Leaving Kyiv

We are leaving Kyiv this morning to go to the  first area of our clinics. Kyiv is a big city with around 3 million people. The people are charming but it has a lot of the contradictions of former Soviet states. Lots of older buildings (pre WWI or WII), lots of Soviet architecture and a bunch of modern buildings as well. There are great coffee shops (important in a colder area) and great Ukrainian restaurants. We ate in a Crimean restaurant last night that is operated by a family that was driven out of the Crimea in 2015. 

Kyiv has all the amenities (and tourist attractions) that you would expect in a large urban center with concerts, parks and monuments (inadvertent or not).  I walked on a glass bridge on the hill which allows you to see across the Dnipr river and into lower parts of the city.  It was attacked by the Russians early in the current war and damaged.  The mayor, Vitalii Klychko, vowed to rebuild it and he did.  I remember an article about this in the NY Times.  People were walking all over the bridge and enjoying the scenery.  It shows the spirit of the Ukrainian people.

There are many air raid alerts and sometimes you can hear the antiaircraft weapons firing. I don’t think that any of the Russian attacks were successful.  I heard no explosions and while the attacks were reported in the press, no damage was indicated.  I wish I knew a better way to distinguish the more serious alterts from the less serious alerts. If you went to the shelters every time an air raid alert went off, you would literally spend half your life in the air raid shelters. I guess that is the Russian point. There should be fewer air raid alerts in the clinic areas, for the simple reason that there are fewer targets.

We will have lots of driving today to get to the areas where we will operate the clinics. The Ukraine is big, about the size of Texas. The weather should be ok though. Only about 20 degrees cooler than KC with about an hour less daylight.

From this point on, there will be gaps in my posting.  The Russian try to monitor/intercept all internet traffic originating from the Ukraine and we don’t want our patients (or ourselves) to be accurately targeted.  I will be able to post some days after we leave an area, but then with only vague descriptions of the locations.  Thanks for following along with me on this mission.  God Bless all of you.