Kyiv Connected

Saturday Morning
My daughters picked out dolls yesterday. They are playing with them now as I drink coffee and eat yogurt with fresh strawberries. We had gone to Tsum on Tuesday to check out the goods. On Thursday, we returned. Lianne remembered that the dolls were on the second floor. As soon as we got off the Soviet-era escalator, both Lianne and Katia were off in a flash, running directly to the shelves that display the dolls. All the dolls are made in China. There are even first-run Barbie dolls. The 50th Anniversary series, for 700 hryvnia each (about $100 USD).
Lianne and Katia pulled down several of the clear plastic boxes. One by one. Finally, they each settled on a doll that had her own wardrobe. A change of 4 outfits (with luggage). The box (which doubles as a clothes closet) has a big photo of the Eiffel Tower going up one side. Next to it are solid block letters that spell out WORLD. The color block pattern has fragments of maps. One is of Burkina Faso.

It strikes me that kids in Kyiv now are infinitely more connected to the rest of the planet than the kids who were born just 15 years earlier. During the Soviet era, people could not travel unless it was related to work (e.g. army post, official work-related travel, or a work-mandated trip to a resort with the family.). Now kids go with their parents on charter flights to Dubai (direct, non-stop). They travel overseas to study or to work. They surf the web. (What are the generational gaps that shift is going to cause? It makes the chatter about 'how to manage and motivate millennial employees in the US seem downright frivolous.)

Earlier this week, I went to the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (KMA), a private, selective university. Each student needs to apply and to pass a series of exams to get in. Down the hall from the library was a computer lab, chock full of computers and students. In the hall way were 4 kiosks hooked up to the web. (I posted a tweet from one.) On benches in the hallway were kids tapping out on their own laptops. It looked like a basic college campus. Quite a change from 15 years ago, where we had 1 computer, 3 telephones and 1 fax in the entire offices of the Ukrainian-American Renaissance Foundation, founded by George Soros. (Later, the Foundation was renamed the International Renaissance Foundation.) The only person still on staff was the computer guy who came before I left. I arrived unannounced on a Friday at mid-day. He graciously gave me a tour of the offices and introduced me to each person as:

“This is Dora Chomiak. One of the first employees of the Ukrainian-American (emphasis) Renaissance Foundation. (She is) The founder of UNIAN.” Many looks of 'oohs and ahhs' invariably ensued. UNIAN, the news agency that we founded in 1992, still exists and still occupies the offices at Khreshchatyk 4 that we took over. When we moved in there was no parking lot in front, and all the calendars in the offices inside were still open to August 1991, the day of the putsch that kicked out Gorbachev and led to the dissolution of the USSR.

The news agency was a radical notion. A group of us got together, got funding and convinced many journalists to leave their state jobs and come to work to create a non-governmental news agency. The whole story took months, or really years. It spawned many different organizations, several newspapers, and countless tv shows. I'll write about them another time. For now, I continue to be amazed at how so many things that were so difficult to do here once (e.g. send a fax, get a piece of news) are totally commonplace.

It's still a young country. In many ways, it is still a mess, but the number of people who now have access to a tremendous quantity of information is staggering. It has got to help to country's chances to make it through to the next phase.