Chapter 5: Life and Love In Kherson
OK… let me stop here for a second and interject something. I want to tell you this now, even though it did not become clear to me until much later:
Victoria’s writing to me was an act of Love and Sacrifice.
You can’t even begin to understand what it is like for some of these women. I had no idea.
Understand that in my house, I have a wireless network set up. I can surf the net while in the bathroom. I regularly carry my laptop into the living room, and catch up on email while I watch TV whenever a commercial is on. I have a cable modem, so I don’t even have to dial up to the internet any more. I just point, click, and go.
That’s what it took for me to write a letter to Victoria (in English, I might add, my native tongue.)
Here’s what it was for Victoria:
First she had to get home from work. She took care of her son for the evening. Then, about 7:00 or 8:00pm, she would go to her father’s work. Oh… she didn’t drive. She walked. Thirty minutes – one way. We started writing in the springtime… but in Kherson it was still quite cold. (They had snow at least one day I can remember.) Some days, it was raining. And… she NEVER missed a day.
After she got there, she would read my letter. She has a computer translator that could help… but usually she would have to translate much of it by hand. Then she would write her reply… again she would work out her translation using her dictionary. It would sometimes take her hours to read my letter and then reply.
When I first told her that I would like to write more personal emails, and she couldn’t figure out how to get an internet account, her solution was: “Send it on Wednesday evening, and I will get up early and go to my father’s work before anyone else gets there on Thursday Morning.” Which means she got up at 5:00am and walked to her father’s work.
I found this out this past week while we were in Kiev. And she was not complaining when she told me! She was actually laughing at me because I insisted on taking a taxi everywhere. She was telling me that walking was no big deal for her. She had walked 30 minutes every day to write to me. She was using the story as an illustration as to why we should save my money and take the metro… not trying to impress me with how hard she worked to keep our correspondence relationship alive.
Sometimes, we have no idea what the ladies go through. When she told me all of this, I was very humbled.
(But we still took the dang taxi… I mean… three bucks! Why walk?)
OK… back to the story…
Slowly we started growing closer through the letters, and I began thinking that this lady was special.
Someone asked me recently how I can know this from a few letters. (Well, for one thing, it was over 100… but…) The fact is that you can’t know from a few letters. But I had an advantage… And that was that Victoria was not the only woman I had ever written to.
I had written to hundreds before her...
My father told me a story one time about when he went to this old country doctor because he had a sore throat.
The doctor looked down his mouth, proclaimed: “You’ll be fine, it’s not strep,” and then asked him for $20.
My dad was a little miffed. “You want $20 for a ten second look in my throat? And that’s just to say that nothing is wrong? How do you even know?”
The doctor told him: “You’re not paying me for the ten seconds I looked at your throat. You are paying me for the two thousand throats I’ve looked at before yours…”
Well, it isn’t just the letters that Victoria and I wrote that made me think something special had happened. It was all of those that had gone before… and had failed to catch my attention like Victoria did.
Then, something else happened. In one letter, Victoria asked me if I had told Emily (my daughter) about her. The truth is that I hadn’t because at this point, I really didn’t have anything to tell her. Victoria was just someone I was writing to. I explained that I had not told Emily because I didn’t want to get her hopes up. I am very protective of her that way.
Victoria told me that she had shown her son, Stas, some of my letters and my pictures – especially the ones with Emily, and that he was very excited, because he always had wanted a sister. She asked me if it would be OK if Stas wrote to Emily.
I told her it was OK, and that I would just tell Emily that she had a pen pal. Luckily for me, my daughter was so happy to be getting email of her own, she never thought to ask how a boy from Ukraine found out about her.
So, once a week, our kids would correspond. And every day, we would. And, suddenly, I started to see how all of the pieces might be fitting together.
