So, would you like to work on the Ark?

Check out that Ukrainian sky...

Reproduced below is a list of the risks faced by personnel who are working on the Ark:

Potential radiation risks of the "Shelter" personnel are the following:

• Job activities inside the 'hot cell' (the "open" plutonium area);
• External exposure;
• High risk of radionucleotide inhalation;
• High risk of radionucleotide absorption through cuts and/or wounds;
• High risk of a combination of severe injuries and intensive contamination of open tissues or inhalation of radioactive materials;
• Influence of high temperatures, hypoxia, and heat stress; and
  
• Synergism of radiological risk within general industrial risks.

The additional hazardous factors are as follows:

• Aggressive chemical aerosols, including welding aerosols;
• High humidity and uncomfortable temperatures at any time of the year;
• Absence of a forced exchange ventilation system inside the Object Shelter;
• Insufficient and artificial illumination;
• Presence of "confined spaces" in most of Object Shelter's rooms;
• Work at heights;
• Presence of debris and difficult access to workplaces in elevated ionizing radiation fields;
• Influence of personal protective equipment; and
• Probable synergistic effect of numerous hazardous factors.

Also, personnel will be exposed to factors stipulated by a shift type mode of work in the Exclusion Zone - shift in dietary regimen and type, accommodation in hotels, regime-stipulated restrictions in the Exclusion Zone, etc.

Not the most pleasant job, eh? In my interviews, I've been asking ICARR scientists what they thinks motivates the Ark workers to seek jobs in Chernobyl. So far, the answer has always been, "They can't find a job anywhere else."
___________________________________

This week I will be interviewing Chernobyl liquidators. These people were drafted to the Chernobyl site immediately after the disaster and helped to clean up the plant premises and the surrounding area. Generally, they were men aged 20 to 45. They were mostly plant employees, Ukrainian firefighters, plus many soldiers and miners from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other parts of the then Soviet Union.

The exact number of liquidators is unknown as no completely accurate records were kept of the people involved in the clean-up. However, more than 700,000 people who were involved (both on- and off-site) in tackling the accident’s aftermath were eventually granted the status of liquidator, and were provided special government benefits.

Ukraine spends about five percent of its annual budget on benefits for Chernobyl liquidators, which include a housing subsidy and free public transportation use. They come to RCRM for health care.

I'd like to know just how informed they were about risk when they went to work at the Chernobyl site... Also, why did they decide to go there? (or did they even have a choice?) Here are some of the questions I plan to ask them:

1. Where were you when you first heard about the Chernobyl disaster?
2. What was your reaction to it? Did you think it was serious, not serious?
3. Who asked you to be a liquidator?
   
4. Why did you agree?
5. Did you want to go to Chernobyl?
6. Did you have a choice about going there?
7. Were you aware of the risks of working in Chernobyl? Did anyone tell you about the dangers? (If no: Would you have agreed to be a liquidator if you had known about the risks?)
8. Were you scared about going there?
9. What did you do as a liquidator?
   

Etc, etc. I think the liquidator interviews will be very relevant to my project because I should be able to draw parallels between their situation and the situation of the Ark workers today.

Unfortunately, since the men won't speak English, I'm sure the language barrier will be an issue. (It's even an issue with the scientists who speak decent English.) I will have a translator with me - probably one of the RCRM people - but I've noticed that some questions just don't translate well. Here's to hoping the big ideas get through, at least.
___________________________________

On a lighter note - I did some more sightseeing this weekend:

Statue at the Dnipro metro station.


Incredible Chimera building, now used as a presidential administrative office.


A close-up of one of the chimera.


Friendship of Nations Monument, celebrating the 1654 "unification" of Russia and Ukraine.


At the Pyrohovo Museum of Folk Architecture & Everyday Life. It's an open-air, living history museum (think Williamsburg, VA) that is divided into seven "villages" representing different regional areas of Ukraine.


There were lots of windmills on the property.


This was taken in the Carpathian village, I think.

If you'd like to see more pictures, I've posted the links to my online photo albums on the bar to the right.

It's been a week!

(from pizdaus.com/)
Lenin sinks a three.

Tomorrow morning marks my first week in Kyiv, and what a week it's been. I've made some friends, seen some sights,

eaten some real Ukrainan food, and learned a whole lot about ICARR.

I also began conducting interviews with scientists at RCRM. Sometimes the language barrier makes it hard for my interviewees to understand certain questions, but with patience I can usually make myself understood. I've found it useful to give a typed copy of my questions to my interviewees, since many of them are stronger at reading English than at hearing it. I've been recording my interviews with a digital voice recorder, and I plan to spend some time this weekend listening to them and transcribing them.

I am looking forward to talking to Ark workers, hopefully next week. (Since it's summer, check-in controls and special controls happen less frequently, and we didn't have any this week.) I should also know more details about my trip to Chernobyl with RCRM.

I'm absolutely exhausted... research is hard work!

Some notes about the Ukrainian language

Since my summer course is coming to an end, I think it’s time for me to write about my impressions of the Ukrainian language:

1) Ukrainian is HARD.

It’s funny…I (reluctantly) took French in high school and college, and before this summer I would have told you that it was the absolute hardest language. However, after taking Ukrainian, I realize that the process of learning French was actually much quicker and much, much easier than the process of learning Ukrainian. Ukrainian is just so utterly different from English. According to the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State, Ukrainian is a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. This means it has “significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English” and takes, on average, 44 weeks or 1100 class hours to master. Other Category II languages include Farci, Vietnamese, Thai, Hindi, Hungarian, Urdu, and Hebrew.

French, Spanish, Italian, etc. are all Category I languages. They are closely related to English and take only 23-24 weeks or 575-600 class hours to master.

2) Ukrainian differs from English in interesting, but often frustrating ways.

First of all, Ukrainian uses a different alphabet than English. For me, the most noticeable consequence of this was that vocabulary did not stick in my head like it sometimes did in French. It’s very hard to memorize a word that looks different from anything you’ve heard in English and sounds different from anything you’ve heard in English.

For example, in French, the word for “blue” is simply “bleu.” It’s easy to retain in your memory because it looks English and sounds English. But in Ukrainian, it’s блакитний, which is pronounced kind of like bla-ke-tnee. Now, how on earth am I supposed to remember that?

Unlike English, Ukrainian is a declined language, which means that nouns and adjectives have different endings, depending on how they are used in a sentence. In English, we use word order and intonation for basic meaning; very few of our words change endings. In Ukrainian, however, it is the endings that convey meaning. Word order is flexible, something that is just used for emphasis and subtle shades of meaning. This definitely takes some getting used to… Ukrainian speakers can just throw the words out there any which way they want, but the meaning of the sentence is still retained.

So, for each noun and adjective you encounter in Ukrainian, you must learn their particular pattern of endings, based on the noun’s gender, number, and the case required for the function of the noun in the sentence.

The idea of case is something we don’t have in English. The best way to think about case is that it is a road map that tells you where things are going in a sentence and how they connect together. There are seven cases in Ukrainian: nominative, accusative, genitive, prepositional, dative, instrumental, and vocative. There are general uses for each one (dative for indirect objects, vocative for direct address, etc.), but there are secondary and tertiary uses as well. And, because case is so important, you can’t swallow your endings while speaking Ukrainian. You have to be thinking closely about it all the time.

And verbs… oh the verbs… they’re another story altogether. Conjugation seems so simple at first. Unlike English and French, there aren’t a lot of tenses in Ukrainian – just past, present, future, and imperative. However, Ukrainian is unfortunate enough to possess a little thing called “verbal aspect.” Basically, each verb has two forms, imperfective and perfective. The imperfective is used to denote the occurrence of an action, with focus on the action itself: action in progress, incomplete, repeated. The perfective, on the other hand, denotes a whole action, with focus on the result, inception, or limited duration of the action. Some boundary of the action is expressed in the verb itself.

For example, the sentences “Have you taken out the garbage?” and “Did you take out the garbage?” would require different verbs in Ukrainian. Ugh. It’s hard.

3) Despite all of this, Ukrainian is a charming, beautiful language.

Here's just one reason why I love Ukrainian: The word for “flip-flops” - в'єтнамки - sounds like “Vietnamki” and is derived from the Ukrainian word for a Vietnamese female.

This time next week, I’ll be on the plane to Kyiv. I can’t wait!

HIV/AIDS in Ukraine: Lessons learned from the "Альянс"

My Ukrainian professor spent all of last week preparing us for a meeting with a mysterious “Ukrainian delegation." This group had asked to visit our class at Pitt on Friday morning, and my professor had obliged. When we asked her about the composition of this “delegation” (Are they students from Ukraine? Professors?), she said she did not know. When we asked her why they wanted to waste their valuable time in the US witnessing the painful, frustrating process of three Americans learning Ukrainian, she also did not know. It was a riddle, and my classmates and I had no idea what to expect.

Still, we diligently prepared a presentation on our class activities, full of references to Cossacks and horilka; practiced a skit about birthday parties; and memorized the answers to several questions that we were sure the members of the delegation would ask us (“Why on earth are you studying Ukrainian?” being the most anticipated). All of this was done in Ukrainian, of course.

Friday morning came, and the “delegation” was a no show. My professor was not troubled, however, because she had received an apologetic call earlier, and they had invited us to pay them a visit at one of the local hospitals after lunch in lieu of their visiting us at Pitt that morning.

So, mystery solved. Turns out, the delegation was composed of physicians and public heath experts involved in HIV/AIDS work in Ukraine.

They had come to America for a short time on a kind of medical exchange program.

Of course I was thrilled at such a turn of events, although I can't say the same for my two classmates, neither of which is interested in health policy. (One of them is a graduate student studying Ukrainian folklore, and the other is a linguistics and religion major at Pitt.) Now, instead of seeing the meeting as a conundrum, I saw it as an opportunity to meet experts in Ukrainian public health who might be willing to help me on my project.

When we arrived at the hospital on Friday afternoon, we went to a small room and watched the 10 or so members of the Ukrainian delegation give a power point presentation (in Russian, with an English translator at hand) on the efforts of their organization, called the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. It was a truly fascinating lecture. I had no idea about the enormous problem Ukraine is having with AIDS. Here’s a quick summary that I gleaned from the presentation and from the Alliance’s website:

Ukraine is experiencing one of the fastest growing HIV epidemics in the world. It is estimated that 1.4% of people aged between 15 and 49 are living with HIV. This is the highest percentage in Europe, and according to UNAIDS/WHO, the actual number of people infected is considerably higher than official statistics suggest. And the epidemic is still growing. In 2006, 16,078 new cases of HIV-infection were officially registered, up from 13,770 in 2005.

Some basic facts about Ukraine and HIV:

	Total population 46,481,000
	Life expectancy (W) 73 (M) 62
	People living with HIV 410,000
	HIV prevalence 1.4%
	Deaths due to AIDS 22,000

Southern and eastern regions of Ukraine are the most affected, including the oblasts of Dnipropetrovs’k, Donets’k, Odesa, Mykolaiv and the Crimean Republic. While a third of the population lives in these regions, they represent two-thirds of all officially registered HIV cases. Western regions of Ukraine remain the least affected. I don't know why this is... All I know is that the south and east are more "Russified" than the west in terms of language and culture. Perhaps the southern and eastern areas are also poorer than the west? If anyone knows, let me know.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance office in Ukraine was established in December 2000 with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Its total available funding until 2008 exceeds $70 million.

The Alliance in Ukraine prioritizes community support to reduce HIV infection in the population groups most vulnerable to HIV (injecting drug users, female sex workers, men who have sex with men, prisoners and street children aged 10-18 years); develop community support for HIV-positive people and those close to them; reduce the stigmatisation of, and improve services for, people living with HIV and those groups most vulnerable to HIV; and identify, share and replicate best practice in most effective public response to the epidemic.

The Alliance's contributions appear to be very important. According to the delegation, although the Ukrainian government has continued to increase its funding for HIV/AIDS programs, the amount of money it provides is still quite pitiful given the scope of the problem. For example, right now, most of the money that funds antiretroviral treatments comes from international organizations like the Global Fund, not the state budget. Only 39% of the people who need ARV therapy in Ukraine actually receive it, due to the financial constraints of both the individuals and the NGOs who are trying to subsidize their treatments.

I'd like to learn more about the HIV/AIDS crisis in Ukraine. After the presentation, I struggled through a conversation in Ukrainian with a member of the delegation who lives in Kyiv. We swapped contact information, so hopefully we will have a chance to meet again and discuss all of this...

But maybe in English next time? :)

Is a language simply a dialect, plus an army?

When I first began learning Ukrainian, I assumed that it was essentially a dialect of Russian. After all, Russia and Ukraine have a long history together, and the question of dialect versus language is a tricky one. Generally, it is agreed upon that if you understand perfectly, you speak the same language. If it takes some effort to understand, then you speak different dialects of the same language. If you cannot understand at all, you speak a different language. It's as simple as that.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian doesn't fit neatly into one of these three molds vis-à-vis Russian. The languages are certainly related; according to my professor, a Russian who has been exposed to Ukrainian can usually figure it out. However, the languages are sufficiently different that a Russian from, say, Siberia, who has never met a Ukrainian person before, will probably not be able to understand.

I have proof of this notion. A friend of mine at Pitt grew up speaking Russian with her parents in Brooklyn, but was never exposed to Ukrainian. When I asked her if she could understand Ukrainian, she said she could to a certain point, after which it becomes too garbled. According to her, a Ukrainian speaker sounds "like a Russian who has been punched in the mouth." On the other hand, her father, who grew up in Belarus, can understand Ukrainian perfectly.

The reverse is also true in theory - Ukrainians who have heard Russian before should be able to understand it, while those who have not, should not. But in reality, nearly every Ukrainian can speak Russian fluently, so it's not a very relevant point to make. Indeed, some of the only people in the world who know just Ukrainian are students like me, who have taken or are taking the language outside eastern Europe. My professor even warned us that our knowledge of Ukrainian may be more "correct" than many native speakers', simply because our ears haven't been tainted by Russian.

Another interesting point: because Russian is so pervasive in Ukraine, a sort of creole language has become popular in many parts of the country. My professor, who is from Kharkiv, says that this mixed language is mostly found in the east. In the west, there are more people who speak Ukrainian at home (as opposed to Russian, or the mixed language), so there are many more "pure" speakers.

Someone once told me that a language is simply a dialect, plus an army. In the case of Ukrainian's relationship to Russian, this probably isn't true. All modern linguists agree that Ukrainian and Russian are separate languages that diverged from a common source many centuries ago. (To be specific, during the 13th century, two major dialects of Rus began to arise. The northeast dialect was the basis for the future Russian language, while the southwest dialect was the basis for the future Ruthenian language, which in turn developed into Ukrainian.) Nevertheless, from a historical perspective, the Ukrainian language has served both as a galvanizing factor motivating people who believed in the need for an independent Ukraine, and as a source of contention for those seeking to diminish the prospects for Ukrainian statehood. What a unique, complicated situation.

Was it prudent for me to take Ukrainian this summer, given that Russian is often the more popular spoken language in Ukraine? If my goal had been simply to speak to people in Kyiv and Chernobyl, then probably no, it would have been wiser to take Russian. But I also took this class to get a feel for Ukrainian culture - how Ukrainians think, what to expect from the nation and its people. I am learning that, so I do not regret my decision.

Plus, as Ukraine becomes a more powerful nation, and more and more schools start to offer the language, and more and more students decide to learn it, then my Ukrainian skills should prove very useful - maybe even invaluable - in the future!

"Ukraina" is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland'...

I just finished reading a great book on Ukrainian history, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine.



Author Anna Reid, who was a Kyiv correspondent for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph from 1993 to 1995, tells the story of Ukraine by dedicating each chapter to a different city or region. For example, in the first chapter, entitled "The New Jerusalem: Kyiv," Reid traces the great Slav civilisation of the tenth century that created and maintained Kyiv.

I found Borderland to be a very readable book because Reid mixed personal anecdotes and literary references with her (extensive) historical research. Ukraine is a vast country with a complex history, but Reid was able to successfully summarize its past by creating a "quilt" of sorts, constructed with patchwork stories about all of Ukraine's diverse inhabitants.

From the first page:

Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid 17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Being a borderland meant two things for Ukraine. First, it inherited a legacy of violence, and second, it was left with a tenuous sense of national identity. I think the issue of language helps to elucidate the latter point. In the eastern part of the country, almost everyone speaks Russian. In fact, in the Crimea (a south-eastern region on the Black Sea,) many residents refuse to accept that Ukraine is an independent nation at all - they still consider themselves Russian citizens. However, in the western part of the country, nearly everyone speaks Ukrainian. Indeed, Lviv (a large city near the Polish border) became the birthplace of the Ukrainian independence movement. Also, Ukrainian is a more rural language associated with the peasantry, while Russian is spoken in most big cities.

I think the cultural dynamic between Russia and Ukraine is fascinating. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out in Kyiv and Chernobyl, the places where I will be spending most of my time. I hope I made the right choice when I decided to learn the Ukrainian language this summer instead of Russian...From what I've read, most Kyiv residents are bi-lingual, but I have no idea what language is dominant in the north-central region of Ukraine, where Chernoybl and Pripyat are located. Fortunately, Russian and Ukrainian share some vocabulary, so there is a chance that I will be able to understand one by knowing the other.

This post is getting long, but before I stop writing I want to share with you an interesting map that shows the Ukrainian-speaking world:


There appears to be a significant Ukrainian community in Canada. Who knew!