Russia (#11) "Aht - LEECH - nah"!

     As an element of our preparation for this missions trip to Russia, we were told that our responses to the country and to the culture would likely change over the ten days we were there. We could expect, broadly speaking, to think everything is wonderful early on before finding all that "goodness and wonder" replaced by overwhelming negatives -- a kind of manic/depressive experience. That up and down roller coaster should, finally, even out, find a middle ground, allowing us to see the country for what it is, neither all good nor all bad. This last state of mind would allow us to see Russia realistically, objectively. The caution for us was that some would not have enough time in country for their perspectives to even out.

    One doesn't have to leave home to know that there is enough "bad stuff" virtually everywhere to complain about if one is disposed that way. Complaint-worthy stuff can be comprised of many things on a trip to a foreign country -- being outside of one's comfort zone, discovering that few things meet one's expectations, actual hardships of one sort or another, or, even, boredom. 

       All this to say, my personal experience in Russia, as it has been with all the countries I have visited, did not follow this pattern. For me, it has all and always been "aht-LEECH-na" ("excellent," according to our Russian phrase sheet), as I told my student questioner at the Pedagogical University. Oh, the privilege and joy of being there!

      Even posing for a group photo in front of a statue of Lenin, whose patched, pasted, and strangely preserved body lies in state in a mausoleum alongside Red Square in Moscow, was a once-in-a lifetime treat. I'm not sure where the little boys who joined us in the photo materialized from but, I guess, everyone enjoys a serendipitous photo-op! 

     We were told that many of these soviet-era monuments had been torn down, but the ones that remain -- and there are many -- remind us that politically inspired hero adulation is tenuous and fleeting.

   We were fascinated, or course, by the gym floors that infused vivid color into our days. In many of these gyms we also found the Russian Olympic Bear mascot from the 1980 summer games that the US pulled out of over human rights concerns. These bears adorned many walls in the athletic venues we visited.

     On other walls in these athletic spaces we found whimsical cartoonish figures meant, I suppose, to lighten the mood and encourage the young athletes. Here, in down time before or after games, the boys found a training room with these figures. Stefan took on the climbing rope challenge and was rewarded with an encouraging thumbs up from the big dog on the wall.

     At some point among these astonishing sights and opportunities, it began to dawn on me exactly how extraordinary it was for us to be in Russia at that moment of relative peace and congeniality. The Dads among us, having grown up in the Soviet era, had to regard this experience as nothing short of miraculous. 

      I would have this sense constantly in the days to come. 

     I remember early on our first day in Russia, as our bus was driving away from the Moscow airport in, we passed a police station. In front of this small station were two uniformed solders sweeping the walkway with short handled brooms made of bundles of sticks or limbs. But for the uniforms, the long military overcoats, they might have been mistaken for the babushkas one sees frequently tidying up.

    I was not fast enough with my camera to capture that scene. Like so much from that trip -- and from life as we might experience it -- I saw a richness that passes too quickly to be captured or saved, but for which I will always be grateful.

    All notions of basketball prowess aside -- the idea that our primary task of making friends and being ambassadors of good will, our mission, was growing in me. It seems right to me now, all these years later, that what we understand of what we are doing in God's service must be grounded in the common details of place and time -- a grounding that fills us with unspeakable wonder.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#17]

Where Did You Come From? Why Are You Here?

On January 2nd we headed for the Zhang family village, which is to say, the village of Edward's father's family.  Festivities honoring Edward's father were set to begin around noon, and we were invited.

We had been to the Zhang village briefly the day before after our hike into the mountains. Before going to bed we had been told to be ready to go by 9; but at 7 a.m. Edward announced we were leaving in 20 minutes.

As it is also nearby, we drove first to Edward's mother's village, LuoXi. To say that these villages were unexpected to us as western foreigners is almost laughable. In this world all manner of discontinuities exist side by side.

I had had similar impressions on visiting Vladimir, Russia, in 2004. There, Soviet era buildings on the main streets gave way to 19th Century wooden houses on streets of dirt and mud on every side street and back street. The telescoping of time, culture, technologies, and material wealth is almost beyond comprehension for American eyes; the transition from one block to the next is simply astonishing.

In these Chinese villages there is no transition. The telescoping is absolute. For example, there is no mud in the thoroughfares as one might expect -- and as I found often in Russia -- because nearly all walking and driving areas are smoothly and recently paved with concrete.

It is easy to see that a certain kind of village renewal has been going on and that the government has invested in basic kinds of infrastructure (roads, paths, bridges, public areas). This investment was also true in the Zhang village, so it was clear that progress in rural villages has been a priority.

Houses, unlike the road and bridge infrastructure, are structurally varied. New construction sits side by side with old buildings.  All construction, all progress, moves by fits and starts; it continues, I am informed, until the money runs out.

Construction itself is labor intensive, which means virtually everything requires many hands, from digging foundations to mixing cement to hauling materials to laying bricks. Older home are made of an earth colored brick with tiled roofs; many have dirt floors. Newer homes were largely poured concrete slabs with brick walls layed on a two-story, rebar reenforced concrete framework. When they are finished the houses have steel doors and metal grills over the windows; but some houses had open windows and empty door frames, presumably because money had run out before grills and doors could be purchased.

It is one of the astonishing stories of recent Chinese growth and success that these two women, Edward's mother and aunt, spent the first twenty years of their lives in this little blond brick house. It has two rooms. To the right is the room where their father slept. It was his room. To the left is the room where the mother and her children slept. Two thirds of the room is a bed; up a wooden ladder in the loft is another bed.

The window opening is covered with wooden bars and the ceiling is just the underside of the roof tiles, which rest on sapling supports. My guess is that the tiles slid occasionally and let in wind or rain.

 Edward's father grew up under similar circumstances.  Either just before or just after they got married, Edward's mother and father left the village for the town, Lehu, where they lived in town poverty rather than village poverty. For a number of years Edward's father worked various laboring jobs before their fortunes changed and he began to make money.  Edward remembers being poor when he was very young and envying playmates who had new toys.

Poverty remains part of life in the village.  We watched Edward's aunt try to give money to the masons building a house next to their two room childhood home -- the construction pictured above -- so that they could buy supplies to continue working. But giving the money took considerable negotiation and explanation since neither of the masons were used to handling money.

We have this phrase in English, dirt poor, that I have no first hand experience with.  But here we came close to seeing what it might look like. This poverty is as unimaginable to me as the material success and wealth of Edward's parents. Their rags to riches story is the stuff of dreams, American or otherwise.

Despite this recognition, nothing I might conclude from visiting this village is simple or easy. Perhaps it is enough, here, to say that I have been astonished and humbled to see with my own eyes what I could never have imagined.