“It’s really surreal. One minute I’m meeting with my team in the shelter and then I’m eating a $7 ribeye at this little European bistro on the sidewalk with some colleagues, and it’s beautiful,” Kevin said over the phone on his first night in Kyiv.
What’s also surreal was hearing the missile alerts speak to us decisively on his phone when he first returned to DC and forgot to silence them. They commanded us to go to shelter, repeatedly and, dare I say, alarmingly. However, when the alert was over, an hour later, they kindly blessed us to return to our lives with a cheerful, “May the force by with you.”
Kevin’s reports include the following. The 11-hour overnight train ride from or to the border of Poland allows for privacy but only a bench and not a bed per se. It was kind of cool being introduced at a meeting by the Prime Minister of Ukraine. Cyrillic is hard to get his mind around. And he loves the people in Ukraine, whom he says are unwaveringly committed to victory, open to nothing less. His team is close and they like to be at the office, now located in a big hotel with a safe bunker and back-up generator, because it feels like a reprieve from the intense pressure of everything else in some ways.
It doesn’t fully protect mentally, however. Kevin’s hardest day in his brief three weeks on the job came the day of a terrible missile attack that landed on a children’s hospital (only 10 minutes from his apartment, I might add). Being a day-time attack, the team was at the hotel-office at the time. Kevin had to refuse to let his colleagues leave work to collect their children, which he said was very hard, but one can’t be out during a raid. The mothers were beside themselves, as I could completely imagine. (Most of his Ukrainian colleagues are women because men are less available.) They came together for lunch and wine in the office the next day, just to decompress and collect themselves as a community.
In addition to the extremely disruptive power outages, which are frequent and make communication and working difficult at best, a big concern is disrupted sleep. Missile alerts happen almost nightly it sounds like, and there are limited sleeping spaces in the shelters. First come, first serve is the system. People shelter in subway stations and basements, as anyplace underground is best.
Unless you’re Kevin and have decided that sleeping in your bathroom is just fine. “Yeah, it’s fine. It’s pretty safe. I’m inside double walls. I don’t worry about my safety,” he told me. What does “pretty safe” mean—shouldn’t that be a yes or no situation? He has not yet gone to find his designated actual shelter in the building next door. (That shelter is under a kindergarten, which I can hardly think about.)
But other than those issues, Kyiv is a garden of roses. Literally. There are gardens everywhere, and summering in Europe is delightful. Kevin raves about the architecture, the cobblestone streets, the sidewalk restaurants, murals and street musicians. It sounds amazing, once you get over those pesky missile alerts.
Now that his two-week summer vacation is over, he’s off again, currently in the Frankfurt airport en route to Krakow en route to the border en route to the overnight train en route to Kyiv. (That sounds like the beginning of a bad children’s story.) He would love for me to come visit and see his stylish apartment with its balcony in the trees on one side and overlooking a charming market on the other. As much as I would love to eat pastries under fairy lights at some artful bistro, that doesn’t seem quite wise at the moment. In fact, that might be a little surreal.
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