Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Belarus: Minsk

 

Minsk

Minsk in the early 1990s felt like a place suspended between two eras. The Soviet Union had technically dissolved, but the city still looked and functioned like the USSR. Wide, monumental avenues built after the city’s near-total destruction in WWII had little traffic. It would take some time before cars became a “thing.”  Concrete apartment blocks with identical stairwells and the faint smell of boiled cabbage dominated the city landscape. Trolleybuses and trams rattled but ran on time. Kiosks continued to sell cigarettes, newspapers, and necessities, but collapsing supply chains often meant that shelves were empty. People lined up in long queues outside shops, even when no one was sure what was being sold. A sense of order without resources, structure without certainty pervaded. People were polite but cautious; the habits of Soviet public life didn’t vanish overnight.

Television was full of debates, new political parties, and the shock of Western advertising. I suppose my interview as a visiting educator bringing Western teaching methods to Belarus classrooms stunned as well. The city was waking up, but groggily.

In Moscow or Leningrad, Westerners were already becoming more common by the late 1980s, but Minsk was different—more provincial, more controlled, and less exposed to foreign visitors. So, though I tried to blend, I was noticeable—people would look twice on the street. I had not purchased my clothes at local shops, and I spoke Russian not with a Belarusian accent but with the accent of Mother Russia (with the soft consonants typical of the southern dialects, I have been told).

I fared better with my Belarusian colleagues. They approved of my attempts to blend, could communicate easily with me because they, too, spoke Russian, the widespread lingua franca at the time, and because when we focused on work, we found we had much more in common than not. Most important, they referred to me as the consultant, not as the American.

A Westerner arriving in Minsk in 1991–1993 was stepping into a society that was opening its windows for the first time in decades, blinking at the light. It was a moment when everything was changing, but nothing had changed yet. The Soviet visual order remained intact. The economic chaos that was to come was just beginning. Yet a psychological shift permeated the air: people suddenly were allowed to speak more freely, but they were not yet sure how. And then there was the quiet astonishment of locals encountering a Westerner not as a spy, a diplomat, or a rare tourist, but as a colleague.

I think my colleagues found me a source of hope. The West represented to them a path out of economic, social, and psychological stagnation. That hoping for hope strongly accompanied the delegation of educators from Gomel. When I talked about individualization of instruction in my faculty development workshops, they asked how they could adapt to the realities of students’ lived experience of post-Chernobyl realities. When I talked motivation, they asked how they could motivate any student to engage in serious study when the child in front of him or her had died the day before, the one to the left was being treated for radiation-related illnesses, the one behind had just  lost a family member, and the one to the right had birth defects, which increased geometrically as people ate food grown in irradiated ground or suffered the consequences of direct exposure to radiation. They were not resisting; they were not testing me. Given that 25% of their students had died and many more were ill, they wanted help. They wanted answers. They wanted suggestions. Most of all, they wanted hope.

I personally witnessed suffering from the consequences of the Chernobyl accident that reached as far as Minsk. When I work abroad, I prefer to stay with just plain folks, the vibrant bearers of local customs and history, whenever possible, not in barren hotels. In Minks, I stayed with Nina, a school principal, and her jolly husband, Sasha. Nina and I bonded, and to this day I have a shawl she crocheted for me and a table runner and napkis that she meticulously embroidered in the deep red and pure white colors and patterns unique to Belarus. I remember Nina with affection when I see them. I remember Sasha with love and tears—and some of the joy that  no matter what he brought to every interaction.

Sasha worked as a respected chemist. Along with other chemists, he was sent by the Soviet government to Chernobyl to measure the amount of radiation remaining after the accident. He knew that the protective coverings they were given were inadequate. They all knew that. Still, they went. They had no choice. Not really.

I watched as Sasha dealt with the pain he experienced all day every day as a result of that duty. Later, when I came back on another visit to Minsk, I dropped in on Nina and Sasha. Sasha was in the hospital, in severe pain, and I would not be allowed to visit. Nina shared all that she knew. Not long after, Sasha died. In his mid-fifties, he had so much more he could have shared: his optimism, positive thinking, and, above all, hope for a better future, one that he did not get to share.

 

From the forthcoming book:

In with the East Wind...A Mary Poppins Kind of Life

Volume 1: ABC Lands

by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver

For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.

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