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Published: March 25th 2009
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We started on the next leg of our adventure with a 2 AM taxi ride from our Jerusalem hotel to the Tel Aviv airport and our flight to Kyiv, Ukraine via Prague, Czech Republic. Our one-hour drive brought us to what should have been a sleepy deserted ghost town of an airport. Instead, it was bustling with activity. People were coming and going even at 3 AM. Don’t they know it’s time to be home sleeping?
Our Czech Airlines flights on Airbus 320’s were uneventful but pleasant. The crew was pleasant, efficient and even attractive. The food was some of the best airline food we’ve had in decades.
We arrived in Kyiv about 1:30 PM and cleared customs by about 2 and our missionary friend, Jon Eide met us at the airport. He and his young friend, Dennis, drove us from the airport on the south side through the city to Jon & Tracy’s home on the north side.
Along the way, Jon pointed out several of the city’s sights and filled us in with some background. For example, Kyiv (or Kiev) can be pronounced two different ways, depending upon who you want to offend. If you want
to offend the Russians, use the Ukrainian pronunciation KEEV. If you want to offend Ukrainians pronounce it KEY-ev.
Most inhabitants of Kyiv live in apartments and are financially strapped. The local currency is called a hryvnia and had been pretty stable for years at about 5 hryvnia per US dollar. It had fluctuated from about 4.5 to 5.5 over the 10 years that Jon and Tracy have been in this country.
Then the world-wide economic crisis hit and Ukraine experience about 100% inflation in just a few months. When I was doing the research and preparation for this trip, I looked up the interbank transfer rates for the currency in the countries we would be visiting. Ukraine’s was 5.5 hryvnia to the dollar. A day or two before we left Jerusalem, I visited the same website and found the exchange rate to be 7.9 hryvnia to the dollar.
By the time we arrived in Kyiv, I went to an ATM and got 7.8 hryvnias for my US dollar. The advertised rates as we walk down the streets are 8.3 to 8.4.
Kyiv is situated on several hills, not unlike Rome, and is bisected by the Dnieper
River. The river is pleasant enough to look and there are long stretches of beach on which to have picnics and just stroll. It is not, however, a good place to go swimming due to the continued radioactive pollution from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. Chernobyl is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) upstream from Kyiv. I’ll talk more about that later.
Jon explained that they were going to split Thursday and Friday into two touring days. He would take us Thursday on a “dark” day to the cemetery, the Chernobyl Museum and Babi Yar (the site of WWII atrocities. Tracy is to take us on a “light” day to several cathedrals, the opera house, and several other historical and scenic sites.
He also told us a little about his young friend, Dennis, who had come along for the trip to the airport. Dennis is 17 years old and is largely reliant on Jon and Tracy for sustenance. He’s a respectful, quiet young man who “lives” with his alcoholic mother and their landlord in a single room along with his younger half-brother and cousin. I say lives in quotation marks because he really gets no support or nurturing at home.
Jon says that Dennis does not speak English, but he understands far more than Jon gives him credit for. Since both Jon and Tracy converse with him in Russian, there’s no real need to test his English skills. Cheryl did while Jon and I were away from the car for a few minutes and found that they could understand each other quite well. But then we’re used to sign language and noises in a variety of countries.
We arrived at the Eide estate of about 300 square meters (1,000 square feet) in a quiet residential area of north Kyiv. We were greeted by Tracy, the girls Alison (12) and Natalie (9) and the newest, Zachary (2 ½). Aly and Natalie are their natural children and they adopted Zach about a year ago.
He spent the first year and a half of his life in an orphanage in Kyiv. Ukrainian orphanages tend to be pretty much just warehouses for unwanted children. The kids often have severe heath problems and if they haven’t been adopted by about age two or three, they probably never will.
Jon and Tracy are pretty sure that Zachary spent most of his orphanage time in a crib. Because of that, his motor, social, verbal and exploratory skills were pretty lacking. In many ways, he’s just a normal 2 ½ - year old; but in some other ways he‘s acting like a somewhat younger child trying to make up for those 18 months behind bars. He’s a great kid living through the “terrific twos” just a little delayed is all.
Alison and Natalie go to KCA (Kyiv Christian Academy), a 180-student K-12 Christian school primarily for missionary kids. They take all the normal classes a US kid of their age would take, plus they are required to take both English and Russian.
They have grown up speaking both languages and they are fluent in both. Cheryl was talking with Natalie and said, “I’m just so impressed that you speak English and Russian!” Natalie responded with, “What would you expect?” It’s just second nature to them. Why wouldn’t we speak Russian?
The girls took us on a tour of the house and are obviously proud of their home, their rooms, their yard, their life in Kyiv, their little brother and their cat, Peanut. We had met the girls when they’d been home on furlough but this was our first time to meet Zach. They are happy, well adjusted and looking forward to spending their adolescent years in Ukraine.
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