Ten Years of Ukraine

Today is a pretty significant anniversary.  Ten years ago, March 27, 2006, I came to Ukraine for the very first time.  It was just a two-week visit, and I had no idea at that time that it would be the start of a ten-year odyssey that would be arguably the most remarkable period of my life.

The Arrival

I really didn’t know what to expect when my plane touched down in Boryspil early that Monday. It was the culmination of a wild weekend. I had just returned to Denver Saturday morning from a week-long business trip to Peru, and I had only a day to organize, pack and prepare for my two weeks in Ukraine. I left Denver Sunday morning, and owing to time-zone changes, arrived in Kyiv early Monday afternoon.

I was dog-tired as I got off the last of the three planes that carried me from Denver to Kyiv. Going through passport control was a bit intimidating that first time, but it’s gotten better since then. After emerging from customs, I looked around for the guide I was expecting but whose face was unknown. A young girl named Marina soon greeted me and we were off in a taxi to find my hotel. And so it all began.

Why I Came

My reason for coming that first time – although I am loathe to admit it – was that I had gotten involved in the online scam of websites that promote dating and marriage with women from the former Soviet Union. I really didn’t know much about this “industry” and had gotten into it accidentally in 2005 while researching things to do in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where I thought I would be working. Up until that point, Ukraine had never entered my mind as a destination for any reason.

But as it turned out, I received letters from a number of women in Ukraine and struck up some correspondence with a couple of them, one of whom seemed particularly interesting. She invited me to come and meet her. The situation in Kazakhstan didn’t work out, so I decided to make the trip. About two weeks before I was due to arrive, I got a letter that she had suddenly become engaged. That seemed really strange, and I figured out soon after that the woman probably never really existed; the letters were likely written by an agency employee and the photos were probably fake.

But it was too late to cancel, so I made the trip. I found an independent translation agency in an eastern city called Kharkiv, and they sent a translator/guide to help me. I did meet a couple of other women, but I quickly figured out that the whole thing was a scam. The women were “professional daters,” whose game was to meet a succession of men who would take them out to nice dinners or shows, and then leave.

The whole “industry” had bad people on both sides: cynical women who scam clueless foreign men for money and despicable guys who travel to these countries as “sex tourists,” using the nicer and more vulnerable girls for a week of sex and then never being in contact again. I wanted no further part of that, and I was embarrassed to have been involved with it at all.

That was the bad part. But there were some good points of my two weeks in Kyiv; a lot, in fact.

A Turning Point

I saw many different and interesting places in the city and had a lot of fun, mostly with my hired guide. Having learned some Russian years before, it was interesting to be in the midst of the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Even the sore spots of the city – street beggars, dull Soviet-era architecture, and horrible drivers – were intriguing in their own way.

At one point, while we were returning to the center from a visit to an open-air museum of historical Ukrainian building styles, I looked out the window at the people going about their business. We were in traffic, moving slowly through a mixed neighborhood of residential and small-business buildings. The houses were typically dull five-to nine-level apartment buildings, and the streets were dotted with grocery stores and other small businesses.

Suddenly the thought came to me: I could live here. It was a feeling I’ve had in few other places in my life; throughout my many travels, only Colorado and Ireland come to mind. Sure, language was an issue, but I could learn, I could adapt. After all, I had learned enough Spanish to get by pretty well in Peru.

I was at a point in my life where something inside of me was crying out for change. It’s something I had gone through several times in the past. I seem to need some kind of change – big change – every five to eight years or so. Ten years ago, I was feeling that need, and in Kyiv, the seed of change began to take root.

Before Kyiv

I had been working for a small project management company for almost eight years, and it had been great. Doing that kind of work and being asked to join that company was something I never could have anticipated when it happened in 1998. I worked with good people, had interesting adventures in places like South America and Kazakhstan, and had regained the high level of professional self-esteem that had taken some hits in the early ‘90s.

And I was doing very well financially. By 2006, I was living in a comfortable, cabin-style house on four acres of forest in the beautiful foothills of the Rocky Mountains. My home was a retreat from the city, and I had nature and quiet around me most of the time. It was the second house I had bought since I started at that company, the first having been a new-construction home in a Denver suburb. I had two pickup trucks, the second being a new Nissan Titan with all the bells and whistles. That allowed me to let my daughters use my other truck as they needed, and I enjoyed being able to do that.

I had a lot of other creature comforts as well. From a material point of view, my life had never been better. And I was able to travel and see new places, mostly in conjunction with my work. It all seemed pretty good. But something was missing.

The biggest part of that something was probably what led me to take a chance on the dating website that discovered me while preparing for Kazakhstan: loneliness. I had been living alone, without a love in my life, for too long. We men don’t like to admit such weaknesses, but there it was; it’s hard to deny that it was a big factor.

But there was more to it than that. Between 2001 and the end of 2003, I had been involved in a difficult and, at times, nasty environmental cleanup project outside of Chicago. For the final six months of the project, I had become the sole onsite manager from my company’s side.

Dealing with the people around the project, particularly the residents and the local politicians was absolutely terrible. Most of the people were just looking for ways to extort money from our client, a large utility company, and the politicians were using every means possible, truthful or not, to castigate the utility company and advance their own political careers.

That area in and around Chicago was (and remains) completely controlled by the Democratic party, and we were at the mercy of liberal politicians. I learned firsthand how nasty and downright evil they can be. At the end, I was exhausted and very cynical.

For the next several years, I got more involved in some South American mining projects, which seemed great. But again, politics and other factors intruded to sap my enthusiasm for the projects. It seemed as though all we did was create feasibility studies, but we never got on the ground to actually build anything. And during this time we had some very bad internal incidents that jaded my feelings about the company. It had become time for me to do something else.

Something Different

Coming to Kyiv ten years ago was not just a desperate attempt to find love; I was also moved by the sense of adventure. I was going to Ukraine, a place that used to be part of the dreaded Soviet Union. In a previous life as a Navy intelligence analyst, the USSR had been my primary target, and going there was beyond impossible. But in 2006, there I was. It was a fantastic adventure.

When I had that feeling on the bus that I could live there, I paid attention to it. Being at that “need for change” point in my life, I wondered what I might do in such a place as Ukraine. I didn’t think too seriously about it at that moment, but I kept it in the back of my mind as I returned to Colorado and went about my project management work.

After the trip, I continued to correspond with my guide, and those e-mails fed my thought process about making a life change. More and more, I knew that I needed to do something different. A few months later, in May or June, I had a lengthy online chat with the owner of the translation company in Kharkiv that had provided the guide for me. I wanted to know what I might do for work if I came to Ukraine and wondered what she knew about teaching English there. I had a vision of a simpler life in which I would write and teach English.

In the course of the conversation, we discussed working together within the framework of the company she had been trying to build, expanding it and registering it in the United States. We would become business partners. In addition to writing and teaching, I would help manage and market this company; we would grow it as a translation and interpreting company focused on business and tourist clients. At that time, it looked like Ukraine was poised to be an emerging market for such services.

Also, I would continue my business writing and editing work, but on a freelance basis, and we would fold it into the overall offerings of the new company. It all sounded pretty good, and I began making concrete plans.

The Result

That talk led to another trip to Ukraine at the end of 2006 during which we set further plans and organized a team. It also led to my resigning from the project management company. It was a very amicable resignation, and I continued to do work for them, and for some other local companies, as an independent contractor for several years.

In early 2007, some cracks began to show in our business partnership, but I had made my choices, and there was no looking back. In May of 2007, I came back to Ukraine to spend a month working together on the business, which I had registered in Colorado, and to do some business writing workshops at several local universities.

Later that summer, I sold my house in the mountains. It was a sad moment to pack up and drive away from my beautiful refuge, but I was now headed in a new and different direction, and it wasn’t financially possible to keep the house at the same time. A few months later, in September, I rented my first long-term apartment in Kharkiv, and by May of 2008 I had become a full-time resident.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Years Since

There have been a lot of ups and downs over the years that I have lived here. I’ve experienced personal highs and lows, and I’ve seen the country go through enormous convulsions. But both Ukraine and I seem to be surviving.

When I first arrived in 2006, Ukraine was in the second year of the Yushchenko government. He was the president who had been elected during the Orange Revolution of late 2004, beating the kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovich. There were high hopes that the Yushchenko government would rein in the thieving oligarchs, reform the country’s corrupt institutions, and bring real democracy to Ukraine. But even by the time I arrived, people were starting to lose faith.

As it turned out, the Yushchenko government was a failure, mainly due to infighting between his camp and the camp of his Orange Revolution partner, then Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. As a result, the arch-kleptocrat Yanukovich won the presidential election in January 2010, and “thug” government began to return. “Tax police” raided businesses to exact bribes, and a whole slew of shady government authorities got rich from the public coffers.

At the end of 2013, people had had enough, and in November, a small protest movement began on the Maidan in Kyiv. It became known as Euromaidan, and by February 2014, after the killing of 100 protesters by the government, democratic forces swept Yanukovich and his cronies out of office. A caretaker government took control while new elections could be organized, and a few months later, the current president, Petro Poroshenko, took office.

In the meantime, Russia, which had long pulled the strings on Yanukovich, began to move against the new Ukrainian government in early 2014. First, they took control of Crimea and then annexed it after a trumped-up referendum. Then they set about creating trouble in eastern Ukraine in concert with the existing criminal element in that region. That trouble took hold in Donetsk and Lugansk and evolved into the war that has been ongoing since the middle of 2014. For many months, there was a real fear that Russia would stage a full invasion of Ukraine. We were very nervous.

I saw firsthand in March of 2014 how Russian provocateurs tried to foment upheaval in Kharkiv. Thousands of Russians had come into the city on March 1st to stir up locals who supported Russia over their own government. I personally witnessed a scene in which tens of thousands of people crowded Kharkiv’s main square and angrily egged on thugs who were beating Euromaidan supporters. It was ugly.

We all worried about Kharkiv going the same way as Donetsk, especially with Russian military units only 30 kilometers away across the border. But, thankfully, nothing materialized, and Kharkiv has remained relatively safe and very Ukrainian. Still, we all know that Russia is not far away, and one day it could all come crashing down.

And the Economy

When I arrived in Kyiv for the first time in 2006, the currency exchange rate was about five hryvnias to the dollar. As an American with dollars, everything seemed remarkably cheap. When the worldwide financial crisis hit in late 2008, the exchange rate jumped briefly to 10 to one, and then settled down to an average of about eight hyrvnias to one dollar. It stayed that way for about four years, and we were all able to live with that, and despite inflation, the cost of living was still pretty good overall.

But in early 2014, it all came undone. The exchange rate shot up quickly: 12 to one, then climbing to 15 to one, and then past 20 to one. It settled down again for a while, but the news of Ukraine’s failing economy the past months caused the rate to spike again, and the rates have been in the range of 26 or 27 hyrvnias to one dollar. Quite a change from when I first arrived.

But the currency exchange rate isn’t the only problem. Ukraine’s economic output since the beginning of 2014 has plummeted due to lack of industrial production in the warring eastern region. As a result, Ukraine has been unable to pay its debts, and inflation has skyrocketed. Food prices have risen multiple times, and energy prices have gone through the roof. Because I and other people working in IT get paid on a dollar basis, we do all right. But for millions of others, especially older people living on meager government pensions, it’s very difficult.

Once again, Ukraine sits at the edge of economic and political disaster. Infighting is tearing the government apart, and it appears to be only a matter of time before a key member of the post-Euromaidan government, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is forced out. That will fracture the governing coalition. It all seems like just more of the same.

When I first arrived, and for some years thereafter, most people I talked with were not thinking seriously about leaving the country. There were some who wanted to emigrate, but most had the notion of making Ukraine better. In the past year or so, however, I have encountered far more people who have given up and decided their lives would be better in Western Europe or North America. These days, I have a lot of former students and a few good friends who are now living elsewhere.

My Ten Years

The business we had planned, Nova Mova, failed. The financial crisis of 2008-09 had a lot to do with that: it became very hard to get client work. But also, it turned out that my business partner was extremely dishonest and incompetent. By early 2010, the company was no more.

But in the meantime, I had cultivated a good body of work as an English teacher. It started with doing speaking clubs at a local language school, and before long, I had individuals asking for private lessons. In the fall of 2008, I was invited to come several times a week to give speaking clubs at a local software development company, EPAM Systems – the company at which I work full-time now.

I added another large IT company, Global Logic, to my list of work in the fall of 2009, and my schedule was further filled out with private students. At the end of 2009, I dropped the language school and became focused on providing teaching services to IT companies and private students. Soon I had more work than I could handle. I wasn’t writing as much as I had planned, but I was doing a LOT of teaching.

More important, I think, I was growing. I was changing as a person and developing as a teacher. New ideas came to me – ways to more directly help the students I had with the kinds of business English skills they actually needed. After decades of different kinds of work, I had really found my niche. I was doing what I was meant to do.

Now I work full-time for EPAM, which has grown to more than 1,000 employees in Kharkiv alone, and more than 4,000 in Ukraine. It keeps me very busy, and with that level of work, I've had to cut back to just a few private students. But I enjoy what I do – something I have not always been able to say about past jobs.

Living in Eastern Europe has afforded me opportunities to travel that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve made several trips to Switzerland to visit my daughter and her family, which has been a real joy. I’ve also been able to see a bit of Italy, France, Denmark, Austria and Hungary. Last year I took a real resort vacation to the south of Turkey. And I am still thinking about making a return to Ireland someday soon. All of that has been great.

Throughout these ten years of my Ukrainian life, I’ve had a number of special friends and unique acquaintances. And I’ve built a LOT of memories. There are a couple of people here I would count among the best friends I have ever had in my life, and if I hadn’t come, I would never have met them.

In these years I’ve also felt the hope of love and the sting of heartbreak. I still live alone; that hasn’t changed. Perhaps this points out that this kind of relationship is something I’m just not meant to have in this life. Maybe it’s just a tough lesson of karma. Who knows?

Maybe it’s more related to the one thing about living here that perhaps does not fit: age. For all of these years, I’ve been an older man living among much younger people. My friends and acquaintances are all many years younger. I know no one over 40 and very few over 35. Very often, I find myself wishing I was a lot younger; lately I’ve thought about that a lot. But I am not – and there it is.

But all of that aside, my life here has been good. I sometimes reminisce about the house in the mountains and listening to the sweet, calming sounds of a Colorado forest on a warm summer day. But aside from that, I have no regrets. I am where I am meant to be, around people I am meant to be with, doing what I am meant to do. I think a lot of people would have trouble honestly saying the same.

The Future?

Maybe I shouldn’t try to look ahead for now. I’ve thought a number of times over the past four or five years that I probably should leave. But I am still here. Maybe that's because I've been not ready – or afraid – to make another change. Or maybe it's because on some level I still feel like I belong here. I'm not sure. 

I really was primed to quit Ukraine after a series of bad events in 2013, but then someone came along late that year who made me want to stay and see what might happen. The jury is still out on that, but I’m not quite ready to pull up stakes and move on. (UPDATE: The jury came in, and nothing good came of it.)

And I have great work now. There are challenges, and sometimes I feel like pulling my hair out (if I had any to pull) over corporate bureaucracy and such. But still, I find myself most days feeling pretty good about what I am doing. I’ve finally gotten myself to start doing some serious writing on a book. Again it’s all good, and it might be for naught if I give up on Ukraine now.

But there is that urge to change. It’s a part of me. Maybe I need to leave, or maybe I just need to make some other kind of big life change without going anywhere. I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I do realize that I am overdue to make some kind of big change. So, either way, I guess some big things are still in the offing.

All I know for sure is that my arrival in this country 10 years ago was not an accident: there was a purpose behind it. The life I’ve lived since then, including the very hard parts, has been the life I’ve needed to live. And I am glad for every moment of it.

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