Source: “Freie Presse” of March 28th, 2001

Where pants fly at half staff

A transport unit bringing help from Germany reaches Transcarpathia—where not only flood victims have problems.

“Papa, do we have to die now?” When Lajos Vince heard his little daughter’s question at the beginning of March, the man from the Ukrainian village of Tzschornotiziv could give the child no answer. The floods of the River Theiss overflowing its banks had made the inhabitants of his house prisoners overnight on an island of fragile sod blocks. With the rising water, fear trickled into his house—the fear of losing not only his worldly goods but also his family. Any moment his very pregnant wife Irénke could have gone into labor. Down below in the village the weakened walls of single-story farmhouses by the hundreds were buckling under the pressure of roofs.

But Lajos was lucky. His home withstood the rainwater and runoff from melted snow up to seven meters deep from the Carpathian Mountains. Today the substance so necessary for life, which brought misery and many deaths to the village of mostly ethnic Hungarians along the Theiss, has flowed away. Lajos and his compatriots are left behind--captives of poverty in a forsaken region on the edge of a prosperous Europe. When disastrous flooding occurs on the Rhine and in Bretagne, those governments help, insurance companies pay damages. But in Ukraine the victims are on their own. Dozens of villages look like places ravaged by a mass destruction campaign. Whole rows of houses are rubble. Local people covered in mud and dressed in faded clothes much too big or small are tearing down remnants of buildings alongside whole companies of soldiers from the Ukrainian army.

The apocalypse accompanied by heavy rainfall has washed the joy of life out of the faces of thousands. The few salvaged possessions are sadly piled up on tables. Dirty table coverings, blouses and pants on clothes lines flutter defiantly in the cold wind blowing between the boards of emergency housing, like flags at half staff. Nearby children dig in mountains of sod for pieces of roofing or fencing—firewood for those who haven’t been able to move in with relatives. Again and again the work of the ragtag army is interrupted. A truck from the county government brings a small amount of food. Immediately the unloading area is surrounded by dozens of people. They mostly want drinking water and bread, since the raging Theiss River has robbed them of their livestock, potatoes and grain supplies.

Donations are urgently needed. “When you take everything into consideration, dissatisfaction in Germany is quite exciting.” So says Ildiko Gruner, a 27-year-old from the village of Tzschornotiziv. She was married to the president of the Lengenfeld organization, the Transcarpathia Benefit Society, a few years ago in Germany. Andreas Gruner has already organized many transport units into the region. On the previous weekend he and members of the Plauen Kiwanis Club were en route with four transport units in Vinogradiv county. They distributed food, medication, clothing and toys—donated from Germany. For Lajos Vince the volunteers had packed a used baby carriage. In a region with 90 percent unemployment, in which industry totally collapsed following glasnost and perestroika, Lajos could not have afforded this luxury. By using the proceeds from his delivery business using horse and wagon, he scrapes by for his family to obtain life’s necessities. The man can offer in gratitude to visitors from the prosperous homeland of the organization little more than a shot of plum schnaps. "When we travel about in this area, the people often set on the table the last thing that they have,", Andreas Gruner tells us.

And the last thing is not a lot. Irénke Vinze gives birth to her baby in a Ukrainian hospital, because the family cannot afford to go to Hungary for her to give birth. In the “front parlor” of the west there are significantly fewer catastrophes in clinics. But anyone who gets sick in Transcarpathia had better pray to God that the doctor is having a good day. In Ukraine the prevailing health system reveals the same indifference to people’s pain as in the border crossings of the former Soviet republic. Gruner’s father-in-law Öcsi Deák once had a heavy bowl fall on his foot. After the foot underwent severe swelling, all attempts failed to obtain an ambulance for transportation. So the Society’s leader himself took the patient to the clinic. Then he was supposed to go first to the dentist’s office, since he was the only one with an x-ray machine. But another doctor advised against it because on that day the doctors were in a “plaster cast mood” and handing out stiff bandages independently of any diagnosis. In a hospital in a county seat, time is irrelevant. As you walk around the dark corridors and patient rooms, which sometimes remind you of a sick bay from the 19th century, you see a young woman with a painfully torn face falling on a rotted wooden bench. She has a broken foot and has been waiting an hour for emergency treatment. A man came in with an unnaturally turned hand. The staff sent him with a prescription for a plaster cast to the nearest drugstore.

Öcsi Deak could tell about many stories like this one. In the house of the unemployed electrician the high water merely flood wine cellar, but the people from the transport unit bringing help don’t show up. He is the only one in the village with an interational telephone link to his daughter and granddaughter. When relatives of the neighbors call his phone, this unofficial village electrician jumps on his rickety bicycle and informs the people. If the often loudly conducted discussions are then over anytime, the farmhouse changes into an information exhange central.

Even the Germans are finding advantages in the work, as they can thus take targeted gifts over the 1300 kilometer journey via Vienna and Budapest to the area where wine is grown. A nearby hospital could be helped out of an almost comical situation. The doctor had only one battery for use in two cars. If he was using one car to visit patients, the other car could not be used as a backup for emergency cases. The need for food is just as great, for example at a Reformed prep high school in a neighboring village. There six women cook 450 meals every day for soldiers, pupils, and ordinary people who have nothing but the clothes on their backs. For Pastor Janosch the donors in Germany brought three cwt. of wheat and several sacks of potatoes. From the high school garden, the victims of the flood can gaze on the mansions of prosperous Ukrainians. Local people tell us that only 5 percent of the people enjoy a western level standard of living. When the naive inquirer asks where they get their money, the only response is laughter. Even for the pastor in Tzschornotiziv money seems to be irrelevant. Constantly drunk, swapping Christmas and Easter sermons, he has a fancy rectory with little turrets in a neighboring town, as if it were transplanted from a tale in a Thousand-and-One Nights.

There is feverish stamping of documents at a terminal station. In order to bring goods to the needy it is necessary to take a long breath. President Kuchma has indeed asked the European Union for support. But his border people at the former Iron Curtain place obstructions in the way of any transport unit, with their bureaucratic souls being subject to bribes. A war of nerves lasting seven hours involving a military person obsessed with copying and stamping documents increases the costs of the trip. Every individual shipment of goods being sent has to have paperwork translated into Ukrainian, the personal data of every volunteer is noted on a separate slip of paper, which has to be surrendered when exiting the country. Among these administrative papers and the inspection of vehicle documents comes a wait lasting two hours. We are waiting and waiting, but no one knows why.

And that is how things are with transportation. Öcsi Deák dealt with border people for days. Without his influence and a wad of cash, the border control point would be the end of the volunteers’ hopes to cross over. Isolated old Audis and Mercedes creep day and night across the border toward Hungary. Sometimes 5000 cars at once are queued up at the border gates—all of them with diesel fuel in their tanks. It is much cheaper in Ukraine than in Hungary. For many unemployed men it is the black market in fuel that offers the best chance to earn money. Furthermore nothing is changed by the fact that for a few years an import duty of 2 dollars per cubic cm has been in force for cars older than 5 years old. It is utterly meaningless to flood victims. They are concerned with the question of whether the government will guarantee credit for home reconstruction as it did following the previous flood three years ago. No one believes this will happen. The doorway and gateway for corruption is already open. When the mayor of Tzschornotiziv in 1998 guaranteed generous help to the gypsies living there, he had a knotty problem for six months. The gypsies back then had torn down their cabins of corrugated iron, in order to qualify for the money. Since elections were around the corner, the mayor overlooked this circumstance. When it was over the town chief was a broken, graying man under arrest.

"We Germans cannot imagine at all what conditions are like there,", said Andreas Gruner. This seems to apply not only to the situation in the prisons, for only once did a television team wander into Transcarpathia in order to shoot a 90-second segment.