nEUrosis

Drunken wolves

April 1st, 2007 by Pim de Kuijer

‘’This is what we all are in the Balkans, wolves in cages and they keep us drunk to keep us calm.’’ These words came from a man with the surname of Vukovic, which means wolf, or so he told me. He was my interpreter when I was in Montenegro as an election observer. In our sparetime we had gone to see a local celebrity, a wolf kept in a cage by the roadside with a pile of empty bottles beside him. As we approached, the sad wolf started wagging his tail (what would you do, said one wolf about the other, if a meal would just walk up to your cage?) and Vukovic started his sad tale. He explained that no matter how good a degree you have, how high your ambitions are and how much you want to ‘get your teeth into something’, poverty, ignorance and a political class fearful of change would keep you down. For those not fortunate enough to get to Western Europe, only the bottle is left.

The story struck me all the more because I had heard it before, although not in the same words. In the Ukraine, again as election observer, I had another interpreter, the elegant Liudmilla. She spoke fluent English, recited Pushkin by heart and as a girl in Communist times she had studied, for free, in Moscow and the US. Now, she was teaching English to the four or five children who were left in the school of her rural town in the Poltava region. She had had to send her two sons into the army, far away, in order to give them something of a chance at an education and a future. She brought me to her school building, a beautiful place built in the early twenties, which reminded me somewhat of the modernist style I have seen in Brussels and Barcelona. The building was half empty and becoming derelict. Liudmilla told me of her plans to convert the building into a cultural centre where local people could study languages and participate in exchange programmes. The local dignitaries had laughed at her plans. Survival was all that counted in a poor agricultural region suffering from a recent Russian boycott on Ukrainian foodstuffs.

I asked Liudmilla whether she thought membership of the EU and NATO, both highly controversial in her country as well as in the West, would make things better for her. She heaved her shoulders in the most Slavic of ways and said that she did not see the point. Funds from either organisation would never trickle down to Poltava. As for the political turmoil in Kiev, again very much topical today, she said it did not matter to her who was in power in the capital. It was all the same to her as long as the same relic from communist times was still running her school and the fight over the local mayorship was being fought between another such relic and a man who had shot one or more of his adversaries and was in fact running the local maffia.

But the most amazing thing about the two stories for me was, that it applied only to my highly educated interpreters. As for the drivers, Zelko in Montenegro and Pjotr in the Ukraine, they seemed happy as could be. Taxi-drivers in everyday life, they earned more than a month’s salary driving me around for four days and as long as they had food on the table and a wife in their beds, all was well according to them.

Living in a land without opportunities is hard. My advice; don’t get an education.

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