Dnipro Region, Ukraine

This is the most beautiful building in the industrial town where we spent about 2 months of our lives while we adopted 2 of our sons from this town.  The name of the town was Dniprodzerzhynsk. The name is now Kamianske. The bigger city about an hour away was Dnipropetrovst.   The area is affectionately called the armpit of Ukraine. We experienced quite a bit of culture shock in this area because it was very different to the United States.  The pictures immediately below are of a huge statue of Lenin in a larger city in the area.

Much of the buildings in this region are old or very run down.  The country of Ukraine is very poor as are most of the post USSR countries.  When a country becomes a communist country the result is always that all the citizens become poor and the government becomes powerful and holds the purse for everything.  When Ukraine left the USSR it took with it the same mentality and habits of a communist regime.  Corruption is alive and well in Ukraine as well as Russia.  

This area of the country is rarely seen by the outside world like many areas in China and so the money does not go to these places to have nice government buildings and infrastructure for the citizens. 

This is a government building in the region.  The pictures below are of the orphanage where our boys lived.

The shower in this bathroom was a pipe on the wall with holes poked in it.  They would turn on the water and cold water would spray on the children and as a result they took very short showers.  When the boys arrived home in the US, we taught them about the luxury of a hot shower.  It was an adjustment.

This bench was in the city where we attended church, Note the statue of the man on the bench.  The trash can below was a typical site in the morning in the town.  The men in the city started drinking early.  The photo of the man below was the typical look of a Ukrainian man.  They were usually overweight and many smoked and drank heavily.  The women of Ukraine were very beautiful.  A friend of mine commented that every 3rd woman was a supermodel and it was true.  Very beautiful women here. 

Almost everywhere we went there were dogs laying around.  Even in the middle of buildings, including the courthouse.  No one bothered the dogs.  They were very dirty, hungry and invisible.

These were the people that we rented out apartment from.  Our son Tyler who came to Ukraine with us to translate Russian for us was resourceful in ways to exercise in Ukraine. We never saw a gym or an exercise machine in the country. Despite this the women still looked like they could model for any fitness product.

This cake that our friends bought to celebrate an event was a huge disappointment.  It wasn't really a cake.  It was frosted like ones that we are accustomed to in the US but inside it was a hard Styrofoam type of material. We didn't ever see a cake mix in the stores or any kind of corn bi-product like corn syrup or corn meal etc.  Perhaps this has to do with why the women are in such great shape.

This was the most appalling place that we experienced in the country.  The next 6 pictures are of a children's hospital in Ukraine.  There were no staff at all at the hospital. The kids were left to fend for themselves and were not fed much at all.  The boy we went to visit had been given an apple and he ate the entire apple including the core immediately.  Another family at the hospital said that the nurses had required the other family to bribe them to get in to visit.  Everything that they had brought to the hospital for their son had been taken by the nurses.  The boy in the last picture was in the hospital because his mother and grandmother didn't want to take care of him anymore.  Evidently he would hit you in the face or bite you hard if you got close enough.  Maybe he scared off all of the staff.

Look at this filthy bathroom and the surgery room below.  There was no sterilization or clean sterile hospital smell to be found anywhere.  I didn't see any sign of anesthetic.  With the filth and decay of the rooms, I am sure that disease was shared with many in this hospital of horrors.

This was the way that the orphanage cleaned the carpets.  They took the rugs outside put water on them and then pushed out the water with a piece of wood.  Ingenious! As we walked the streets of Ukraine, we had to be careful to not step on used drug needles, broken sidewalks and other trash and debri.  This was the first time that we had to be careful not to step on a chicken foot.

This was a little broom that someone made our of rose bushes.  Ingenious again.

Mcdonalds has made its way to Ukraine and has a stronghold there. There were very few American Resturants in Ukraine but we sure enjoyed the golden arches every chance we had.

 One thing that we noticed in the apartment buildings was that the individual apartments could be pretty nice inside but the common halls and stairwells were usually always very neglected.   The third picture shows drug needles that were laying in playground behind our apartment.  A friend suggested that perhaps the men who sent their wives to earn the living while they stayed home and drank could maybe start a business cleaning the stairwells.
  

Like many markets in the world, the fish is sold fresh in the stores like this.  The milk is a different story.  It is often sold on the street by older women in 2 liter soda bottles.  They would milk their cow and then sell it in a Fanta bottle with no refrigeration  etc. We did find that the ice cream and milk products in Ukraine that were sold in the stores were very good.  They seemed more creamy than ice cream in America.  Much of the Ice cream was sold in bag in the freezer section.  No cardboard cartons to influence the taste of the ice cream or allow freezer burn. Ingenious number 3.  Ukraine will be Ok eventually.  They have the ingenuity to do great things.

Above is a typical meal at the orphanage everyday.  Soup and bread and a juice made with dried fruit and hot water.  When our boys got to America they both almost doubled their weight in a couple of months. People still thought that they looked too skinny even after they gained weight and would give them food when they begged for it at school.  

This is the store that we bought most of our food at.  The name is pronounced  AH-tu -Buh, spelled ATB. 



This was the ceiling in a train station where we were waiting.  It was beautiful.  There were some really amazing things in Ukraine.  I plan to do other blog posts about the countryside and Kiev.  Sorry that much of what I wrote here was rather negative.  Ukraine is doing the best that they can.  They have very little money. They have a lot of corruption and yet they produce most of the grain for all of Europe and have been blessed with many amazing natural resources. Many of the people are paralyzed with addictions and problems inherited from communism.  I call it Red Ruin.

We also had some negative experiences in this region with serious corruption during our adoption.  No one wanted to do their government work unless you paid them extra to do it in a timely manner.  We found out after the fact that our facilitator had bribed the judge to the tune of $5000 of our money to approve the adoption and separate siblings.  We intended to adopt both a brother and a sister but the sister was influenced by lies told to her by teachers in the orphanage.  They told the kids that we were only adopting them to sell their organs etc. etc.  The adults could not fathom that we would spend our own money to adopt orphans in Ukraine without some big financial benefit somewhere.  We were trying to do a good thing and help some kids but we were treated like we were criminals and had evil intentions.  That combined with the extreme changes in culture, our impression of Ukraine could have been skewed a bit.

One of our best days in Ukraine was when we were permitted to travel to the part of Ukraine where our son Bryan was serving as a missionary.  We traditionally would receive a call on Mothers Day from our missionaries but we got to go and visit Bryan on Mother's day and go to church with him and have lunch at his apartment.  This was a real treat for our Russian speaking newly returned missionary to see his brother now speaking Ukrainian.  To date we have had an additional son also serve in Ukraine and another son serve in Russia.