Three Months in Ukraine

Observations and Recollections of a Short-Term Volunteer

I’m back in the US after an almost-three-month stint in Ukraine, mostly in the relatively safe confines of Lviv, Ukraine’s western-most major city. Here’s are some random memories and observations.

Why Did I Go?

I’ll mostly skip over the moral and geo-political reasons for making the trip, other than to state the obvious — Russia has once again invaded a neighboring country and repeatedly committed atrocities. And it’s clear to most people, especially Europeans, that Russia will continue this pattern unless it fails so spectacularly that its populace forces fundamental reform. And that would be good for the planet, and eventually, even Russians.

The more personal reasons had to do with where I was in my life. I’d retired 18 months earlier, and like many retired people, was feeling fairly un-useful. Somehow, straightening grocery carts in the supermarket corral wasn’t as fulfilling as I’d hoped.

I joined a great organization, the Wild Bees US/Canada, which 3D-prints items for the Ukrainian military and is well worth your support. But after a time, that wasn’t enough for me, and after my almost-perfect dog, Renzo, died after living a long, full life, there weren’t any day-to-day responsibilities keeping me from traveling. As my mom advised, “Do it now, while you still can.”

The Search Process

But what to do when I got there? I wasn’t interested in disaster tourism; I wanted to make an impact. And I’m not really a “wing it” person, so I needed to know up-front what I would be doing and where I’d be staying. Considerations included:

• What did I have to offer — minimal practical skills and non-existent Ukrainian language skills. Hmmmm.

• What was needed?

• How steep was the learning curve for the gig, and how long of a stay could I commit to?

• What would the social environment be? A long time ago, I had worked in Japan under not-ideal conditions, and it was a pretty isolating experience that I didn’t want to repeat.

So this search took a while, with a fistful of possibilities that didn’t pan out. Once again, though, LinkedIn came through, as it has a couple times before in my life. After I posted my desire to volunteer in Ukraine, an old connection (Pete) introduced me to his friend (Harrison) based in Ukraine, who then put me in touch with my eventual boss (Ben), who ran something called the Sex Dungeon.

Wait, what?!? I’ll explain later. But first, let’s talk about Lviv, home of the Dungeon.

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Lviv

Lviv

In this city’s 770-year history, it’s been part of 10 different countries (depending on how you count), including Poland (2-3 times), Austria-Hungary, Nazi Germany, and (of course) the Soviet Union. The old girl has been around, albeit not always by choice, and its motto, “Lviv is open to the world” seems more like a rueful acknowledgement of its history than a tourism sales pitch.

With age comes beauty, though. Here’s the Lviv Theater of Opera and Ballet, remarkably close to where I stayed (thanks Ben!):

Unfortunately, given Russia’s habit of attacking civilian targets and cultural monuments, the theater now stays unlit.

My nickname for Lviv was “City of Uneven Surfaces”, due to the cobblestone streets and ubiquitous accretion of mis-matched repairs over the centuries. I had wrenched my back on the way to Ukraine, so for a couple weeks I was acutely aware of every undulation and variation as I walked the city. Unlike the U.S.’s “dynamite it and re-pour” renovation playbook, the only building tear-downs I saw were of a few shack-like kiosks. Exteriors are usually maintained, no matter how drastic the interior re-hab.

By virtue of its far-west location, Lviv is the safest Ukrainian city, with air raid alerts sounding roughly twice a week. Contrast this with Kryvyi Rih in south central Ukraine, where I stayed for several days and experienced a half-dozen alerts per day. Early one of those mornings, I witnessed a Russian drone being blown out of the sky by Ukrainian defenders. A few weeks later, a drone struck nearby, pointlessly killing several civilians.

Update: On the night of July 29-30, Russia hit Lviv with many missiles and drones, damaging more than 20 residential buildings. Russia is using more ballistic missiles, and Ukraine is running out of Patriot missiles to intercept them. I fear this problem will become worse.

The Sex Dungeon Awaits

It turns out that “Sex Dungeon” is just an ironic nickname, because while the workshop is located in a basement, it’s completely devoid of sensuality or kink. One might very well sue for false advertising.

Here, I worked up to six days a week with a small handful of volunteers from the US, Canada, Germany, Romania, and the UK, plus some nomads whose home countries I’m unclear on.

At the Dungeon, officially called the International Cossack Forge, we broke down dis-used eBike battery packs donated by Eyes on Ukraine (the Netherlands) into their constituent cells, tested them, tossed (responsibly!) the bad ones, and sorted the good ones by model and capacity. The good cells then got soldered into smaller configurations that slid into 3D-printed boxes to make home-made power banks to be used by units and their soldiers. We also had a “boffin” who figured out how to make larger power stations that were a very cheap substitute for the much-in-demand (but expensive) EcoFlow units. Armies might march on their stomachs, but electronics need electrons, and electronic devices are everywhere on the modern battlefield.

The Dunge—I mean, Forge — is also now producing small unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) out of donated used hoverboards. This is another example of the Ukrainian ability to make lemonade out of lemons.

What was great about the Forge was the camaraderie and collaboration, with sometimes nearly a dozen people helping each other solve problems and brainstorm ideas. For most of my career I had searched, usually unsuccessfully, for that vibe. I only had to travel 7,850 kilometers to find it.

Cottage industries are a big business in Ukraine, with thousands of basement and above-ground workshops throughout the country. This dispersion keeps people safe and “lets a thousand flowers bloom,” sparking a furious rate of innovation, but at the cost of wheels being re-invented every day. If Ukraine can find the right balance here, the war might be over in six months. But it’s very hard problem.

Language

Learn the Cyrillic Alphabet

This is easier than it might sound and will be very helpful, even if you don’t learn much Ukrainian beyond please, hello, and thank you. Many Ukrainian words are English cognates — they have the same meaning when spelled in the Latin alphabet. So “sport” is “спорт” because the “c” in Cyrillic is a Latin “s”, the “п” is “p”, etc.

A great resource for learning Cyrillic in week or so is “Ukrainian Script Hacking.” It’s used as a workbook, where you get practice decoding, coding, and writing Cyrillic characters. I highly recommend doing this small amount of prep before going to Ukraine, even if you don’t invest in learning much of the language. And if you do want to learning the language (it’s not an easy one!), this is the first step you should take anyway.

Learning the Language

I tried, I struggled, I gave up. Not exactly “Veni, Vidi, Vici.”

However, there are people, like Ben, my boss, who have persevered and become relatively fluent in Ukrainian. My failure is due to lack of sustained effort and poor choice of technologies and techniques. Don’t use DuoLingo, do use Pimsleur. Even better, get a tutor.

English is much less prevalent here than in western Europe, thanks to the Soviet influence that forced Russian on folks. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy, grew up in eastern Ukraine speaking Russian as his first language. This has been changing, particularly since 2014 (Euromaidan protests, Crimea’s annexation, and Russia’ incursion into Donbas) and has been accelerating even further since the full-scale invasion.

But for me, thank goodness for Google Translate.

The Volunteer Community

Volunteers come from all over. In Lviv alone, I encountered folks from:

Canada, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. Probably others that I’ve forgotten (apologies!).

Some have come and decided to make their lives in Ukraine, other come for a few weeks every time they have piled up enough vacation days. For some, like me, this is a bucket list experience that may or may not be repeated.

A special class of volunteer is what I call the Nomads. For them, living in a foreign country with a non-native language is how life is lived to the fullest. While I had to gird my mental loins to prepare for what I considered a once-in-a lifetime opportunity, these folks are comfortable (or at least seem like they are) with being a stranger in a strange land. One good friend I made was an American who came to Ukraine after living in Hungary.

Two things hold the Lviv volunteer community together, the WhatsApp chat group and the nightly dinners. The chat is a great resource for asking questions, sharing information, gossiping, and, less usefully, re-litigating historical grievances, It’s an interesting laboratory in which to study intragroup dynamics and pathologies. So far, Godwin’s Law hasn’t manifested itself, but I won’t be surprised if it does.

Every afternoon, “Mano” posts the restaurant that people can meet at that night, and the bar that most people can congregate at later. I usually skipped the bar; I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and once I’ve done a group dinner, I’ve had my fill of people for the day. But knowing there would be a nightly dinner sold me on the Lviv volunteering opportunity, because I knew I wouldn’t feel isolated. I got to know a bunch of people who were doing other volunteering roles, I and learned a lot about Ukraine and other countries in the process. It was the highlight of my day, and I went almost every night.

Volunteer Opportunities

Below are just a few of the many volunteer opportunities that I either tried or had friends who tried. You can see a much bigger list at Volunteering Ukraine.

Lviv Volunteer Kitchen — Armies still march on their stomachs, and if these days there’s not as much marching, soldiers still need to eat. LVK, along with many other kitchens, prepare food in various non-perishable forms for various units. Much better than MREs. Much of the work involves peeling potatoes and vegetables, so if you heard about “KP Duty” from your ex-military relatives and want to see what all the fuss was about, here’s your chance. I know one of the key volunteers there and would be happy to introduce you to him.

Make Energy Bars — Another food-related opportunity. I hear they’re excellent!

Dog Walking — Lviv has an animal shelter where you can sign out a dog and take them for a walk along some wooded trails, giving them much-needed exercise and mental stimulation. It’s good therapy for the humans as well.

Help Internally Displaced Persons — Although the Russians slowly advance at literally slower than a snail’s pace, their scorched earth tactics and eagerness to kill civilians nonetheless make additional Ukrainian towns and settlements uninhabitable. This creates IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) who arrive in cities like Lviv at the train station and need help getting situated.

Make Camo Nets — This is a great opportunity to help soldiers stay alive. These are custom-constructed by hand according to specifications provided by the units that order them. I tried this early in my stay and was completely outclassed by all the women netters, whose fingers blurred as they tied the variously colored ribbons to the netting (while I fat-fingered my way through the process). But at the end, when we’d finished a whole net, I got a hug, so that made it all OK.

Make Shrapnel — If you’re feeling a little more kinetic/furious, you can run a shrapnel-making machine. It’s quite satisfying.

Restaurants

There are some quirks to Ukrainian restaurants for foreigners. For example, don’t expect everyone’s dishes to come out at the same time, and be sure not to order a desert along with your main course, because the desert just might come before it. The rule is “don’t wait, eat it while it’s warm.” Your hamburger will be served with black surgical gloves. And don’t expect your bacon to be crispy.

But one thing Ukrainian restaurants do far better than American ones is handle bill-paying for large groups. In the US, unless you’re a bunch of penny-pinchers who use integral calculus to figure who owes how much each person pays, groups simply ask the server to “split it evenly to/three/four ways.” Some American restaurants will even balk at splitting the bill more than two ways.

In Ukraine, though, individuals in a group can use an app to find the items they ordered and pay for just those specific items. Less fuss, less muss. American restaurateurs, pay attention!

Aptekas

These are ubiquitous, to the point of inspiring theories about why there are so many. In Lviv, it’s difficult to walk more than 300 meters before encountering one.

Aptekas are what Brits would call “the chemist”, and they sell medications, skin creams, and sometimes eye glasses. The premises are immaculate, the offerings oddly slim. But there are so damn many of them!

One take is that they’re part of a money laundering scheme. Others say it’s due to lower regulation of pharmacies and pharmaceuticals, still others point to the fact that Ukrainians shop for things more frequently, mainly due to being on foot and having less storage space at home.

Cheese

Ukrainians love their cheese; you can find a cheese shop every few hundred meters in Lviv.

Everything Stops at 9 AM

For some reason, I was sitting on a tram a little earlier than usual, lost in my phone. The tram stopped moving, even though the next stop was several hundred meters away, and everyone (except me) stood up. I thankfully figured out what was going on, and in embarrassment, I stood up as well.

This is the daily 9 AM Minute of Silence that’s practiced publicly throughout Ukraine. Traffic lights turn red, traffic stops. Drivers stand by their vehicles. Sometimes a metronome plays on a loudspeaker.

This minute started after the full-scale invasion in 2022 as a way to pay respect to the fallen and to remind everyone that — no matter how normal their lives seemed to be — Ukraine was in a fight for its life. I love this tradition. I hate that it needs to exist.

Will I go back?

I’ve been asked that question dozens of times. The honest answer is that I don’t know. I’m a homebody who suffers from very occasional bouts of wanderlust, so it’ll be a while. But I’ve now been away for a month, and as I predicted, my desire to return grows a little each day.

When will that growing desire translate to action?

In the meantime, I’m still printing for the aforementioned Wild Bees, and I’ve joined a great new group, 50 States for Ukraine, which raises money for, upgrades, and delivers life-saving pickup trucks for soldiers at the front. They’re both worthy of your consideration to either donate to or to join.