After Ukraine gained its independence, a considerable number of Ukrainian students, as well as other young people, began to rave about traveling abroad. Everybody had his/her own reasons for this kind of dream. In most cases, young people, finding themselves in dire straits as a result of the mid-1990s economic crisis in Ukraine, saw no alternative but to leave their native land for a few years in order to earn some money and then come back home and thus secure a cloudless future for their families. Their chief motivation was not a lack of patriotism but the lack of any prospects to get a job in their fatherland.
With this idea in mind, many students went after graduation to the coveted “Eldorado” to see with their own eyes the “land flowing with milk and honey” in the Western civilized world. Instead, once overseas they found nothing but a lot of not so sweet daily bread and the constant awareness of their “otherness,” differences in mentality and perception of the surrounding reality of Americans and Ukrainians.
Another category of foreign travel fiends are students, who as tourists dream of gaining many new impressions and invaluable experience — in other words, their chief goal is to see how people live over there. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately for the Ukrainian nation, there are a lot of exchange programs for any taste and at any price, which allow a young person to study, work, or vacation everywhere, but most often, at the student’s wish and at the suggestion of the other side, in Canada, the US, and the European Union.
Who can say how many exchange programs there are in Ukraine, which enable young people to attend various universities and exchange experience that is really useful in the context of our realities, not foreign ones? This question can baffle a layman because even if such projects exist in Ukraine, information about them is very limited. Previous issues of The Day have already spotlighted the initiative of its editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna and Ostroh students to establish an Ostroh Academy-based club for free and informal contacts of young people from all the regions of Ukraine.
It is gratifying to note that the idea of intra-Ukrainian youth projects has aroused interest among students of different specialties. This article is perhaps one of the first attempts to shed light on Ukrainian exchange programs in general and one of them in particular. An organization called the Ukrainian Students Exchange Program (USEP) was set up at the end of last month exclusively on the initiative of students, which some may say is rather unusual.
On their way home from the Kharkiv-based All-Ukrainian University English Language Olympiad, students from three western Ukrainian higher educational institutions — Uzhhorod National University (Andriy Husti), National University of Ostroh Academy (Yuliya Lukyanchenko), and Rivne State Liberal Arts University (Anton Rohashko) — agreed, at first half-jokingly and then in earnest, to launch a program that in its general outlines would resemble existing time-tested international ones.
The main difference is that program participants are not supposed to go abroad but travel within the borders of Ukraine, visiting various universities and comparing their systems of teaching and organized student life. This makes it possible to drastically cut the program’s duration because it only takes two days to visit each institution, which is quite enough to see the city, attend lessons, and hold roundtable debates with students about the introduction of the Bologna System in Ukraine. Incidentally, the Bologna System calls for a more active exchange of experience among universities. So far, it only calls for, but does not ensure, this.
According to the approved schedule, a group of 10 Uzhhorod students visited National University of Ostroh Academy and Rivne State Liberal Arts University. Students from Ostroh and Rivne paid a return visit to Uzhhorod on May 26-29. I am not exaggerating when I say that they gained masses of lasting impressions and sincere emotions. Making new friends, seeing a new city, and visiting an unknown university in which everything seems different from your “native” one is an enviable experience.
One of the most acute problems that the program organizers faced was lack of funds, so almost all costs were covered by participating students. Strictly speaking, this cooperation was between academic departments rather than universities. As it turned out, it is more to the point to make such exchanges between students of the same or related specialties (in this case, Romance and Germanic languages) because it is easier for the participants to find a common language and effectively analyze differences in teaching and other areas. While faculty deans offered some support for this program, Yuriy Maiboroda, head of the Transcarpathian branch of the Ukrainian League of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, sponsored a considerable part of the program’s Uzhhorod phase.
It is normal to support an initiative both morally and materially. USEP organizers will be applying for a US embassy grant, but there is a glut of people in Ukraine who are not so poor, and it would not hurt them to acquire some practice in the art of sponsorship and help this project become an annual, rather than a one-time, event. After all, USEP serves a noble purpose.
The participants of this exchange program come to know more about their own country and analyze the cultural and ethnic differences among different regions. The realization that ours is a beautiful and inimitable fatherland in turn forms the feeling of national dignity, identity, and patriotism.
Political spinmeisters will never unite Ukraine. All they can do is cut our land into pieces in the Caesarean spirit of “Divide and rule” and manipulate public sentiments before an election, trying to win shaky political dividends at the expense of an embittered electorate over which they supposedly agonize. Programs like USEP make it possible to realize that there are no Left-Bank, Right-Bank, northern, or southern Ukrainians but one Ukrainian nation. Yes, we may differ in our customs, traditions, or even languages, but it is we who are creating a Ukrainian nation today and building an independent Ukraine, no matter how bombastic this may sound.
