Host family visit

If I had to describe my host family visit in two words, they would be “food” and “heavy”. Immediately upon crossing the threshold of the front door of my host family’s house I noticed a table set up like a banquet with about 10 place settings. There was all kinds of food and such an overabundance that after the ten of us ate, the prepared food lasted every meal for three of us throughout the duration of my two and a half day stay and still there was a remainder. Of course my host grandmother would pack some of it for me to take on the train. And after every meal, I felt heavy. The reason for the smorgasbord was that it was my host grandmother’s birthday.




















As we began the feast, the toasts did as well. They kept pouring me glass after glass of both champagne and wine. They had me double-fisting in addition to the ingestion of a grotesque amount of food. It was like PST all over again.

It was after the meal that I witnessed something strange. There was only one other time in my life that I’d noticed anything quite like it and it was among old Korean men at a passionate reunion of old childhood friends. They began singing songs together. I know that doesn’t sound that strange, but you had to witness the gravity of the moment. This wasn’t karaoke. In their half-drunk state, they took turns singing dirges, with the low frequency vibrato that echoes the pains and memories of generations, particularly from a people that have had such a tumultuous and defeated history as Ukrainians. Some of them would grimace soulfully as they bellowed their guttural notes.

There was one other man at the table. He was an elderly man with white hair. He was bald on top and the hair on his sides billowed out freely but unobtrusively. He had about 5 teeth, probably not due to age: he didn’t seem that old. He had the look of a retired professor. He was quiet but not timid. Never was there a superfluous utterance that came from him. During one of the songs, he left the table abruptly as his hands covered his face. His wife, sitting across the table from him, chuckling understandingly, explained to the others, “this is his favorite song”. At that juncture I realized the heaviness of Ukrainian culture. The last day in Armiansk, Michael and I had a conversation about how different it is here: how different it is from how different we thought it would be from home. There is a heaviness in the countenances and attitudes of people here and more and more I’m beginning to see how it shapes peoples’ lives here. After switching over to a “lighter song”, still somewhat dense to my ear, they sang another dirge and the man, mid-note, contorted his face and spilled tears as the note turned into a sob. Heavy.

Potatoes

I’d told my host family that I wanted to come back in the autumn to help them harvest their garden. And so they left a patch of crop untouched, just so that I could do some of the work that I so eagerly waited to help with. Little did I know that I would be carrying my own cross. I knew that my Ukrainian grandmother wanted to give me potatoes to take back with me, because she told me over the phone to bring an extra bag. I didn’t. Not because I forgot, but because I thought I could just bring them back in a plastic bag.













As my host grandmother would have it, she emptied my backpack filled with my belongings and placed them in a plastic bag. She then proceeded to pack my backpack full of potatoes. And she packed it. I was expecting to take back just a few pounds with me. A backpack full of potatoes is, I think, about 30 + pounds, maybe more. I kept telling her that it was too heavy. She would respond by lifting it slightly off the ground with one arm, then waving me off, telling me that it’s nothing. That’s easy for her to say. She’s not the one that has to carry it on her back for 30 minutes to the bus station and then around the metro in Kiev. So I did just that, sweat dripping from my face as I trod my way to the bus station. It was heavy.