A Day in Donetsk

Wikipedia photos of Donetsk and the Euro2012 logo. We passed this stately church on the way to the bank.

On Tuesday I took a six-hour bus ride to the big Donbass city of Donetsk, and then 3 hours later I took the 6-hour bus trip back to Starobelsk. All those hours riding a bus just to get to a Peace Corps-approved bank to get a new ATM card so I can access my PC account and the $250 I get in my monthly allowance! That’s because my old card was eaten by a local ATM machine and reported a “hot” item when my wallet was stolen at the end of December on the train from Lugansk to Kyiv. Luckily my wallet was found and returned with my passport (but no money), so I got to go to Egypt. What a miracle that was, and in so many more ways than anyone could have predicted.

There was no heat on the bus, but the driver was a real expert at driving on snow and ice. The roads were as bad as those photos I've seen of the roads in Chicago after the recent blizzard blew through the Midwest.

I've become an expert in layering up for winter weather, so I snuggled down and relaxed for the ride. A few times I thought our time had come as we skidded this way and that. But not yet. The bus driver was in God’s hands and God, or the goddess as Loren would say, correcting me, got us home.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see much of Donetsk. It is a big city of over a million and it will be one of the sites of the 2012 European Championship football (soccer, of course) games. It looks like a prosperous city. It was once called Stalin and then Stalino, a big steel producing and coal mining city on the Kalmius River surrounded by the farmland of the Ukrainian steppes. It's had a tortured history of Nazi occupation, destruction, and rebuilding. Today it is the home of president Yanukovich and his good friend Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.

The city looks to be in pretty good shape for Euro2012. There are even signs in Russian, Ukrainian and English at the ugly old bus station! Streets are being graded and paved. The huge Donbass Stadium, built by Akhmetov, is ready, according to my taxi driver, who spoke about as much English as I spoke Russian. It's a big football city, home to two winning teams.

So you'll be hearing a lot more about and from Donetsk in 2012, especially if you're a soccer fan. Maybe its teams will bring a victory to Ukraine. That would be a huge morale booster for the entire country. Go Donbass! Hope springs eternal.