The week started off with our first visit of the season from
the Canadian Embassy. Well actually it
was my niece, Jeannette Menzies, coming in from Oslo Norway, where she works on
Arctic issues at the Canadian Embassy.
She was accompanied by two of my sisters (one of whom came in from
Cairo) and a cousin from Waterloo Ontario.
They came for the Molotschna Mennonite experience and to find out what
Mary and I are really doing in Halbstadt.
While this blog is supposed to be about our work at the Mennonite
Centre, I will take the liberty of describing a few experiences we had with my
family.
It is a unique experience to have all ones siblings together
in Halbstadt. We drove down to Lichtenau
to see the house that our great-grandfather built and where our mother was born. It is now the mayor’s office but we were
given free reign to wander throughout the building and try to imagine our
mother living there with her family. We
went through every room and shared stories that we heard from our mother. We even recreated the famous photo taken in
1890 with my great-grandparents proudly posing in front of the house with one
branch of their family. If you count the
cost of all the airfares to get there, it is probably the most expensive photo
ever taken with my camera.
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| 2013 |
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| 1890 |
One afternoon we recreated the start of our mother’s
emigration to Canada. We had a detailed account
of this trip written by my aunt.
Unfortunately, she hand wrote the original document in German in the
Gothic script. A knowledgeable friend in
Winnipeg had kindly re-written it for us and now all we had to do was translate
it into English. We worked on the
translation collectively, and then boarded the train in Halbstadt (now called
Molochansk) as our mother had done in November 1928, stopped at Lichtenau where
relatives had met the train to say goodbye, and then continued on a few more
kilometres to Feodorovka. My mother’s
family disembarked at this station and switched to another train going north to
Moscow. We continued on south to
Melitopol where we were met by Dema and Oksana (staff at the Mennonite Centre). We enjoyed a great meal together and then
drove back to Halbstadt.
Another day we visited the local police station as they were
looking for assistance in some planned renovations. My niece, with her embassy perspective,
expressed an interest in getting a better understanding of local issues and we
invited her to join us for this meeting.
My niece has previously worked at the Turkish Embassy and has travelled
extensively on embassy business in some of the surrounding countries that used
to be part of the Soviet empire. I
personally hope that she will someday work in the Canadian Embassy in Kiev –
maybe even have the role of Ambassador.
The police station desperately needed some upgrading. For
example, their holding cell had no bars on the window and even I could have
made a break for it. The police agreed
to give us a written request on specific projects where they needed help. Before we left, I asked if I could take a
picture of one of the police officers in their building. This was a problem to them as they all were out
of uniform. They quickly offered to
bring in a uniformed police officer from the street to pose for a picture. I accepted the offer and was surprised how
long we had to wait. Eventually a
uniformed policeman showed up in very well pressed outfit. He looked sharp. I suspect they had taken him home to get his uniform
pressed. My niece posed with the police
officer.
After the police station, we stopped at the Molochansk
School of Music to investigate another opportunity. We had a beautiful impromptu performance from
one of their voice students and my niece got to play their grand piano. While it is impossible to involve every guest
or supporter of the Mennonite Centre in our daily work, I enjoyed the
opportunity to share these experiences with my niece who understands the
difficulty of trying to identify problems and resolve issues in another
culture.
On Saturday we drove south to the Crimean Peninsula. We were looking for the Mennonite village of
Spat. My cousin’s father was born in
Spat and left in 1929. It was her first
visit and it was a beautiful experience for us to explore this village with
her. We found a local historian who was as
interested in our story as we were in what she had to say about the local
buildings built by the Mennonites. She
has had no contact with other historians and we promised her a copy of the
Ukrainian version of Rudy Friesen’s book.
We will stay in touch with her and if possible invite her to come to the
Mennonite Centre in Molochansk for a visit.
I was fascinated with some of the non-Mennonite information we
got from our local historian in Spat.
She told us that in 1945, Churchill landed at the nearby airbase on his
way to Yalta. I was interested because
the father of a friend in Winnipeg flew the decoy airplane on that important
visit and would also have landed at that airfield. When our historian found out I had an
interest, she took us to the airfield and talked her way into giving us a
tour. This is amazing because it is
still a large active military base under the control of the Russians. We walked around the base and took many
pictures. When we left, the Russian guards
greeted us in English and I shook hands with them as we thanked them for the
unique opportunity.
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