We were met at the hotel in Kiev by four men who had been sent with a bus to take our delegation to Chernivtsi, a 10-hour drive.
There were 18 of us from Salt Lake City, Chernivtsi's U.S. sister city. Not only did we each have a suitcase of our own, but several had a second, packed with medical supplies donated by medical people in Utah for the people in Chernivtsi. Our 40-odd suitcases not only filled the luggage bins in the bottom of the bus but they were stacked to the ceiling in the back of the bus as well.Soon we were on the road, passing through the suburban areas of Kiev and heading down a two-lane highway toward the very southwest corner of the Ukraine several hundred kilometers away, where the Carpathian mountains rise to form a natural border with Romania, and close to Moldava, where ethnic conflicts threaten to cause border disputes re-echoing history.
Chernivtsi is the main city in a region called Bukovina, a name derived from the thick forests of beech that blanket the low Carpathian hills.
It would be some time, however, before we would enter Bukovina. For hours we drove over rich, flat farmland, which still wore a mantle of spring. Galaxies of yellow dandelions and buttercups dotted the roadsides and pastures. Fruit trees were in full blossom. As we wound through provincial towns, people would look up from gardens to watch us pass in our bright red Intourist bus. Clothes on clotheslines seemed to wave at us. Bright Oriental rugs, laid out to air over fences, were like banners of celebration in the early summer sun.
In the midafternoon we stopped at a rest area and ate lunches prepared ahead of time by our hosts. Hal, Teresa and Scott settled down in the grass a little ways from the rest of us, and within a few minutes we were surrounded by a herd of cows being driven home from pasture. Undaunted, the three humans held their ground and went on with their lunches as the cows meandered past on either side.
Back on the road, our mainstay translator, Sergey, who spoke the best English of the four Chernivtsiites, would comment on the bus microphone from time to time about passing points of interest - ancient fortresses and towns that were part of the historic Rus culture.
About 3 o'clock I took over the microphone and sang a song from the '20s I learned by heart from a 78 rpm record my dad once had: "I'm Tying the Leaves So They Won't Fall Down." Mary Ann led us in a few songs and Hal played his mandolin.
Then the four Ukrainians - Michael, Maryan, Sergey and Igor (Igor, I later learned, was a member of the City Council) - drawn from their otherwise shy demeanor, began singing Ukrainian folk songs. I never knew there could be so many. Sergey really got into it and went on for miles in his deep guttural voice over the bus microphone. As he sang, I just sat and looked out the window at the passing landscape. What a wonderful introduction to the landscape of Bukovina and the city of Chernivtsi.
As the sun drooped low, our four caretakers went into a deep and serious huddle in the front of the bus. Something was up. At the next town, they had the driver stop at a civic building of some sort with the familiar old Soviet red placard on the front with gold letters.
"We have to make a phone call," they said. "We're going to be late" - whatever that meant.
Another hour of driving and we were entering the outskirts of Chernivtsi. We passed over the narrow bridge that crosses the Cheremosh River and wound up the hilly streets toward the heart of the city. This was the city I remembered from my visit of two years ago. Pale pinkish-tan stucco buildings glowed golden in the setting sun. Tightly pruned trees lining the streets were just beginning to bud. Cobblestone streets recalled an age that predated World War II. It was then that Chernivtsi had become a part of the communist realm. Germanic for centuries and Romanian for decades prior to 1940, Chernivtsi is Ukrainian at its heart - a fairy tale city in many ways, covered with a thin film of dust collected over 50 years of often brutal repression.
The city had arranged for us to be guests at the Cheremosh Hotel, an architectural showpiece built in 1987. As we approached, we realized the reason for the mysterious phone call.
Standing in front of the hotel was a whole contingent, led by Mayor Victor Pavlyuk and a good portion of the City Council. Also in the crowd were Valery, Dr. Krutsiak and Bogdan, who had been part of the Chernivtsi delegation to Salt Lake City in 1990 and had been to our home for a mid-July Thanksgiving dinner, and whom we had taken out on the face of Mount Timpanogos, where they savored wild flowers and gloried in the breathtaking view of the valley.
There were bouquets of carnations for all of us, TV cameras and several girls in traditional Ukrainian dress stepping forward with a round loaf of bread on an embroidered scarf. On top of the bread was a little dish of salt. We each took a bit of bread dipped in salt and ate it as a traditional gesture of welcome. Jane Turner, head of the Utah Committee for American-Soviet Relations and leader of the sister city delegation, said a few words to the crowd, followed by Mayor Pavlyuk. I felt bad that the mayor of Salt Lake City could not be with us, a feeling repeated many times in the next 10 days.
Though I didn't realize it yet, over the next week and a half I would experience one of the most spiritual times of my life, a constant outpouring of awareness of and love for the people of Utah that we were fortunate enough to take the full brunt of - and since I frankly found the people of Chernivtsi to be much more conscious of the sister city relationship than we tend to be here in Salt Lake, over the next 10 days a commitment developed to do what I could to change all that.
So here we are. I hope you will join me in the next few weeks as I share with you a few of my personal impressions of Salt Lake's sister city in Ukraine.