More about faces

Waiting in an interminable line at the post office at Maidan, I watched fascinated as a clerk used a sewing machine, right there behind the counter, to run up a cloth bag to enclose something for mailing. When have you ever seen a sewing machine in use at a post office? Never.

Obviously the lines are going to be slow if they’re sewing customized mailing bags.

My friends Pat and Roman are teachers at the school. They’re from Alberta, have Ukrainian ancestry and know all about the history of the area and the “breaking of the Slavic people” under the Soviet system. They're always helping me to put the difficulties of living here into perspective.

Last week I rode the trolley with Roman and Pat. Trolleys have this system where you buy a ticket and stick it into a little machine to punch a hole in it. It takes two hands--one to hold the ticket and one to push down the lever.

No one on a trolley has two free hands. Almost no one has one free hand. You’re holding a bag, you’re holding onto the bar for stability because the trolley is reeling back and forth and there are no seats.

I mentioned this to Roman. He told me that this is a remnant of the Soviet era, when everything on the “ground level of living” was difficult, and calculatedly so, to prevent people from having the energy to think about ideology. “You have to hold the ticket AND punch the ticket while grabbing onto your potatoes after waiting in line for three hours to buy them. And you‘re told that you‘re living in a Soviet paradise.”

So...no extra energy to grin at a stranger.