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Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union continued, page 2

Two blocks from the center of downtown Gomel.  These are the same Belarus tractors

are sold in the states, only in Belarus they're blue instead of red.

When she was done she took my laundry to… well some place or other, and have everything washed.  She also did my grocery shopping if I wanted, as well as performing a hit-and-miss job as a part-time translator with my neighbors in the building.  All this, the apartment, laundry service, Oxsana and my utilities cost me a little less than $100 a day, which was considered a high price there.  (I did pay for my own groceries and often tipped Oxsana. for her trouble, although tipping in eastern Europe seems to mark you as a sucker more than anything else.)

Later, on subsequent trips and after I met Olia, I learned that she was not so keen on my having domestic help, and she took over most of the kitchen duties and taught me how to shop for food in the bazaar.

While my earlier experiences were certainly enjoyable and entertaining, I found that having an intimate to show me around was by far the best way to learn about a foreign country. 

However, although we traveled by train a fair amount and a little less by hired private car (in Belarus anyone with an automobile and who's a little short of cash can become a taxi driver on a whim.  If you want a ride somewhere and wish to avoid the very efficient trolley-bus system, you simply stand by the curb with your arm outstretched palm down, and someone will stop and negotiate a fare with you.)  Olia and I were married and she was well on her way to becoming a U.S. citizen before I would return to Belarus and she would show me what life was like outside the city.

That was my primary goal when we were there last.  Olia wanted to visit with friends and relatives and I wanted to see what the country-side was like other than what I’d guessed when flying over it.  For that trip, we flew into Moscow and spent a week in an apartment there before taking a sleeper train to Gomel. 

This is where my diary of notes begins and I change to the first person:

By now we’re getting fairly comfortable in Gomel, or at least familiar.  There are a lot of things I enjoy about being here, but the bed in this apartment is just as bad in the same ways as the one I used to have over on Kirova Street: lumpy and short with a dividing crack in the middle where they’ve put two teeny-tiny mattresses together to make one inadequately small one. 

Sleep is sort of a challenge for me here anyway, except during the times when I want to be awake.  I let one of my prescriptions run out just before we left home, so I’m not breathing too clearly and thus snoring quite a bit I suspect, although O. says she hasn’t been aware of it.  That’s not the real problem, though, nor is the bed.  The problem is that, even though I’ve avoided the numerous vodka challenges I’ve had in previous trips, alcohol is a large part of the culture here, and we frequently wind up in situations where everyone is drinking at a much earlier hour than I’ve grown to consider prudent, so I often find myself napping in the middle afternoon because of two or three glasses of wine at lunch. 

Nearly all the Russian men I've met (and I use the term to include Belarusians and Ukrainians) are exceedingly fond of alcohol and to put it bluntly, a man is judged by his ability to drink.  Although I’m much more of a wine-sipper at home, I can, when necessary put away a fairly respectable amount of vodka and give the impression of being sober.  I do this by remaining seated as much as possible and keeping my mouth shut, which is easy since no-one understands any of my Russian anyway.    Oddly, this seems to work very well, because the majority of the Russian men I have met seem to view getting roaring drunk with about the same mystique that under-age American boys do, so anyone NOT falling all over themselves is apparently viewed as practically sober.

I’ve never really been outside of a city here except when riding a sleeper train through the country, and you don’t get a very good view from the sleeping compartments.  I’ve noticed, though, even when just flying over, that things are much different here than anywhere else I’ve been. 

As you know, when you fly over the American countryside, especially the Midwest, you can see that the land has been divided up into section, township and range so that you see lots of blocks based around forty-acre squares, or as you go further west, forty-acre circles where the land is irrigated by pivot sprinklers.

What I’ve seen from the sky of western Europe is similar to this, but the land is more a conglomeration of thin strips which I assume were laid out centuries ago to maximize row cropping by different land owners.

Here and in Russia, on the other hand, there is no discernable pattern to the land ownership because the land all belongs to the state. 

While money will get you almost anything you want  these days, you don’t see any single homes out on large acreages (and by "large" I mean more than an acre or so).  From the air you either see cities, tiny villages or, if you’re flying low enough, dachas, amid all different sizes and shapes of fields and forests owned by the government.

It’s the villages and dachas that I’ve been most interested in, because from what little I’ve seen from the highway or railroad, they appear as if lost in a time before I was born.  There is electricity to the villages, but you see about as many horse-drawn vehicles as motorized ones and things look more like some of the old near-ghost-towns in Missouri, (Burnham is in my mind at the moment.)  I’ve really been curious to know what things were like down along those dirt “streets”.

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