Toilets, Triage and Traffic

By Wolodymyr Derzko

Ukraine’s sixteen years of gradual but often uneven progress towards democracy has shown that this path zigzags back and forth through reciprocal periods of success and setbacks.  Ukraine’s nation builders have borrowed models of democratic institutions from countries with long-established democratic traditions and adapted them to local circumstances, but often with mixed results. The key success factors, however, are not the “bricks and mortar”, but the acquisition of habits, and the mindset of the people who run and occupy these democratic institutions and the culture of a democratic society as a whole, without which even the best-designed institutions are prone to failure and malfunction. This is a far more difficult and painful task and may take several generations to acquire and spread evenly through out the entire population.

Many of the young people who were born 16 years ago and never lived under the Soviet Communist system simply get it and can’t imagine life any other way. They’ve been exposed to Western ideas and traditions or have had a chance to live, study or travel to the West. The problem by in large, lies with the older generation, the so called  former political elite or nomenklatura, comprised of high-level Communist and government officials, who during the Soviet era lived in a separate world, detached from millions of regular folk, and a generation who still feels that they deserve these privileges.

This gap between reality and expectations of these two polar groups opens up a series of paradoxes, anomalies and contradictions, that are often ignored by the locals because they seem so common - like water for fish, but an eyesore for the casual foreign observer like myself, and anyone who bothers to look deeper into the fabric of society.

In my last month-long trip to Ukraine, I had the opportunity to travel by car between Kyiv and Lviv several times instead of just by train or airplane. These road trips open up a whole new world which the casual tourist rarely gets to experience.

The Ukrainian health system is a paradox...

On the way to Lviv, we stopped into a regional (Oblast) hospital in Rivne - a building that seemed to be about 40-50 years old, clearly from the Krushchev school of architecture. On further exploration, it turns out that this hospital had only one functioning men’s washroom, with the old Soviet hole-in-the-floor toilet, no toilet paper, no hot water (only cold) and, of course, no soap. I attributed this deficiency to old outdated Soviet building design and thought nothing more of it until I was in Lviv two weeks later at the brand new Faculty of Dentistry building - a structure that’s less then two years old. Yes you guessed right. The modern building in Lviv still has “hole-in-the-floor” toilets for students and no soap in the washrooms.  If a medical facility can’t set a basic example of good hygiene, who can? I’m sure the special hospital built only for deputies in Feofonia has more than one washroom and with soap. After all, this one hospital for the political elite in Ukraine has a budget of two times the entire state budget for all the remaining hospitals in the entire country.

Yet functioning toilets are not enough to attract all deputies and politicians to get health care inside Ukraine.

Early in September, Internal Affairs Minister Vasyl Tsushko was quoted in the press saying someone “helped me fall ill” when journalists asked about his heart attack this past May.

Was Tsushko treated in Ukraine? No, he was whisked off to Germany, where he underwent surgery paid for by his friends. He said that if he remained in Ukraine for medical treatment, he would have been dead more than 40 days ago.

Tsushko was not the first and will not be the last high-level Ukrainian politician to seek expensive medical treatment abroad instead of turning to the domestic medical system that millions of Ukrainians rely on.

Construction jobs in Ukraine are a paradox too...

Ukrainian construction workers have to travel to Portugal and Italy for work, yet the two road construction projects near Lviv have exclusively hired foreign Turkish and Macedonian workforces. It’s common knowledge that, otherwise, the asphalt would likely be stolen by the local workers to pave new roads in every village between Lviv and Oles’ko.

Traffic in Kyiv...

On the roads, Kyiv has become a city in 24/7 traffic grid-lock. Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych happened to get stuck in Kyiv traffic last week, while on a working visit. For some reason his motorcade was not given the traditional elite escort, having roads cleared and blocked off by police. What is his solution to the problem? Instead of suggesting ways to address traffic jams and build new roads for the average citizen, he proposed that politicians use a more modern mode of transportation. He wants to buy helicopters for officials to go over the traffic jams … and let the average motorist suffer getting around them.