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.

Russia (#10) 4-6-2004, An afternoon at the Pedagogical University

    My notes for this day are proving to be insufficient -- cryptic, sketchy. On days like this, there are too many holes in my cryptic jottings to be entirely filled in. So much for my own insistent admonition to the group to set aside time for the journal and keep the information basic rather than ambitious. Nevertheless,  on the afternoon of our tour of the old city, we traveled for a game at the Pedagogical University, and a number of things stand out in memory.

    One thing that stands out was the playing floor -- pink in the center from foul line to foul line, a darker pink in the key, yellow in the side lanes, and green along the sidelines -- a real eye catcher. In addition to vividly functional, colorful paint, the floor showed its age. It was safe, but occasionally the ball would bounce oddly on a pass or a dribble. It reminded me of the old Boston Garden parquet floor with its "dead spots" that gave opposing teams fits . . . nice to look at but tough to play on.

    While the whole gang made the trip, only the boys were scheduled to play. It was a tough game. Our high school sons played a university team, which made for an interesting match-up. Our guys played well but ended up losing. My notes say we lost by 3; Skip's official email home for this day notes we lost by 2 after leading most of the game. Either way, we lost, so who's quibbling: it was a good game, fun to watch. 

    I remember finding a seat in the balcony that overlooked the court, where I chatted with Andrew before the game about what we had seen that morning and about the Pedagogical University. Just before the game started, Andrew said he'd be right back and he left. 

    Almost immediately I found that students began filling in all the neighboring seats, including Andrew's. That was OK -- except that I didn't know what to say to my new neighbors; my page of "common Russian phrases" didn't seem all that useful. Just before he excused himself, Andrew told me that a student behind him wanted to know what I thought of my experience so far in Russia. I pulled out my sheet, located the word for "excellent," which I believe phonetically pronounced "Aht - leech - nah," which I said with enthusiasm. I hope it was heard with the measure of intensity and clarity I had intended. But starting a conversation once Andrew left was not likely to happen.

    The other memorable tid-bit from that afternoon, as I noted earlier, was the multicolored gym floor. It was quite spectacular.

    None of the photographs I have in my possession quite capture the way those colors dominated. After the game, as a gesture of our friendship, our boys gave the Russian players a bag keepsake gifts, and then everyone posed for pictures.

.

    The real point of the encounter was that the Russian team joined us for dinner at our hotel. We had a translator at each table to facilitate conversation. The idea was to"break the ice" with these guys, to let them see us a people rather than competitors, and to create interest that folks from the Ministry Center could follow up on.

    

     My notes for the day make no mention of what we were served for these friendship dinners. But my notes do record that at our devotional time that evening, Andy Norton asked us "Why are you here?", to which Mason Sorsensen immediately answered, "To see a pink gym floor for the first time!"

Russia -- Tues 6 April '04 -- a day of leisure (#9)

    Given that there were 19 American guys in our group with many talents, gifts, professions, and skills to offer beyond the Dads' team clearly fading basketball skills, it is not surprising that the folks at the Ministry Center had arranged to assign different men, different groups, to a variety of different tasks. John Woodard, our IT guy extraordinaire, was in high demand setting up IT systems and fixing computers at the Ministry Center itself. He was also our official photographer. John Horton and Mason Sorenson, as pastors, were sent to meet with other pastors in the city. The coaches among us were sent to meet with Russian coaches. And so forth.

    All this to say, our experiences in Russia varied depending upon where one was needed. That meant for me at least a morning of leisure touring Vladimir on the Tuesday after Palm Sunday. The tour began after our American breakfast, of course, which consisted of short, fat hot-dogs, hollow noodles, hot coffee, and yogurt. I was becoming convinced that the "average Russian" knew about as much about America culture as the "average American" knew about Russian culture.

    Being neither pastors nor skilled technicians, a group of us were given the opportunity to walk the "old village" Vladimir. That is, we were given a tour of the original, once-fortified city by our interpreter and tour guide, Andrew, who described himself as a "Jack-for-all-trades." 

      On reflection I will note that several "themes" appeared to run through what we saw in the "old village," also referred to as the "old city." One of these themes took the form of architecture expressed through old buildings that are curiously compelling, storied, and beautiful in their own right. Who knew, for example, that Vladimir has the greatest number of extant 12th century buildings in all of Russia? Many, such as the church pictured here are built of white stone; others are built of brick or even wood.

    For this walking tour, Andrew pulled me aside and asked me to relay to our group certain information that he would tell me. As his English was very good, I am not sure why he wanted assistance nor do I know exactly why he chose me as his relay, but it was a pleasant surprise to have gained his trust in this way. 

    As has happened on visits I have made to other countries with long and complex histories, I quickly understood how extensive my ignorance actually was.These structures mirror other characteristics of the old Russian culture that are beautiful, compelling, and storied as well.

 

    Our tour began with a nunnery/convent and the church it is attached to, dating from the 12th Century. Neither this nor many old city buildings were actually open to visitors, so we toured mostly outside.

    In the old city we saw many one story wooden buildings, too, with elaborate window decorations. Andrew told us to think of  the windows as eyes, which are a gateway to one's soul; the window decorations, consequently, are designed to ward off evil spirits, to keep these dark forces from the inner parts of the house. Although early April was not yet the season for leaves, mountain ash were growing at the corners of many of these old wooden houses for good luck. The mountain ash or Rowan trees can be identified by their compound leaves and their clusters of berries that turn orange or red. They carry a long history of bringing luck in the folk traditions of many cultures.

    A second theme that ran through our tour of the old city were the ever present signs of Christianity, many cohabiting with these folk superstitions, which attest to traditionally deep beliefs in the supernatural. My impression was (and is) that centuries of hardship, war, scarcity, and centuries of oppressive government under both the Czarist and the Soviet systems have led to a strong sense that "fate" usually gets the last word.

    The "Golden Gate," built in 1164, is the only old city gate remaining. The Copper Gate and the Silver Gate were destroyed during siege by one foreign army or another.

 

     A third "theme" I note in many aspects of old architecture is the persistence of suffering, particularly suffering as a consequence of war, of which there have been many.

    In the years surrounding our visit, the Russian Federation was engaged in military conflict in Chechnya, which, we were led to understand, caused worry among the parents of young men. I assume this conflict was little reported by the western press as I knew nothing about it prior to our visit. 

    In addition to the Golden Gate, which was intended to defend access to the old city, were remnants of the medieval earthen ramparts, essentially a protective wall that once encompassed the whole city (see below).

    

   In list form I will note that within walking distance we also had opportunity to visit the old city water tower [the brick building with the cone-shaped roof below] and a museum beneath it housing the "youth agricultural learning center."

 

 

     We passed by St. Nikita (the Martyr) Orthodox Church established by St. Vladimir. My notes refer to it as the oldest church in Vladimir, which makes it very old indeed, although it seems unlikely that the present structure is the original one. But for the onion dome, the present church building strikes me now as then to resemble a Victorian house. The green of its exterior is a particularly Russian color, and its windows display the kind of decorative features found on many old wooden houses.

    Further on we visited the library where Andrew had studied as a student and the building that had housed the Vladimir Communist Party Headquarters where Andrew's father, now retired, had worked. As sensitively as I could, I tried to ask about that time; the question ran along the lines of "Did your father lose his job when the Soviet Union broke up?"

    Andrew answered rather circumspectly that his father, like many older Russians, missed the stability and relative predictability of life under the old regime. They had known nothing else.

    In retrospect, I think it was beginning to dawn on me that one large benefit of a short-term missions trip extends well beyond what a missionary might actually "do."  Even before playing most of our games I knew that basketball was, after a manner of speaking, "incidental." The real benefit of our trip was personal. Whatever benefit there may have been to our missionaries and to the contacts we made, my world had been exponentially enlarged.

     The last words in my journal for that tour were "Wow -- What a morning!"