Intro to Belarus
Here are some facts: Belarus is a former Soviet nation state to the east of Poland and to the west of Russia. During World War II, it was literally bulldozed through by the Germans and then the Russians and the Germans again. During all of this bloodletting, one out of every four Belarussians died.
I went to Belarus in July 1996 after traveling around Western Europe with my ex for over a month. He and I parted in Rome. He was going to linger in the Eternal City a bit longer before heading state-side. I flew from Rome to Vienna, Austria, to Minsk, Belarus.
Why would anyone trade a few more days at the lush Hotel Mascagni in Rome, gobbling up the Coliseum and the Vatican, feasts of pizza and insalata caprese and hearty red wine for Minsk, Belarus? That’s a sensible question. But just the sort of thing I would do and relish. I was, please keep in mind, just 20 years old.
I was an aspiring anthropologist/Spanish major and had never done any anthropological/archaeological field work. I think we need to pause for a moment, to vindicate myself to my fellow anthropologists out there. Yes, I’m educated as a cultural anthropologist, not as an archaeologist or paleoanthropologist. For those of you not up to your eyelashes in bones and theories of cultural relativity, cultural anthropologists do work in “the field” but not literally in the dirt. We don’t dig up bones and pottery shards from medieval or Bronze Age or colonial middens. We go to “the field” and watch people, real living, eating, breathing people.
Nonetheless, I went on an archaeological dig in Belarus despite the fact I eventually developed more into a cultural anthropologist. At this time in my education, however, I was much more interested in paleoanthropology (studying our/humanity’s ancestors: Lucy [Australopithecus afarensis], Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo sapiens neanderthalis, etc.) than archaeology.
My father thought it would be a good idea for me to get my hands dirty so after nibbling stinky cheese in Paris, enjoying Woody Allen’s filmed hilarity while high in Amsterdam, glimpsing turquoise rivers swirling through the Swiss Alps, I went to Belarus after my year in Sevilla, Spain.
I was in shock as soon as I got off the plane in Minsk and ducked into what I thought was a bathroom, which the tiny room turned out to be, despite all indications to the contrary. No toilet paper, no toilet, just a perfect circle in the ground and grooved slots on either side of the orb on which to position yourself while you squatted or hovered or whatever maneuver you could muster to get the job done.
At the time, this was all quite new to me. Not that I’m now a full-fledged world traveler but since this first experience with—what are they called?, Turkish toilets?—I’m much better and more tolerant of all things “bathroom.” Gosh, as an anthropologist, me of all people should be sensitive to other ways of doing things and be keenly aware that not all people around the world are as spoiled or prissy as we are. I recognize and acknowledge that but I was still freaked out.
I had my big red pack, filled with the clothes I’d been traveling with for the past month, washing them in hotel sinks and tubs from Brighton, England, to Milan, Florence, and Venice.
I waited in line to clear customs. The tag of my shirt must have been sticking out as the person behind me in line, brushed my neck to adjust it for me. That gave me quite a scare.
A fellow teacher and acquaintance of my dad’s, let’s call him Walt Turner, had organized the dig I had come all the way to Belarus for. He taught in the same public school district as both of my parents, leading their middle and high school’s programs for gifted students. He was also associated with my dad’s alma mater, Muhlenberg College.
Walt Turner, though what’s to follow will cast him in a less than favorable light, was an interesting man, having done a slew of extraordinary things. He had worked for the U.S. government in some undisclosed capacity that had him living in northern China at the height of the Cold War. Also, Christa McAuliffe, who perished in the Challenger disaster with all its crew on January 23, 1986, had hedged him out of the running for her spot in the NASA teacher in space program.
Walt was a man of at least 60. I wonder now, as I write this, over ten years hence, if he’s still ticking. Although he’s American, he wore Speedos. Although he’s less than attractive, he had plenty of what my parents diplomatically called “lady friends.” His daughter ice skated furiously. I think she was pretty good in her own right. He was the leader of this excavation and he was supposed to meet me at the Minsk airport.
At this time, I spoke only English and Spanish. I knew a spattering of German words, mainly niceties and greetings, but nothing else. I remember getting off of the plane expecting to see him. Minutes elapsed into hours. I kept revisiting the instructions as to where we were to meet in my mind, wondering if I could have gotten something wrong. I seemed to be where I needed to be.
It was dim outside the airport. I kept close inside, fearing that if I wandered too far, that would be the exact moment I would miss him and his crew.
Finally, he arrived and we headed to an apartment in Minsk. There’s so much to this experience but I’ll keep to the most salient details.
The site of the dig was in the hay fields bordering the village of Snydin in southern Belarus, not far from the Ukrainian border (it’s so tiny I’ve failed to find a map with it on it). We were so close to Ukraine that we needed to check the well water each morning for radiation, due to the fall out from Chernobyl.
In fact, sixty percent of Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout landed in Belarus. When I finally did get to Ireland after the dig on my way back to the States, I stayed at a quaint B&B in Shannon run by a sweet middle-age Polish woman and her Irish husband. During my first and only morning there, after a run around the block a few times, she sat with me while I ate my yogurt and had a cup of coffee. She asked where I was coming from and whatnot.
I told her I had been in Belarus for a month and a half. She gasped. She was from the region and was more familiar with the horrors of Chernobyl than most other people, I reckoned.
She also told me that Shannon hosts kids from Belarus each summer to provide them a break from their surroundings, akin to innercity, fresh-air kids in the United States. Studies have shown, she asserted, that one summer away from the fallout adds years to the children’s lives and frees them, if for only a blissful two or three months, from the detrimental effects that persist in this struggling pocket of the second world.
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