Watch the One Man in Siberia Voyageur Journal
The cold tarmac at the Vladivostok airport was the end of the line for me. The air was about 17 degrees Fahrenheit, as warm as it was going to get for a mid-winter morning. Twenty dull hours of flying had set my wrist watch no less than fifteen hours ahead of Washington D.C. to a distant time zone in the Russian Far East. Here, if not for strict border crossings, a person might drive to North Korea for lunch or go to China for an all-afternoon shopping spree. I was, for the moment, in a different dimension.
The moment we stepped off the bus that ferried us from the plane, the main terminal door swung open and we entered reverently in a single file. Down the hall a crowd of eager Russians, shapkas on every head, searched our group of new arrivals for a glimpse of their husbands, girlfriends, and business guests. I, too, was looking deep into the crowd for a man who just two days before had promised in a short e-mail to meet me here. He had sent me his telephone number in case one of us failed to show up, but he didn’t see the likelihood of that happening since he had booked himself on a flight that would arrive several hours before mine from a distant city in Siberia. The only thing he noted with some level of concern was, “I have problems with English language.” And that was it.
It was almost 11:00 a.m. by my watch, and I stood in the middle of the hall wrestling with my bag before I set it down on the shiny floor. For a moment it occurred to me that he would not arrive. After all, there are still many things that can keep two complete strangers 9,343 miles away from each other from converging at the same time on the same spot of earth in a place unfamiliar to both.
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On the Trans-Siberian Railroad traveling to visit ADRA projects along the way. |
That impossibility, however, came only as a passing thought.
I watched a family, anxious to see a relative arrive, stretch out their arms as he approached their side of the airport hall. As for me, I imagined the meeting with my local contact being something like this:
“Am I glad to be here! I wasn’t sure if we’d meet, but I’m certainly happy that you made it. So, good flight from Novosibirsk? Are you ready to get on with the trip? By the way, when do we catch the train tonight?”
Which is why, a minute or two later, when I found myself standing in front of a man wearing a suit and tie and an elegant black shapka who spoke to me only in Russian, but to whom my identity was fully known, I was only half convinced that this was Nikolay Grebenyuk, director of ADRA East Russia, the person with whom I had corresponded for a month and who had replied to all my inquiries in a series of messages in well-written English. How could this be? I was flummoxed. Then I said:
“Nikolay?”
A wide smile spread across his face, the kind that says unequivocally, yes, it’s me.
He had immediately recognized the stitched ADRA logo on my windbreaker jacket when I walked into the terminal. He pulled out a paper folder with the same logo printed on it, as a gesture to ensure mutual recognition.
“How did you manage to write in English?” I asked.
He fumbled with some words, and said, “Computer program.”
Pointing to the exit, he asked (I could only guess), how my flight from Moscow had been, and was I ready to get on with the trip? He patted me on the back. As we walked out into the brisk morning air, I sensed that perhaps he was also glad to know that neither of us had flown all this way just to be stood up by the other.
At two o’clock that same night we were seated comfortably in a spacious and mostly empty sleeper railroad car on our way to Irkutsk, a city three days away that lies near Lake Baikal’s southern extremity not far from the border with Mongolia. Although we had enjoyed the convenience of a local translator during the day, our communication was now restricted to loose Russian and English words, wild hand signals, and doodles on a small paper pad.
I crawled into my sleeping bag. Nikolay, who still seemed to be working out some words in his head, stood up and said, “Chai?” The word would have gone past me had I not visited northern Pakistan a year earlier where drinking tea is a part of every social event and is offered to any guest who enters a home, much like a calumet among American Indian tribes, to extend friendship and peace. He quickly dashed through the narrow corridor and got two tall glasses from a train attendant, then filled them almost to the brim with hot water from a boiler at the end of the railroad car.
“Good chai,” I said. Nikolay responded in Russian and seemed pleased by my appreciation of the local tea.
“My country drink chai. All people,” I said.
A puzzled look settled on his face. The confusion, perhaps, had something to do with my assertion that everyone in my country, like Russia, was a tea drinker. Or that he wasn’t sure what country was my country.
“America?” he said pointing to me.
“No, no. No America,” I said putting my index finger to my chest. “Chile.”
I drew an imaginary map in the stale air of our compartment, and after a brief pause, he said: “I Ukraina.”
“Not Russki?” I said in the best bit of Russian I could summon.
Until now it had not occurred to me that Nikolay could be anything other than an authentic born and bred Russian. Perhaps, if I’d known the language well I could have detected a slight foreign twist in his voice, but then again, he had lived outside the Ukraine for so long that he surely had by now left out of his pronunciation any clues of having been born elsewhere.
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In his work for ADRA, Nikolay Grebenyuk oversees all of Siberia, an area equivalent to nearly nine times the size of Alaska. |
His mother and father, who raised him Russian Orthodox from birth (he would later become Seventh-day Adventist), still lived, he said, in his childhood home in Kumejki, a small rural village 110 miles southwest of Kiev, where they had a large field of bright sunflowers, which they tended to year after year. They loved the Ukraine and would not live anywhere else, even if that meant seeing their son, who had lived in Siberia for the better part of two decades, only from time to time. Fortunately, his older brother lived just down the road from them, and that gave Nikolay a measure of comfort.
Family was sacred to him; one doesn’t need words to sense the love of a man for his wife and children. Opening his notebook computer, he clicked on several photographs which popped onto the screen: holding a big fish with his 12-year-old son, Pavel; daughter Katya, 16, posing near the door of her grandparents’ home in Kumejki; and Lena, his wife of seventeen years, sitting on a beach during a recent summer trip. I was sure, then, that being on this train with me meant that Nikolay was losing time with them; it was the nature of the work. We’d all been there: far-removed, longing.
Presently, as we sped through the darkness across the vast Russian countryside, we were taking sips of hot tea. It was late in the night, but there seemed to be a sense of interest in each of us to know where the other had come from—and perhaps where he was going.
The train traveled the entire night along the Chinese border all the way to Khabarovsk, then turned west at the northern end of the city and crossed the Amur River. Nikolay was delighted to see the river flowing undisturbed under a hefty layer of ice possibly as much a three feet thick, he said. To sink a fishing line into the river a man would need to drill by hand for the better part of the morning, a sweaty task even in the deep freeze of winter. But no amount of ice, nothing really, was going to get between a man and his fish.
This was apparent the next day when it came time for lunch. Long before boarding the train (when exactly is anyone’s guess), Nikolay got his hands on a trout that only two or three day ago, I imagined, had been swimming up a river in Kamchatka, an extensive peninsula opposite to Alaska across the Bering Sea whose fresh fish products are considered the best in the region. Now, the trout lay smoked inside a plastic bag. Using a small kitchen knife, he cut the flesh into thick slices; the outside was clearly well smoked, but bringing a piece of the fish to my mouth, I tasted the raw gelatinous body.
“Good,” Nikolay said, “Very, very good.”
One bite was enough. In Russian he offered to give me half of the fish. Taking the knife, he pointed to the slices that were mine. I declined, offering my upbringing as a poor excuse for not being accustomed to eating fish. He said no problem, and having eaten his share of the trout, he put the rest back in the bag and placed it by the window where the deep cold from outside would keep the meat fresh until the following day, in case I changed my mind.
By now it was customary after every meal for us to read from a book or stare out the window or simply sit back and choose a conversation topic to pursue. We had somehow managed to discover words in Russian and English that we both vaguely recognized, and soon we were having lengthy exchanges.
One such discussion started hours after we left Khabarovsk as the train worked its way across a vast, uninhabited plain colonized by birch trees and little else. We were in the Siberian taiga proper, Nikolay said, a biome that extends all the way to Norway and, skipping the Bering Sea, into Alaska and much of inland Canada. A man takes a measure of pride in saying he has been in it—in winter especially. It is, after all, a place of infinite beauty, but which can test even the most rugged of men. In years past Nikolay had ventured into the open taiga for days at a time, not necessarily alone, but always in the spirit of adventure.
“My friend professional hunter,” he said.
It was with his buddy Sasha and two or three other friends from Irkutsk that he would walk into the wild on weekends to camp, rest, and sometimes hunt. He was showing me some photographs of one such trip when he said he owned three carbines. It was with one of these that he went into the forest one day and killed a bear. At present, however, he kept his carbines stored at home, because he hadn’t found much use for them in recent years since he moved west from Irkutsk to the bigger city of Novosibirsk.
Life in Irkutsk had been memorable: hunting trips to the Siberian taiga, visits to Lake Baikal, friends, romance. But Nikolay had not moved there postulating that he would achieve those things, but rather that those things would come to him in time, as one must often do upon arrival in a strange, foreign land. This was 1986 and he was enjoying the relative freedom of having finished four years of training at a military academy in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka rivers 250 miles east of Moscow. The Soviet Army, naturally, would expect a return on its investment. Before the blanket of winter dropped on Siberia, Nikolay arrived in Irkutsk to report for duty and begin, he said, a career as an acquisitions and logistics officer. The job meant supplying the base—from the grunts to high commanders—with everything from socks to the lard used in the kitchen. He was organized and watchful of every detail and over the years he rose steadily, as did his love for Irkutsk and his new wife and later his two children, to become major—by now in the Russian Army.
A few days later, in late afternoon, he would take me to the main entrance of the army base to show me his former home. A Sukhoi jet fighter was propped handsomely on the snow near the gate. A young guard was standing out of the cold inside a yellow building. Nikolay didn’t say a word. He just smiled. But I knew that he had thirteen years of memories tucked away behind those tall black metal gates.
Siberia, if you didn’t know it already, is enormous. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains not far from Moscow and southward to neighboring Kazakhstan, and runs along the borders of Mongolia and China all the way to the other side of Asia where the land dead-ends at the Pacific Ocean eight time zones later. If you take a cutout of the map of Alaska and set it down over Siberia, it will easily fit no less than eight times and leave plenty of wiggle room to add California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Connecticut, and two Districts of Columbia.
To approach the size of Siberia in a different manner, one comes to the conclusion, after some simple mathematics, that Nikolay must oversee—and try to crisscross—as many square miles as the vast majority of ADRA country offices in, say, Africa (twenty-six out of a total of thirty-four)—Mauritania, Mali, Cape Verde, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sao Tome, Angola, Namibia, Madagascar, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Malawi, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe—alone.
One man.
He tackles distances by plane and car and, as we were doing now, also by train. Getting around remains a very big undertaking.
Nikolay, however, had not let a single moment of frustration slip out of him since we’d met. If he ever felt overwhelmed by anything—by the size of the territory he was meant to bring relief to, by the needs of the people, by the time away from home—it was never apparent to me in any way. Perhaps, Siberia had had the opposite effect on him. Or he had dealt with it long ago. The reality, nevertheless, is that eight years after leaving the army to work for ADRA he remained driven, optimistic, confident, and, best of all, cheerful to the marrow.
In the process, he had managed to stay deeply human, too.
“Every time I go to a project I dedicate myself to the people,” he said later through a translator. “I try to do my best to help them and make their lives a little better.”
I saw this side of him even more clearly in Irkutsk, where we arrived in the middle of the night after seemingly time traveling 2,569 miles over the frozen Siberian taiga sipping hot, sweet tea.
The next day at noon we gathered in Novolenino, a residential district of the city, inside a spacious, sunny room at the Regional State Organization Orphanage #2. Here, sometime ago, ADRA had brought food to supplement the pantry of the orphanage and improve the diet that the children needed to grow up healthy. Lunchtime was well underway and two dozen little children, one to four years of age, sat around tiny square tables eating hot soup and bread. A few, too little to master a spoon full of soup, got help from the staff. When lunch was over, the children ran inside the room chasing each other around until they slowly grew tired.
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An ADRA volunteer helps a little boy eat lunch at a center for HIV-positive children in Irkutsk, Siberia, Russia. |
Many of the children staying in this orphanage wing, called Aistenok (it means “stork-baby” in Russian), are living with HIV. Some arrived at the orphanage soon after birth, abandoned, in some instances, near a bus stop, in the snow, or in the alleys between houses, well before they would know the love of a mother or understand the cruelty of the world outside these walls. Fortunately, on this day none seemed aware of the latter yet.
The happiness in Nikolay’s face was palpable. He held a little girl in his arms and whispered a few short words to her. She was shy. Quiet. He said something else, tickled her chin and she broke out in a wide smile.
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Many children who have been abandoned live in infant houses until they can be adopted or transferred to homes for older children. |
“This is what drives me to do my best,” he said. “The children.”
We stood quietly watching the staff put every child in bed for a nap. Not every child was willing to go to sleep. Minutes later, however, the room grew peaceful. Silence. We heard only the gentle, rhythmic breathing.
I was certain that the faces of these children, of so many others, too, would stay with him beyond this day. He had said to me, “Each time I return home after several weeks, I feel pain for the people. I am touched by the sorrow I see in many places in Siberia. But then I tell myself that I’m working for them.”
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Nikolay standing on the ice of Lake Baikal. |
We drove to Lake Baikal the next day over newly fallen snow. The icy surface of the lake was a clear window into the depths of the water. So clear, we could see the bubbles trapped inside the ice. Nikolay walked to an open market not far from the edge of the lake. When he returned, holding something wrapped in a newspaper under his arm, he said,
“Baikal fish.”
I sensed right away that Nikolay Grebenyuk wasn’t going to let my upbringing get in the way of a good fish.
We spent the next hour eating fish with our bare hands.
“You like?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
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Eating omuel, a popular fish from Lake Baikal. |
