I arrived in Rivne last October 16th, after taking a 4-hour minibus ride from Kyiv. Although it wasn't as comfortable as the train, it was a lot faster, and it was great to see more of the villages that make up the countryside.
Rivne is the central capital of this region, providing a large business and industrial base - as well as being a major transit point. The landscape around Rivne is covered with rolling hills, similar to my native Wisconsin's wooded farmland. Everyone speaks Ukrainian here. It is a melodic and soft language, compared to Russian. Everyone speaks Russian as well though, so it's sometimes impossible for me to distinguish between the two.
After spending the night in Rivne, we went to Tuczyn right away to continue work at the orphanage there. Our friend Karel from Brno, Czech Republic, had been there for a couple days already. The village is very small, approximately 2,000 people, about thirty minutes away from Rivne, which is huge by comparison, with 200,000 people.
Our Mercedes minibus seemed to be the main lifeline, between Tuczyn and Rivne - as well as connecting many other small towns. Babushkas loaded with goods, and young men in work clothes and uniforms piled into our bus until there was hardly any room. The cost of the 40-kilometer ride was about 20 US cents.
Tuczyn is a picturesque village with probably four or five businesses making up their downtown. Like much of Ukraine, most of these stores are small kiosks that sell everything from beer to kovbasa to toilet paper. Dairy cows roamed free through the village, as farmers carried piles of beets and other tuberous vegetables on horse carts. Most people could be seen walking or using bicycles for transportation. We saw a few lumbering military trucks, being used for farming, and dilapidated soviet-era cars in the sometimes muddy, unpaved byways.
The homes are typical country homes, white blocks with A-frame roofs made of sheet metal or, sometimes, clay shingles. Large yards, surrounded with picket or wire fences enclosed chicken coops, gardens, sheds, and compost piles. Every plot seemed as though it would be able to sustain its tenants through economic think and thin. Ducks, turkeys, chickens, and geese are ubiquitous, practically running all over the city. In my naivety I wondered why they didn't just run away, but I learned that domesticated birds always return home.
A little less inspiring was the state of cows, horses, and goats. These animals were often chained to a small rope, allowing them to barely move. Some calves also had their front and hind legs tied together, to disable them. But this is the way it's been for hundreds, thousands of years, and will be practiced for hundreds more, perhaps.
My friends and I were with the Rivne-based Ecoclub NGO to do practical insulation work at the orphanage in Tuczyn under the auspices of a project known as the Ukrainian Energy Brigades. The UEB is part of an even larger network sponsored by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the Green Party in Germany, with satellite groups in many eastern European countries including Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Hungary.
This fall the UEB is insulating two orphanages, and will continue with a third in the spring. The idea for the project was born nearly a year and a half ago, when Peace Corps volunteers and UEB coordinators decided on the locations and formulated a $15,000 budget to be raised from foreign donors.
The project had to be postponed last year for many reasons, including a lack of fundraising, but the past year we were able to raise the whole amount. These funds included significant help from the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Association in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as the Cottonwood Foundation and the Global Greengrants Fund. There were also many of our friends and family who also pitched in to help out.
Tuczyn's orphanage has about one hundred kids, living in a large three-story dorm. The building was surrounded by several acres of a wooded park area, a large playground, and an adjacent school. Rooms were large and bright, filled with sagging beds and closets. Although some artistic remnants hung on a few walls, I had the impression that these kids had few personal belongings, let alone toys. The basics were well covered however, as Tuczyn in every way showed a place where kids were being well looked after and nurtured. I was very impressed to see that men, as well as women, were caretakers of the children.
Our job there was to install silicone stripping in the frames of each of 250 windows, as well as to replace and repair broken wood and glass. Our tools consisted of two retrofitted Bosch power saws, imported from Czech Republic, and miscellaneous planers, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers and the like. The installation itself is simple enough for anyone to do, but for safety reasons we make sure that only older teenagers use the power tools. We cut and placed the stripping in small grooves that we sawed into the perimeter of the window frame, creating an airtight seal in the windows. We've learned that sealing a room against drafts in winter can increase room temperatures by up to three or four degrees centigrade, thereby eliminating the need for auxiliary electric heaters which are often needed in Ukraine. With our improvements, the heat emanating from the orphanage's hot-water radiators would be sufficient to keep the kids warm for years to come.
Although the benefit of the project is obviously improved heating, our real aim is to improve energy efficiency throughout Ukraine. This is a big job in a country that has a largely un-metered electrical power grid, centralized municipal heating, and large-scale industrial waste of energy. Ukraine has a proven ability to reduce its future energy consumption by up to twenty percent if it were able to improve energy conservation and efficiency. However, because of politics Ukraine is heading towards completion of two new nuclear power reactors near to Rivne and the city of Khmelnitsky, an incredibly risky choice based on the contaminated nuclear legacy of the Soviet Union, including the damage caused by the Chernobyl disaster.
We often incorporate education about energy efficiency in our work, including information about renewable energy resources. Ukraine has a large potential to develop these resources, including biogas, wind, solar, and small hydro to reduce its dependence on traditional sources of power such as coal and nuclear power.
Although we can't decide whether Ukraine chooses the path of a sustainable energy future alone, we're hoping that these orphanages may at least one day be considered part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
Editor's Note
Dan Miner-Nordstrom is an activist and teacher living in Kyiv. He is the father of a newborn baby girl, Nadja Jane. For further reading and more information he suggests one see the following websites: www.energybrigades.org International Energy Brigades www.atominfo.org.ua
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