Beautiful Drone of the Stage

I collapsed last night,in my own bed at home in Lviv, a small picturesque city on the west side of Ukraine close to the polish border.  Yesterday was a blur.  I picked up money sent from my mother (my job here hasn't started yet) and it was enough to buy myself some simple food and get a train ticket back to Kyiv I indulge in delicious raw honey and raw milk from the "babas bazar" and a friend visits and helps me get to grips with paying bills in my new Ukrainian apartment. red tape concerning the gas boiler. nothing is easy here.

I bump into an old patriot friend.  Lviv is a small picturesque city, likely you will bump into people you know esp in the centre where I live. She tells me she does not agree with joining eu and wants Ukraine to stay as Ukrainian as possible. no point arguing with her about how Ukraine's only hope of getting rid of Russia is to go towards EU, if only for a little while until Ukraine gets stronger.

 I surf the web today catching up on links and news about the Protests back at ground zero, the independent square in Kyiv, The capital of Ukraine. I was too busy and nervous to read while there at whats known as the 'Maidan'. People seem to have have dropped the "Euro". In the evening I tap into Aronets live video stream of the independent square. It's been two empty days away and I'm hungry to see how things are and if its the same as when I left on New Years morning. Relief.. It is ...and the beautiful drone of the loudspeaker with protest voice is suddenly for the first time in my life extremely comforting.....touching something deep......i need to be back as soon as possible. tonight?

Surprised by emotions I don't understand: how a screaming male voice over a loudspeaker about Ukrainian nationalism (I'm guessing as I only understand limited Ukrainian words) in indiscernible language could have an effect on my emotions. this is the longest I have been away from the square in a month. I walk in the cameraman's shoes, smell the wood burning smoke, the musty smell of unwashed clothes, campers huddled by burning barrels, the soup cooking on the open fires and tea with lemon and jam. I think I miss the 24 hour excitement that something will happen. Anything could happen at any moment.

Here I was again in the country that my grandparents fled sixty years ago and abandoned for ever. seemed to me the country was headed towards the same turmoil and instability of a war-torn country (that they left behind) and was I running to it, wanting it, maybe wanting to finish off the job that they had started! England had been my home all my life but for Ukraine the roots ran deep. but why was the voice on the loudspeaker so familiar?

Was it a memory trigger for when I was a child? A two year old, California, Berkeley campus where my mother, a single mother student finishing her degree in English and Psychology. Protest voices calling for freedom, expression, young voices, frustrated, new at this protesting thing. protesting about sexual equality, race equality, to end the Vietnam war to express their freedom by turning a derelict space into a children's park. The next day the military tore down the park, students were hurt, maybe even killed. I remember playing in a dusty park with makeshift crooked metal fence and my mother giving me marijuana seeds to plant in the soil. later she described how I had been one of the children who played for that one day inside that illegally created park. Later it was to become a symbol and part of the sixties history, it was named "peoples park".

Our move to back to Europe and to England was spurred by my mothers experience of this moment in history and by a police raid in the middle of the night that landed my mother in jail overnight. Police came into my bedroom as I was sleeping and grabbed me out of my bed carting me away to an unknown place....officers arrested everyone in the house, and me too I thought (two year old child) really I was in a children's home. A week later my mother and my teacher got me out. I only remember it as a lonely place full of rows of children and hot chocolate. Would this explain why I have the protest fever.....at age two hearing "down with the pigs" and "this is the revolution" evening deep discussions, in the future things will be different. revolution, it all came to me naturally!.....

I continue watching video streams, nationalist marches for a commemoration day, live footage of walking around the crowds, hearing the sounds of the Maidan, the occasional chanting, singing, rustling of thick coats in the wintry night, boots on the cold concrete. There had been no snow recently, temperatures were mild of late ( a problem for the barricades made of ice bags that melted) On the phone to a friend at the square, there a loud bang in the background, she says there was an explosion, then says it was nothing. My mind goes wild with imagination, what could it be? and will I miss the big day when the authorities will come and try to sweep the people away? possible to do it?

These people seem so determined, so angry. They have been waiting for this moment a long time. The orange revolution had just been a false start. Now it was the real thing. This is what seasoned people were telling me. On Twitter, the post Christmas police and authority clamp down has begun. Central heating was turned off at the union building which held the press centre where I slept, a building leased by the protesters. At the city hall occupied mainly by supporters of the nationalist party, the hot and cold water was switched off today...I tried to picture it, people using large bottles of water to flush the toilets. Ukrainians are already used to this and always have a supply of a few filled gallon bottles of tap water by their toilets at home always. as the water supply can sometimes go off for half a day in the cities. And who need needs hot water in a revolution?

What keeps this revolution going is people, siting, standing, talking, walking. It's a brand new social scene, and all the networkers ran out of business cards in the first week. If a few police show up, out of nowhere there are a few hundred people immediately at that place. The Maidan is like a living breathing being with antibodies ready to expel the germs that enter. I read in the local news that the local authorities had a meeting yesterday and agreed to start blocking the roads bring in the supplies into the square, wood, food, water, come regularly in large trucks delivered to each camp. The fires are constantly fed with fresh wood to burn to keep people warm. Food by the truckloads comes in too. and endless jars of fruit preserves, pickled items in huge clear jars, large Slavic sausages, raw honey of all colours, and tastes, coffee and teas a whole assortment are always available for the masses. Ukrainians know how to stay well fed and watered to entertain, keep warm and comfortable.

A friend filming a group in a large tent, who had proposed an horizontal system of governance instead of a pyramid. Was the 'Maidan' a microcosm of the Ukraine the country? a political testbed for future government systems being tried out in miniature? perhaps. I had the feeling that different parts of the square represented a different approach how to run a country. In the union building it was definitely soviet communism, with people barking and obeying orders without question, and most of the building was off limits to the ordinary person and we have yet to determine how much money goes into it, where it goes and how much. Outside in some of the camps, 'olde worlde' medievals roam and beat their drums complemented by ginormous vats of cooked millet and rabbit stew, full Kozak Uniforms, swords and white furry hats. Then you have the fresh faced smiling liberal Eco types with their homespun cloths, rainbow hats, loose fitting garments describing clumsily alternative democracies while holding small children on the hip. A regiment of young men in balaclavas and orange hard hats march past. Are their lives so miserable that they would literally fight and risk injury or death by Berkut policemen in the hope it will change their country? Its all very confusing.

One nice thing is that alcohol seems to very low key; even on New Year's Eve, bottles of champagne were spotted outside the perimeter. The rumors that "provocateurs" were going to smuggle in vodka and get everyone drunk was enough to keep everyone sober....more confusion, I thought Ukraine was known as a problem area concerning alcoholism in epidemic proportions? Perhaps the drunks have exchanged their bottles for loud speakers and microphones. On one occasion I was wooed by a Ukrainian mother and daughter to their house miles away from the Kyiv city centre. They plied me with deliciously perfect vodka (called Horilka here) shared by a German and a Canadian Ukrainian who had also been seduced by their promise of delicious meats and desserts. The Canadian brought out of this world Canadian whiskey ... who knew?

Two days later I escape unscathed yet having fallen in love twice, one with the Canadian and once with a young Kozak regiment security guard they had also captured with a long moustache and dreamy eyes. i was disappointed. I thought I had finally come across part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who had not been sent to Siberia.