The Day learned about the village of Lystvyn after its reporters were invited to the Japanese Embassy, where Mutsuo Mabuchi, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to Ukraine, and Valentyna Radkevych, the head of the Association of Village Communities in Lystvyn — recently signed an agreement on a $160,000 grant from Japan to reconstruct the water supply system of this ancient village, which was affected by the Chornobyl disaster.
Those horrible days, when death with no shape or smell was entering homes unseen, were neither the first nor the last catastrophe in the life of this village, once known as Lystvene, a place name that is characteristic of the land inhabited by the ancient Derevlianian tribe. Proof of the importance of this place in Kyivan Rus’ is the fact that the current administrative raion center is the ancient city of Ovruch. After a much-publicized conflict between Korosten and the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, it became known as the premier Derevlianian town.
Thanks to the spirit and energy of its residents — and today thanks to help from Japan — time and again Lystvyn has risen from the ruins and devastation caused by war, revolution, church closure, collectivization, the Stalinist Terror, and the Holodomor, which was followed by another war and postwar famine.
After Chornobyl the village residents were gripped by depression, and later by economic hardship. The local collective farm was the first to collapse. Then its successors went bankrupt because they failed to fit into the market system. The farm administrators were not accustomed to independent management. The cattle- breeding farms emptied. The poor, mostly sandy, soil and tracts of unfertilized land began sprouting weeds. The residents became unemployed in the village, which lacked a social network. The younger residents left to find jobs in other villages and distant cities. The people who stayed behind survived by eating potatoes, mushrooms, and wild berries.
Credit is owed to the United Nations Development Programme in Ukraine (UNDP) and its Chornobyl Recovery and Development Programme (CDRP). Both of these programs are helping areas affected by radioactive contamination and the loss of trust in people. The UN officials helped the Lystvyn populace muster its strength. Before long, they saw the fruits of their joint efforts. In the view of community development experts Tamara Repiova (district project coordinator) and Viacheslav Bortnyk, Lystvyn is a kind of laboratory, the soil in which they planted the first seeds from which a civil society is supposed to sprout. At first, this program (following tough competition and rigid selection procedures) reinstated a number of former schoolteachers, who until then rarely received their meager salaries. They embarked on a series of community activities and began visiting neighboring villages, hitchhiking or traveling on the infrequent buses. They spoke to people on the street or in their homes, and organized meetings. Repiova recalls that people were utterly demoralized by their poverty and simply could not understand: Communities? What kind of communities? What for? Is this another collectivization campaign? Who’s in charge? What can we expect from it? Who needs it? Maybe you are American spies and want to take our two-and-a-half-hryvnias’ worth of Chornobyl relief away from us?
These community development experts have been through all this — and worse. They admit that at times they doubted their project’s success, but they continued stubbornly to seek out concerned citizens to form a support base. In the end, they found people, like Valentyna Radkevych, a small, cheerful, and amazingly energetic middle-aged woman, a retired teacher with a ramrod capacity for negotiating any bureaucratic obstacles. She has never been inactive, and she was loath to just sit around. At the same time, she was wary about getting involved in a project about which she knew nothing. She traveled to Ovruch and met with the head of the district administration. She wanted to make sure she would measure up and whether she could count on help from the local authorities. She was promised every kind of assistance. Now that the project is well underway, there are promises of monetary contributions for community development.
That was how Radkevych joined in the community’s discussions with Repiova and Bortnyk. The conversations revealed that many of the villagers thought that this was no concern of theirs, but this attitude was not a decisive part of their mentality. During the survey it turned out that villagers living on various streets and in different parts of the village had needs that differed from their neighbors’. These needs formed the base on which to establish separate communities. Four were created with unusual names: Maria, Nadia (Hope), Mriia (Dream), and Molodizhna (Youth Community).
I asked Mrs. Radkevych why no one had thought of a name like Liubov (Love). She did not answer, and it took me some time to figure out that at the time there was nothing in the village to inspire this appellation. People were busy trying to solve their immediate daily needs.
Lystvyn’s first successful community project was to build a public bath. This was followed by a hair salon. Afterwards, the physiotherapy room of the local dispensary was renovated with local resources. Later, with financial aid from the Chornobyl Foundation, which is financed by the UN, Japan, Canada, and Switzerland, countries that had helped carry out earlier projects, modern equipment was obtained. Vacant rooms in the local daycare center were used to set up a youth center, including a gym and a computer club. That was when the villagers saw that their life was changing for the better, becoming organized, revived, and developed — and most importantly, that all this was being done not by an anonymous philanthropist but owing to their dedicated efforts.
Everyone here remembers one of the first meetings, when the village council chairman Mykola Khylevych spoke about the dilemma facing Lystvyn: would it survive or perish? By that time, the villagers had acquired some experience of carrying out small-scale projects. Khylevych received an optimistic response to his question. It was on this optimistic note that the Association of Village Communities was nicknamed “Zhytychi.” Mrs. Radkevych explained that the name refers to those who choose a dignified life, not death through alcohol-induced oblivion.
One of the first projects of the united communities was to repair an ancient wood church that was built by the ancestors of the villagers. The church was built according to the technique of folk construction, so it was decided to restore the exterior using the same method.
Oleksandr Nykonchuk is a former local geography teacher. He holds the title of “Merited Teacher of Ukraine” and is one of the better known community activists. “We contacted people with different types of financial status, and no one refused to contribute to the church renovation project. They all paid as much as they could. We wanted to draw up a list of contributors, but practically everyone rejected this idea and made their contributions only as the residents of Lystvyn.’ Nykonchuk is convinced that some important changes have taken place in people’s hearts. (In 1998 his brother, the linguist Mykola Nykonchuk, was proclaimed Man of the Year in the United States for his studies of the dialects of Right-Bank Ukraine and for putting 2,000 linguistic phenomena on the map.)
The village’s most respected teacher read from an ancient document that he discovered in the church archive. It describes who can be a member of the church community. This individual must be “decent and not a drinker; a hard-working member of his family; not a slanderer, not quarrelsome, not lecherous, not given to brawls, with no record of theft or perjury, and a kind and fair attitude to his fellows.” He said that the church icon of the Mother of God, which is held in great esteem by the parishioners, shed tears for the first time two years ago. Nykonchuk witnessed the miracle, swore to God that he did, and added that no one has been able to explain this phenomenon.
One could write entire books about Nykonchuk and the local history museum that he organized at the school, which contains items dating back 15,000 years. There is also an ethnographic museum in the village, which we couldn’t visit. But we saw a rich collection of local Polissian embroideries in one of the school classrooms. Before we went inside, we heard beautiful carols being performed by the children’s folk group Polisianochka, directed by the schoolteacher Svitlana Mekh. This experienced teacher used the few minutes we spent at the museum to convince us that the foundations of Kyiv, dating to St. Volodymyr’s reign, were largely built out of the kind of rock found in the vicinity of Lystvyn. Known as pyrophyllite, it is the world’s best fire-resistant material. Olha Durman, the deputy chairperson of the Ovruch district state administration for humanitarian matters, gave a chunk of this rock to this reporter. She explained that the two mines where it was extracted are now closed. She also warned that this mineral has an increased radiation level, as does the whole of the Ovruch mountain ridge, where the administrative district is located.
The area’s geological structure is the reason why the residents of Lystvyn cannot drink the local water. We were offered a distant view of a water tower that was built by the local collective farm for production purposes. Its water looks clean, but tests show that it contains too much radon, so the people cannot drink it. There is a deep drinking well in Lystvyn, as well as a water tower where the water has to accumulate and partially settle. Now it is out of service, as is the deferrization plant, meant to purify the water. Water is pumped unpurified directly from the well and into water pumps. It has a yellow color and sometimes has a brownish tint, a sure sign of high iron content, which is harmful to the body.
The situation is expected to change soon. We were told by the head of the Association of Village Communities that the money from the Japanese Embassy’s grant has arrived. Our grateful, humble thanks to the ambassador and the Japanese people!
Another problem is whether Lystvyn will be able to properly operate the revamped water supply system and deferrization plant. The chairman of the village council admitted that its budget has an 80-percent deficit (two-thirds of the budget of Ovruch raion, the largest one in Zhytomyr oblast, is subsidized). This reporter spoke with two plumbers, both of whom were hired a couple of months ago to fix all the pipes, water pumps, and filters. They are part-timers and are paid slightly more than 200 hryvnias a month. One of them, Valentyn Oleksiv, has six children. Amazingly, he insists that this pay is enough. Khylevych said he can’t pay them more because each consumer pays between 2.5 and 3 hryvnias a month. He will soon have to confront the council with the issue of higher water supply costs.
We walked away from the shabby, rusting water supply station and headed for one of the water pumps located in the center of the village. Before long we saw a middle-aged woman pulling a sled that contained an empty milk can and a bucket. She was followed by an elderly woman with a limp, who leaned heavily on her cane. The water was meant for the old woman. We took a look at the bucketful of water and were horrified. “Right, that’s the kind of water we get,” said the old lady, as though to allay our fears. She said that the water pump next to her house has long been out of service, and she can’t walk so far by herself to get water. When we asked if she knew that the situation would soon change for the better, that Japan had sent money to fix the water supply system, we didn’t see any joy in her eyes. She rejected our optimism, declaring that nothing would ever change and refused to identify herself. She was obviously frightened. Then a man towing a sled with a milk can approached. He turned out to be another volunteer water carrier for a sick woman living next door to him. Cautiously he negotiated a small but treacherous mound of ice that had formed around the water pump. Identifying himself as Mykola Yakovych, he said that the old woman’s name was Maria. He too didn’t show any enthusiasm for the water supply renovation project. In his opinion, the old drinking well had the best kind of water, but it was destroyed after the Chornobyl disaster.
Clearly, building a civil society is easier said than done. It is no easy thing for people to overcome years of distrust in the government and their own strength. Granny Maria kept complaining about her aching back, so we told her to go to the dispensary’s physiotherapy room. It is clean and warm, and the personnel spoke highly of the chairman of the village council, who had recently bought linoleum for the corridor and the rooms. There we ran into a girl, an 11th-grader, who was in the local drugstore buying prescription drugs for a woman living next door, further proof of the mutual aid system in Lystvyn. Unfortunately, our conversation with her turned out to be very disappointing. She said that the excellently equipped computer club and gym — which residents of big cities could only envy — have been closed for a long time, contradicting what the village council chairman told us earlier, when he assured us that not a single instance of juvenile crime had taken place since its opening.
Prior to this conversation we visited the youth club and were surprised to find it empty. We decided to check out the situation and heard different explanations from three local officials. The first official said was that it was necessary to get a license to teach computer technology; the second one declared that the local sanitary station had refused to allow the club to function because it was located on the second floor, and there is a daycare center on the first floor (we were told that they could trade premises). According to the third explanation, still unconfirmed, the youth center is not operating because someone has his eye on it and wants to take it over.
Another surprise awaited us at the daycare center, the only one in this village of 1,500 residents. The place was warm and clean, as was to be expected. However, its two groups are attended by fewer than 30 children. The daycare worker Larysa Minych told us that there are many more children in the village (this is the demographic picture: 19 babies were born in 2007, while twice this number of middle-aged and older residents died; the local school has an enrolment of 226 pupils, compared to over 500 in the recent past). Minych explained that according to Chornobyl legislation, parents whose children are not enrolled in daycare centers are paid slightly over 100 hryvnias a month. “We have so many jobless people, so this is their only source of income,” she complained.
Bortnyk, the community development expert, offered a sharp commentary on these two negative factors: “If this situation continues, we will lose the coming generations.” However, he and his colleague Repiova, as well as Olha Abdurman from the local administration are convinced that this will not happen. The newly established village communities have a great deal of human and economic potential, and can have a positive effect on the development of a civil society in Ukraine, despite the current shortcomings. This is undeniable. After renovating their water supply system, the residents of Lystvyn plan to repair the interior of the church. After that, Nykonchuk told us, the villagers will start campaigning to have their territory with its amazing natural properties awarded the status of “Polissia Nature Preserve.” Let us hope all their plans come true!
