Ukrainian Bethlehem

O little town of Bethlehem how still we see Thee lie,

Above Thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.

                                                - a familiar Christmas carol.

All the driver had to do was open the doors. Enter five thousand grandmothers, Russian-speaking and locally called babushkas, with their babushka trolleys, boxes and bags and grandchildren – three to a seat with barely room to exhale. The last Saturday evening bus to Pochayiv was vacuum packed.

It would have been alright except my foot got jammed in the rear door every time it opened to take on board yet another babushka, just when one might have guessed the bus was full. The foot-jamming and the likelihood of the bus tipping over each time we negotiated a bend to the left were of concern. All of the weightier individuals, it seemed, had chosen to sit on that side and the bus was about as level as a seesaw with nobody on it. I’d rather not say which side I sat on.

I kept trying to picture the map in my mind, hoping to see unfaltering bends to the right. Looking at the map in actuality was unfeasible on account of needing some arm movement, impossible in that space.

The countryside was unusually hilly and it was just as it was getting dark that my foot got jammed for the last time. When the doors opened there began a babushka flood of great proportions – with babushka trolleys, boxes and bags and grandchildren – spilling out of the bus onto the road shoulder. I guess we’d arrived.

It is said the Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, the second largest monastery in Ukraine, was founded by several runaway monks during the thirteenth century Mongol invasion. Legend says Theotokos, which is the Greek title meaning God-bearer that refers to Mary, mother of God, appeared to the monks in a column of fire, that she left her footprint in the rock she stood upon which has since been revered for its curative powers. Pochayiv itself is a small West Ukrainian town of 8,000 people.

Noble lady Anna Hojska is said to have donated her lands to the monastery in the sixteenth century, from when the current buildings date. She also gave a sacred icon of Theotokos which is believed to work miracles, and cured her brother’s blindness.

But I was slightly disoriented from the bus ride – where was the monastery?

In true medieval fashion, it was a matter of tilting my head upwards – you know, to see the church in all its glory. Perched on a hill in the twilight like a fantastic city of gold, the monastery looked its best. 

The last colours were draining from the sky as I followed a line of lamps along the pathway to the western gate. Behind me a sea of babushkas overburdened with their goods and offspring’s offspring followed like the tide of an ancient sea coming in. They like to sleep over at the monastery hotel to attend the 5:30 a.m. Sunday mass.

Sense would have led me directly to the hotel since I too needed a place to sleep, but the atmosphere of the place beckoned: the mosaics, the huge bell tower, the worshippers coming and going, with women wearing headscarves as they do upon entering a church or monastery in the Orthodox tradition, the gardens and rows of crops on the lower hillside, the black-robed long-bearded monks sitting under trees chatting to attractive, younger headscarf wearing women, the golden domes, the smell of incense, the light of the candles and most of all the twilight. I was drawn not to the hotel but, ultimately, to an empty bench beside the bishop’s house where there was time to imbibe the whole mesmerising scene.

A little too much time… Ten o’clock passed and I forced myself towards the hotel. People sat there in the long hallway with all their belongings on babushka trolleys, waiting for a bed to be found. Some were taking shelter on the floor of the hallway.

The smallest and possibly oldest babushka, covered in black, was the one to see, one of the pilgrims seemed to say. “Follow her,” I was sure she must’ve said, in Russian.

I did tail the smallest babushka for a while, up the hallway and back again, in one room, pausing at the doorway of another. I followed her, about two feet behind and I heard her saying to others, over and over, ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet!’ She was trying to sound authoritative and final but in her face was kindness and I knew she took no pleasure from the shortage of beds. I guessed if I’d really pressed the issue she would’ve eventually found somewhere for me.

But there were all the babushkas and babushka trolleys and boxes and bags and grandchildren. The idea of taking a bed from an old woman was not very appealing; and it was like a sauna inside in any case. Better to be outside – how long could a Ukrainian night possibly last? It was warm and delightfully summery.

So I left the smallest babushka and gave up on my one-dollar-dormitory-bed-food-included dream. I returned instead to the viewing bench beside the Bishop’s house.

With practicalities left in the hotel hallway my mind wandered as stars appeared, the buildings floodlight and fine. I couldn’t help but think the whole experience was slightly Joseph coming to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. The bus that evening was surely the equivalent of a small grey donkey and like Joseph I had been effectively turned away by the innkeeper. Admittedly there weren’t any barns to sleep in, there were no nasty Roman soldiers about and most importantly, I did not have with me the responsibility of a heavily pregnant mother of God.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light,

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.

Tired and hungry: these took turns as the hours passed. It was the pull of the latter that took me out through the eastern gate and down into the little dark town. I splurged on a four dollar three course meal in a café that was empty apart from a couple of old Ukrainian men polishing off a bottle of vodka. Outside local kids loitered and it seemed as though they hoped to find some alcohol of their own.

As I wandered back up through the narrow streets, dogs howling, towards the golden domes of the monastery, the image was once more medieval, of a troubled, evil little town versus a peaceful quiet church.

Perhaps as punishment for my random thoughts when I reached it the gate was closed. There remained a gap underneath through which I could have scrambled but it seemed a bit undignified. As I considered what to do a car drove up to the gate, a black Mercedes. It was perhaps the Bishop himself. All it took then was a word or two in English to the gateman who had appeared to let the Mercedes pass, and I was in.

Hours passed. I could tell that from the bell at the top of the bell tower that periodically rang. I must’ve dosed a bit but mostly I continued to absorb the atmosphere and admire the stars – through the night until the dawn.

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Ukrainian Bethlehem

Oxygen

I

Three thousand, three thousand two hundred and beyond… In the Humahuaca Valley in northwest Argentina the altitude sets in and the human body’s resilience is tested. Just how much oxygen does a body need, anyway?

Normally there’s a mild headache that stretches on from several yesterdays. Normally there’s shortness of breath and lethargy. On a first occasion though, during a first clash with the heights, it must be usual to wonder through the night if the symptoms remain within that normal range. As there’s no past experience, nothing to compare an individual reaction to, there’s no exact measurement to be had.

Is this how initial acclimatisation should feel? Is it static? Is it getting worse?

What’s known: not all human bodies are the same. Elevations affect people differently and while three thousand plus metres is not nearly as high as we can go, at some point there comes for everyone that stage where the body is deteriorating faster than it can adjust – when, oxygen-starved, a body slowly dies. It’s not clear just at what elevation a body will succumb to altitude sickness. The only way to know about the nature of one’s own body is to try.

It’s supposed to take about a month to fully adjust. The body produces more red blood cells to better grab oxygen at lower air pressure. Usually after a few days the headache will go, and the breathlessness will gradually dissipate over the coming weeks. Usually the lethargy does not last.

But is this how acclimatisation should feel?

II

The country was a galaxy in grandeur, the bus turned into a toy with its passengers as pinheads, ants. In a landscape like that, of soft yellows, reds and browns, vast and empty, the human is easily understood to be not more than an unimpressive bag of chemicals, affected by changing conditions and prone to reactions. We’re no stronger than the wind and the air.

The country had been creative, with cacti decorated desert hillsides and twisted, multicoloured cliffs that earned their poetic names like the ‘Artist’s Palette,’ and looked as a great wealth of minerals. There were windblown rock formations and it was worth the breathing strain to see it.

Yet from the reaction to the lower pressure it should’ve been some alpine expedition. It should have been on foot with a walking stick, possibly ropes. There shouldn’t have been a bus service at all, nor a highway, nor beyond that open country, buildings.

That the human species has colonised almost every terrestrial environment would account for the two small towns on either side of the bridge. It would explain La Quiaca and Villazon.

It was time to get out and try to stretch one’s legs, because the future was up ahead, across the little bridge, where those bags of cement were, at great speed, going.

III

They were running across the bridge, hundreds of people, without any formalities. What drove their urgency was at first unclear; that they could run at all was a wonder. Where was the oxygen? Well, they say the locals are born with larger lungs.

It was a colourful procession, short indigenous men and wrinkle-faced women with swinging plaits and carefully balanced bowler hats. They lugged bags of building supplies, grain and cases of fruit, more, unknown boxes and baskets carried in multicoloured aguayo blankets slung over their shoulders and across their backs.

Among the bowler hats were several distinct varieties: black, brown or dark green, full-sized, nicely fit on the head or child-sized and looking a bit precarious, balanced at a fashionable side angle.

To the left, another line was coming southwards: people of the same crowd with the same tanned skin and distinctive cheek bones.  They were then carrying nothing but just as quickly. What was all the rush for?

The world has many borders. There’s a winding train line border from Belarus into Vilnius, a muddy channel with reeds between Iran and Iraq, there’s a long line of Tata trucks parked along the road to Haridaspore. And I remember how as another bus had once crossed from Bulgaria to Macedonia the passengers had hid cartons of cigarettes on the bus roof through the skylight as it drove slowly enough not to knock them off, through the checkpoint.

Still, of all borders it’s that one, La Quiaca in Argentina to Villazon in Bolivia, which is one of the strangest of all.

Why were they running? A tourist said they were contrabandistas, desperately smuggling as many loads of Argentina back into Bolivia as they could while Argentine customs officers stopped for lunch and siesta. It was a street market on the run; it seemed as if half of Argentina would be removed and resold before the customs post reopened.

Argentina has a Titanic-sized human border leak that’s impossible to fix; only a few people stood in the official queue.

And although it was but a small bridge it was a border that seemed natural, due to contrast, not least in the human faces to the north and to the south.

To the south was a largely immigrant country with a strong Italian influence that altered the pronunciation of the Spanish language. To the north there was an indigenous majority country still waiting, as at 2005, for its first indigenous president, an achievement which was surprisingly just one year away. His name was Evo Morales and people would speak of the end of Andean Apartheid after his election.

I wondered what it would be like to have an indigenous Bolivian friend, Quechua or Aymara. Would such a friendship have a distinctive Andean shape to it and how would it fit into the rest-of-life jigsaw, so entirely different as to be left waiting to one side, unable to place? What would life be like in La Paz, after I took up my new Bolivian job?

I remembered my mother, who’d warned me to watch out for the multitude sickness. I can only imagine that’s a rare type of affliction which strikes in elevated locations that are also crowded, places just like the La Quiaca – Villazon border.

And there, incidentally, running is certainly not as obvious an activity as stopping to catch breath.

IV

The Bolivian official reminded me, ‘thirty days’ as he stamped my passport. I thought he was fishing for an insistence on ninety for a small unofficial fee, but I might be wrong about that. In any case it was already planned to pursue a work visa, a process into which a week of my life would disappear, later, in the Bolivian capital.

My first Bolivian steps were in the town of Villazon, which, apart from that Andean dust you can’t do anything about, was clean and fastidiously swept. Somehow I’d imagined a more chaotic Bolivia.

They had an organised ticket system at the railway station and with my newly acquired Bolivianos I bought a ticket for Tupiza, the nearest town.

A robust train conductor in a hard cylindrical cap with a tin sign across it, labelling him in Spanish, greeted passengers at the carriage door; and he religiously swept the carriage every half hour or so.

I sat dusty-comfortable, watching the on-train video of traditionally costumed Bolivians dancing around a train, to the eclectic rhythms of Andean cumbias, and the out-the-window movie of banded dry hills, small gullies, distant mountains and a sunset over cactus flats.

There were a few adobe hut villages with washing drying on thorny bushes by a stream. The occasional goods truck chewed up dust and bowler hatted, long plaited goat herders walked from somewhere over the horizon to somewhere else over the horizon. Finally, there was night.

More Argentina...

More Bolivia...

More Mountains, or... 

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen