Live Fire with Chuck Holton

The highlight of my trip was spending a day in a Ukranian village. Kiev is like any other big city – so influenced by western media that it could just as well have been New York or Paris in a lot of ways. I asked Olenka if she knew of any place I could stay that was off the beaten path, and she obliged me by sending me out to her Grandmother’s house in the tiny village of Peremyshel, about halfway between Kiev and Lviv.

I knew better than to go out there without a translator, since I was told that I would be probably the second westerner ever to visit the village. The first was another friend of Olenka’s a few years ago. So I hired Olenka’s husband Stepan to travel with me and act as translator.

The train arrived in Slavuta in the middle of the night. Olenka’s mother and father had traveled over from Khmelnytsky to pick us up and drive us to the village. Part of the directions for getting there included “turn off the paved road.”

When we arrived, Olenka’s Babushka was waiting for us in her nightgown. She got us settled in our beds, and we all went to sleep.

The next morning was Sunday, and we all woke up and had a wonderful time getting to know each other in that special way that you do when you can’t use language to communicate. (my translator was still asleep.) By the time Stepan woke up, I felt like the rest of his family was old friends. It was obvious that having a westerner staying in one’s house was definitely as special an experience for them as being there was for me.

Anyway, here’s a rundown on how people live in rural Ukraine, based on my experience there.

They live in a concrete and wood home, with four rooms. The floors are simple painted wood, and the walls of the home are whitewashed (don’t lean against them!)

Each room of the house is watched over by an icon of some sort, usually place high in one corner of the room. In the house I stayed in, there was a kitchen, a living room, a dining room and a bedroom. All told the house was probably 1000 square feet, which was larger than the average apartment I saw in Kiev.

The outhouse was out in the back yard, a one-hole affair, serviced by a honey bucket, not a dug hole.

Water was brought in from a well in the front yard. It was the kind that you lower a bucket down on a rope and get the water. I was told that when they built the nearby Khmelnitskaya atomic energy station, the level of the water dropped a good ten feet in the village wells. Inside the kitchen, there was a cool “sink” with a small tank which was filled with a bucket, a faucet above the basin, and the bucket went down below and was refilled by the “drain.” I’d actually like to find one of these somewhere. It was neat.

My hosts didn’t have a car – instead they got around on foot or on bicycles. Many people in the village got around on simple horse-drawn carts. I even got to ride on one. The neighbors kept coming by to see “the American,” curious as I was. One offered me a ride on his cart, and I gladly accepted. We drove all the way out of town and stopped at the paved road. There, the man grilled me with questions about my life, and looked with great interest at all the pictures I’d brought of my home and family. He couldn’t fathom the idea of a lawn. “You don’t harvest it for anything?” he asked, scratching his head.

The Ukranians grow much of their own food – even those that live in town have a “dacha”, or small plot of land out in the country. The people I stayed with had a garden that would knock your socks off – and it obviously required a level of work and tending that is beyond anything I could fathom. The garden stretched out behind their house for a good acre or more, alongside similar gardens tended by their neighbors. They grew pretty much the same things we do – squash, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, beets, etcetera.

There was another plot of land across the street from their house where they grew about a half-acre of rutabagas, to feed their animals in the winter. I’m gonna have to try that sometime. There was also a couple acres that they cut hay off of – I saw some people cutting it with scythes, and it was stored outdoors in old-fashioned, picturesque mounds. I was told that the village collectively owned a haybine, which cut the hay for most people in the area, however.

As for animals, my hosts had chickens and a dog named “Deek.” Some of their neighbors might have a pig or a milk cow – and in the village center you could see people selling raw milk in old one-liter pepsi bottles. I mentioned how illegal that would be in the states, and Stepan said, “I grew up drinking milk like that.”

In all, the family that I met seemed to lead a simple, yet contented life.

To see all my pictures from the village, click here.

Ukraine is the only country I’ve ever seen where saran wrap is a fashion accessory. In fact, the way most women dress in Kiev would make Britney Spears blush, and Panamanian women’s clothing seem loose and modest.

I had my theories as to why: Since Ukraine has a male/female ratio of .86, which is 11 points lower than the U.S, the competition for available males is fierce – and girls are forced to “shake what momma gave them” in order to get noticed.

This highly (un)scientific theory got blown out of the water when I spoke to a group of youth from the Calvary Chapel Mission. After the talk (which, coincidentally was about modesty), one girl came up to me and said, “How can you tell us to be modest when we are just trying to dress like American women?”

I shook my head. “What? American women don’t dress like that!”

She was adamant. “Yes they do. We watch MTV.”

Touche’. Point taken. But it was useless to try and explain that American TV does not reflect American values. Or does it? I guess if enough people turned the tube off and didn’t watch, then the supply would decrease to meet demand.

Unfortunately, most of the world sees MTV as the embodiment of American values. So if you ever find yourself wondering “why they hate us so,” be reminded that the things that other countries hate most about America are likely the same things you hate about it.

This on the heels of yet another study showing the negative affects of watching television. This one posits that “those who watched less than one hour a day performed better at all memory tasks.” That is, your mind stays sharper if you don’t dull it with television.

Randy Alcorn has some good ideas for reducing the impact of television in your home.

This article has some frightening facts concerning the effects that too much TV can have on your children’s development – especially in the part of the brain which controls moral judgment. Yikes.

This guy made a nice poem about kicking the box.

I’m with John Piper on this one:

“My conviction is that one of the main reasons the world and the church are awash in lust and pornography . . . is that our lives are intellectually and emotionally disconnected from infinite, soul-staggering grandeur for which we were made. Inside and outside the church western culture is drowning in a sea of triviality, pettiness, banality, and silliness. Television is trivial. Radio is trivial. Conversation is trivial. Education is trivial. Christian books are trivial. Worship styles are trivial. It is inevitable that the human heart, which was made to be staggered with the supremacy of Christ, but instead is drowning in a sea of banal entertainment, will reach for the best natural buzz that life can give: sex.”
John Piper, Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, Part 2

Here’s a glimpse into what life is like for a family in the former Soviet Union. It’s a little humbling, to be quite frank, since by comparison, my life is characterized by such ridiculous material wealth that it makes you want to puke. But it was a real eye-opening blessing to see life through the eyes of a Ukranian family for a week. Beats the heck out of staying in a hotel.

During the years that the Soviet Union was in charge, they did everything to highlight the importance of the state, and to emphasize the unimportance of the individual. So what you see are enormous apartment buildings which resemble beehives made almost entirely of poured concrete. These austere structures house up to 1000 families each, and are pretty devoid of silly useless ideas like aesthetics. Paint seems to have been regarded as the very height of frivolity in the Soviet era. Why paint when concrete is such a beautiful shade of grey?

Anyway, apartments are classified by size, having one, two or three rooms. The family I lived with was actually two families, sharing a three-room apartment, approximately 900 square feet of living space. It was divided into two bedrooms, a kitchen, a tub/sink room, an enclosed toilet (you can touch all four walls, with your head, without getting up from the toilet). and a dining/living/office/storage room.

If you’d like to see more pictures of the apartment, click here for a set of pictures.

What struck me most about this place is that even though there are thousands of people living in very close proximity to one another, you really didn’t notice much. I mean, due to the fact that the place was constructed like a bomb shelter, not much noise could be heard through the walls, floors and ceiling.

My hosts were incredibly generous and gracious, and have my gratitude for allowing me to take a peek at what their lives were like. My admonition for the rest of you is this: Think about the place where you live, and ask yourself how much you take for granted.

I became more Libertarian after this trip, more than I’ve ever been. My trip to Ukraine gave me a tiny glimpse of what the soviet union was really like, and it ain’t pretty.

It’s not that they haven’t made huge strides since the fall of the wall in ‘91. One Hassidic Jew I spoke to – who was at that moment being hassled for his faith by Passport control authorities in Kiev – told me that the red tape isn’t near as frustrating as it used to be. But it’s frustrating enough.

As if in order to recreate that “The state is everything, you are nothing” Soviet experience, getting out of the airport in Kiev requires patience that would have made Job flake out and kill something. I used to think that the slowest land mammal in existence was the Department of Motor Vehicles clerk. I’ve now learned that when the DMV clerk dies, his body is shipped to Kiev and propped up in a passport control booth. The line I was in was going so slowly that there was almost a riot among passengers who had arrived three hours early for their flights, and were seeing those flights take off without them because the man whose job it was to stamp your passport was apparently descended from a three-toed sloth.

The line moved at a glacier’s pace, and when I finally made it to the window, the man took a look at my passport and shook his head. “Do you have another passport? This one no good.”

“What do you mean?” I said incredulously. “I’ve traveled around the world with that passport! How can you say it’s no good?”

In answer, he simply shook his head and laid my passport aside, and said, “next!”

I was about to yank him through the little glass portal by his necktie. But I kept my cool, and didn’t budge. A moment later, he looked up at me as if to say, “are you still here?” And I just stared at him. He sighed and picked up the phone, and a moment later his supervisor appeared. A short conversation in Ukranian followed. Then the supervisor asked, “Do you have any other form of identification?”

“Sure,” I said. “Here’s my West Virginia state driver’s license.”

The man looked at the license, and then gave me my papers back and waved me through.

Which proves my theory about the guy being a former WVDMV employee. Cool.

If you’ve never spent a night in Heathrow airport – you aren’t missing anything. Due to terror controls, it is now mandatory that whenever you are in the airport, you are made to be as uncomfortable as possible. The furniture in this airport, if used at GITMO, would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. And just so you can’t possibly get some sleep even on the cold, hard floor, after midnight they bring in the workers with jackhammers (!) and hammer drills to serenade you.

There are a whole cadre of people who work here overnight – like the “maze makers” who show up like trolls and design incredibly intricate mazes out of those waist-high poles with straps between them. Then there are the men who drive the floor cleaners which are like something out of mad max.

Yeesh. Get me home.

Saturday was one of those days when you get that feeling like you’re someplace you never thought you’d be, and will never be again.

I booked the trip online through SAM, and was fortunate to get in a group, which dropped the price considerably. We all met at the SAM headquarters in Kiev. There was Lam – from Hong Kong, Piers from London, a woman from Spain, Sven from South Africa and his buddy from Russia, and me. Quite the cosmopolitan crew. All of us shared the same underlying reason for wanting to see the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident – bragging rights. I mean, how many people will you meet in your life who have been there?

Some people might say that touring a place that is devoid of human habitation due to extremely high levels of radioactive contamination is crazy. Then again, some people say being married to me would be crazy, and yet look how nice and well adjusted my wife is. Well, except for that nervous tick she’s developed. Nothing that a little medication can’t fix.

Anyway, we drove the hour and a half from Kiev to Chernobyl packed into a small minibus, making small talk and getting to know each other a little. Piers is a travel writer who is currently living in Moscow. Sven works for a hotel chain. Lam quit his job to spend five months traveling the world.

The first checkpoint is 30km from the reactor. Beyond that spot, you have to have a good reason (in writing) for being there. The soldiers held us at the checkpoint for nearly an hour, being very soviet and stoic, just for effect. It turned out they couldn’t figure why the nice Spanish woman had two surnames. Apparently dual surnames are prohibited in the former Soviet Union, or something.

After we were allowed to continue, I was surprised to see that the landscape really hadn’t changed much. Even after we passed the 10km checkpoint – the countryside looked just fine. Apparently the trees and grass, and even some of the animals are flourishing in the area. We stopped in the town of Chernobyl and met Maxim, our guide. He has been working here for ten months, and likes it. He works fifteen days on, and fifteen off, so as he pointed out, it’s like getting six months of vacation per year.

Maxim gave us a little briefing about the accident – he said that Chernobyl gets about 14 thousand visitors annually, but that because this year is the 20th anniversary, they’ve had over 20,000 visitors so far.

He took us to the site of one of the villages near the reactor that had to be plowed under – showed us mounds where homes had been buried with sand. He knew the geiger counter readings in different areas of the tour by heart.

Eventually, what the tour came down to was standing and staring at the crumbling concrete sarcophagus which covers reactor 4 from about 100 meters away. We were allowed to photograph it, but strongly prohibited from taking pictures of anything else in the area.

Then the real interesting part of the tour began – a trip to the ghost town of Pripyat. This once-thriving town of almost 50,000 now stands empty, strangely intact, even though it has been thoroughly looted and vandalized.

We visited the swimming pool, the high school, the kindergarten, an apartment building, the theatre and the town square. Maxim seemed ill at ease for the entire time we were in Pripyat – the guard at the edge of town only allowed us 1.5 hours in the city, and Maxim seemed all too aware of the radiation which remains there to this day – especially in places like the roof of the 16-floor apartment building, among other places. There, people came to watch the fire in the reactor, unaware that the glowing core was giving them lethal doses of radiation where they stood. It was strange to stand in that same spot, under the hammer and sickle neon sign which adorned the top of the building, and think of those people as we stared at the same reactor.

The people of Pripyat were told to take only enough for three days – but they never returned. So everything is still there – furniture, clothes, you name it. Much has been looted or destroyed, but we took more time than we probably should have in places like the library – poring over old newspapers from April, 1986, and looking at the discarded gas masks scattered eerily around on the ground.

When we stopped at the amusement park, Maxim warned Piers to only stay a few seconds near the bumper cars, which because of all the metal there still give off a very high reading. It was hard to imagine the potential harm, when you didn’t FEEL anything.

On the way back we drove (quickly) through the “red forest” near the reactor. The reading inside the vehicle was 1500-2000 rem per hour – the highest reading on the trip. For comparison, you probably get about 300 rem per year as a matter of course. Most places inside Pripyat emitted that much per hour. Spooky.

When it was over, we went back to Chernobyl and ate a very nice four-course lunch. The SAM brocure assured us that ” the quality of the food is guaranteed”and it was, in fact, very tasty. After that we had to pass through a scanner to check our bodies for any picked-up radiation, and then we drove back home.

So I guess in all, I can give the tour a “glowing” report. Har har.

Despite rumors to the contrary, I have not yet assumed room temperature, and am still doing fine here in Ukraine. Sorry I haven’t kept you up to date – the internet situation here is pretty abysmal.

Today I’m in Lviv, near the Polish border. I am debating whether to cross over into Poland, because I have a train scheduled back to Kiev tonight at 2200.

The last two days I spent in the village of Peremish’e, or something like that. To say it’s off the beaten path is something of an understatement, and my presence had an affect on the locals not much different than if a three-headed green martian wandered into town.

Actually, the folks were quite friendly, and very curious to know about my life. Hiring a translator for the trip has been my best investment yet – though I’m getting pretty adept at communicating on my own now. My hosts in the village were the world’s cutest Babushka and her family, and they seemed to have a real understanding of my objectives while there – to experience the culture – and did everything they could to ensure that I went away with all the experience they could give me.

Yesterday we attended not one, but three separate eastern orthodox services. At first glance it appeared that everyone was fanning themselves to keep cool, then I realized they were making the sign of the cross – over and over and over and over and… I’ve never seen so much genuflecting in my life. The orthodox tradition is filled with mysterious and ancient traditions, and there were so many icons present that it would feel crowded even if you were the only human being in the church.

my presence at the service was something of a distraction for some, though my hosts were sure to visit the church administrators at each location to explain my presence and ask forgiveness for any liturgical mistakes I might make. By and large they were very gracious. I got some great pictures and video – but will have to probably wait until I return to the states to get them uploaded.

After church we went walking in the woods looking for mushrooms – a favored activity among the locals this time of year. There were lots of woods around the village, and since private land ownership is sort of a new concept, most of the woods didn’t belong to anybody. After an hour or so we had several pounds of mushrooms, all of which I was convinced were highly poisonous. The one thing my guidebook said that you should absolutely, positively never do in Ukraine is eat the mushrooms – so when the aforesaid mushrooms showed up as the main course for dinner last night – let’s just say supper was scarier than my visit the previous day to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. But I ate them, and haven’t keeled over yet. Actually, they didn’t taste half bad, either.

After mushroom picking, the family took me to visit the only attraction in the area – another nuclear plant, this one still in operation. It was very interesting to contrast it with Chernobyl, and especially the “company town” which was constructed to house the thousands of workers employed at the plant. During the Chernobyl trip we visited Prypyat, which is probably the world’s most famous ghost town – it had housed 47,000 people, but now stands empty. I’ll make a separate blog post about that later.

So that’s it for the summary of the last couple days. When I have time I’ll post more about each day in succession. Right now I have to find a bus to Poland.

Thanks for all your prayers. Things so far have gone incredibly smooth, considering all the schedules and moving parts involved. Please continue to pray that God will show me the things here that he has for me to see, and that Connie and the kids will stay well in my absence.

Well, in the last 72 hours I’ve been on 6 planes, four trains, four buses, a donkey, four taxis and a rental car. Okay, so I made up the donkey. All of this took place across four states and in four separate countries, five if you count California. In that time, I’ve been able to log a grand total of just over ten hours of sleep.

Last night I left the airport during my 12-hour layover to find a hotel and grab a few hours sleep. I had found one backpacker hostel that was cheap enough (in a VERY expensive city) to justify a four-hour nap.

Problem was, by the time I got there, the door was closed for the night, no more rooms being rented. So, I turned around and headed for the metro, intent on going back to the airport. But when I returned to the metro station, I was told that it, too had closed. Which meant I was stranded in downtown London with my pack and all my gear, until at least 0530.

But being the optimist that I am, I decided that wasn’t such a bad thing, since my body cl9ck was telling me it was only mid- afternoon. So I took a walking tour of London, by night.

I saw big ben, Westminster abbey, (did you know there’ s a statue of Abraham Lincoln across from it?), trafalgar square, Picadilly circus (and what a circus, indeed!), etcetera, complete with a thoughtful complement of prostitutes, drug pushers and chinese mafia hit men thrown in just to give it that “you’re about to die in a foreign city because you’re a moron” feel.

But hey, I beat the crowds. That’s how I look at it. Got some great pictures, too. I’d like to see all those goody-goody rule-abiding, daytime-loving tourbus-riders get a picture of Big Ben without a herd of sheeple in the foreground.

So I headed back to the airport around 0530. Note to self, if you are ever again packing two large bars of specialty soap as gifts for a Ukrainian Babushka, refrain from winding your cellphone charger around the bag containing said soap and tossing in your extra wristwatch. I’ve heard that the TSA takes a dim view of even harmless items made to resemble bombs. Those people have no sense of humor whatsoever.

And speaking of no sense of humor, after what I’d read about the customs process in Ukraine, I half expected to get the old turn-your head and cough routine from some scowling, very large former russian power lifter named Olga, but in actuality, I sailed through without even the most cursory of body cavity searches.

So now I’m in Kiev. It’s much nicer than the industrial wasteland I expected. Makes me feel very small to know all these millions of people have been going along with their daily lives for all this time with no clue as to my existence.

But give me a few days – I’ll remedy that situation.

Friday was a lot of fun – we spent all night hanging out with stuntman Monte Perlin and Randy Travis, on the set of their upcoming movie called “The Wager.” It’s being produced by PureFlix entertainment, the same company that filmed Frank Peretti’s novel, the Visitation.

The shoot ran until 5am, but I hardly noticed. I’ve always wanted to see the behind the scenes action on a movie set, and it was really interesting to see the scale which even a modest-budget film involves.

The big bang of the night was when Monte crashed an 1100-pound Boss Hoss motorcycle into a car. The guy is an absolute magician on a motorcycle. For a short video of one of the stunts, click here. For more pictures of the night, click here.

Here’s the kind of news I really like to see. A Jewish man whose two brothers were killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack in Northern Israel donated his brother’s organs. One man who benefitted was this Arab, who received the eyes of one of the brothers to replace his own, which were failing.

I think this is an awesome demonstration of the way Christ wanted us to interpret the old Lex talionis – “an eye for an eye and and a tooth for a tooth,” which came from the code of Hammurabi. Christ taught this in Matthew 5:38-48:

38″You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[a] 39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Love for Enemies
43″You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[b] and hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you: Love your enemies[c] and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

You see, this is the only way to win a war. Crushing one’s enemy only means you lose less than he does. Loving one’s enemy means you both come out ahead.

I’m glad to see that at least one person in the Middle East understands that.

If you think about it, people don’t wage war – nations do. It’s nice to see some humanity in the midst of so much heartbreak.