Tuesday was the day of Saint Sophia. Despite almost two years in Ukraine, I’m not clear on why she’s a saint or what she did, but the colossal blue cathedral in Kyiv that’s on the UNESCO treasures list was built to her, so obviously she’s pretty important to Ukrainians.
My friend Tanya is in a Christian band that was playing at a concert held on Saint Sophia’s day, so we went over to check it out. It was held in front of Zhytomyr’s Catholic Church. There’s only one Catholic Church in Zhytomyr because Catholicism doesn’t have nearly the hold hear that Orthodoxy does. In fact, plans to build another Catholic church in Kharkov were halted do to an outcry from the Orthodox churches that Catholicism was starting to take over. Yeah, there’s that kind of intolerance. With that kind of outrage over a Christian church, I asked my friend Lisa, who is from Kharkov, what the Ukrainians would do if someone tried to build a mosque there.
“Oh, they wouldn’t care,” she said. “Because it’s not a threat.”
The church was new by Ukrainian standards, only 300 years old, but pretty: a gothic facade in peach and white. An empty stage was set up in front of the church and we waited beside it until the Sophia Day service was over and the congregation piled out of the church to watch the performance.
The music was upbeat gospel, with touches of jazz and rock thrown in. During it, the coolest priest I’ve ever seen, a perpetually-smiling man of about 30, was leading a sort of conga line through the crowd. Instead of hands on hips they had just all held hands to form one big chain, and moved past us in a sort of half-run, half skip.
Then the whole crowd began to do circle dances. They did one traditional Ukrainian one: where everyone holds hands, does this sort of cross-back, cross-forwards step to run in a circle before the whole circle runs towards each other to meet in the center, then runs backwards again to spread the circle back out. Then an MC on stage began coaching the people through many more circle dances that (my friend later told me) they said they had learned from a Polish Catholic congregation. One was vaguely Indian with its twisting hands and hop-step, one was vaguely Celtic/Irish in its moves and so on and so forth, but all were pretty cool. I filmed for a bit but then just got in one of the circles, doing the dances with them. Towards the end they were fast and almost out of control, with people forming smaller circles within the bigger ones and having a hell of a lot of fun.
I still don’t know what Saint Sophia did, but apparently she knew how to party.
***
I was leaving the library on Thursday when I heard English, and I heard it in a sing-song, lilting accent. I was leaving the library with Kirstin, another volunteer and we both stopped, looked at each other, and Kirstin said what I was thinking: “she’s not from Ukraine.”
The English was being spoken by a woman in her early thirties pushing a stroller, and her name was Anna, and, it turned out, she really was Ukrainian. Her child, Marina, though, was American and her husband, Marina’s father, was from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When we got it sorted out, her rather heartbreaking story was this: Anna grew up in Ukraine and learned English here. While in Poland visiting a friend, she met her future husband. Although her husband only spoke Swahili and French and Anna spoke neither, they fell in love and her husband began to learn English for her. It was amongst her husband’s African relatives that she picked up the sing-song English accent.
Her husband moved to America, illegally, to find work and Anna followed him there on a tourist visa, even though she had only one year left in her University schooling. She became pregnant and Marina was born in America. Marina currently has both passports.
Anna came back to Ukraine to finish school, but afterwards when she tried to return to America with Marina, she was not allowed to. The American embassy was worried (correctly) that she would skip on her visa and stay in America with her child. So Anna hasn’t seen her husband and Marina hasn’t seen her father since. Her husband still supports her and the baby, sending money from America, but he can’t leave America because he would not be able to return, and even if he came to Ukraine, as Anna pointed out “who would give a black man a job in Ukraine?”
So to support his family he stays there work and she lives here and waits.
Marina is a beautiful little girl, almost three years-old with mocha skin and extremely curly hair. The hair gives Anna fits, she was saying, because she doesn’t know how to control it. She’s waiting for her mother-in-law, who lives in Congo, to bring some hair product when they both meet in Turkey this summer, one of the few countries where neither woman needs a visa. The mother-in-law, who could get a tourist visa to America, wants to take Marina with her to see her father. Anna doesn’t want her to, because she’s worried her Mother-in-law and her daughter won’t come back.
Marina loves attention and kept making faces at Kirstin and I to get it. When her mother finally let her out of her stroller, she was darting around on the sidewalk, running farther away than most kids are willing to be from their mothers and often causing Anna to chase off because she was reaching into a trash can or about to get into a fountain.
I don’t know why, but watching Anna scold Marina in Russian, my saddest thought was that if this family could be together, Marina would grow up speaking five languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English, Swahili and French.
Anna, tired of chasing her, finally strapped Marina back into the stroller, where she once again began making faces at Kirsten and I, smiling what few teeth she had at us. Anna took both our mobile numbers, saying she was glad to have people to practice English with, and then, pushing the stroller ahead of her, said good-bye and walked away.
***
I climbed my first 5.11b on Sunday. It was only Jon and I, which meant we could just seriously work on skills. We skipped out on going out Saturday night and got up at 5:30 AM, when the only people up were some fishermen on the river and us.
It was on top rope and yet still a sloppy climb, resting after almost every move. One move, the hardest, required a two fingered left-hand pull-up. I’m not kidding. This is why I’m still not a 5.11 climber. Instead of pulling the move clean, I worked my body up so that the rope would take some of my weight and I could half-swing up to the next hold (which, as it turns out, is only the tips of all four fingers, but on my right hand).
We were able to set a top rope because Jon was able to lean over the top of the cliff, me sitting on his legs, and put the rope through the anchor. After I finished it on top rope I tried to lead climb it (a climb doesn’t count unless it’s on lead), but I hit that two-finger pull-up move, fell, gashed open my shin and called it a day.
So I’m not a 5.11 climber yet, but I can feel it coming. That route (which is named after a three-headed dragon in a Ukrainian legend) is my new white whale.