have books, and they are not just any books, but Tolstoy and all the other Russian and Ukrainian greats.”

On our way through, passing immense fields worked by fleets of new tractors and harvested by teams of new combines, a lone horse cart sat on one end of a five acre field.  Working here was a solitary man with a pitch fork.  He was turning over a field of hay.  In the countryside there were no fences, and in a day or two we would begin to find 2 or 3 people keeping watch over the village’s cows or sheep for the day.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the whole country is held in small 5-10 acre chunks by villagers, and assembled into much larger tracts by their tenants.  There is no open land market in Ukraine. How it is leased is still impacted by the communists rise to power. 

1932-1933 was what some call the Holodomor (Extermination by hunger) in Ukraine.  Stalin had seized the wheat, and by spring 1933 general estimates are that around 3.5 million people had starved to death.  The Soviets did the best they could.  They printed posters warning the peasants to refrain from cannibalism and prosecuted 2500 for doing it.

To this day most villagers take their rent in bags of wheat, not cash.  After a year the crop is sold and a new bag takes its place. If God hates a coward, I should think it harder for Him to find one here than other places.  Perhaps I am sentimental.

What does the future hold in store for Ukraine?  I can’t say.  I can say perhaps our presents, though, aren’t all so different.  We are both trying to do the best we can, but find ourselves only able to do the best we know how.  Perhaps we both might show each other how to do better.

“Ring them bells ye heathen from the city that dreams.  Ring them bells from the sanctuaries across the valleys and streams.  For they’re deep and they’re wide, and the world is on its side, and time is running backward and so is the bride.”