First impressions at Base UA Arts Camp

There’s not enough time for all the feelings, and digesting them. I think maybe also for the kids here, definitely not for me, so much of it for the first time, real, not hypothetical.

A–– marches up to me the first day, announces that she loves speaking English, she even works with a tutor. She helps translate things when the other mentors aren’t around or are tired of English, and her circle of friends have adopted me as a sort of mascot / pet / running gag.

She shows me her notebook full of beautiful drawings of landscapes and buildings. She doesn’t draw people (but her friend K–– does, so they’re a perfect pair). She says that architecture is hard when she’s trying to realistically render multi-dimensional perspective. Then she shows me videos of her three Belgian Shepherds. She trains them. To fetch, and protect, and do parkour, and to find land mines, missing people, and bodies. Yeva recently helped find an old woman who fled into the forest during Russia’s ongoing grinding advance toward Potrovsk. Kronus is on the frontlines, with A––’s father on de-mining detail. Fenji is just 6 months old, and A–– is preparing her for the IGP Cup of Ukraine competition. His genes are impeccable, and his bite strength has other professional trainers offering lots of money to buy him. I tell her I hope she wins, then ask if she knows Scooby-Doo before wishing her “Rood ruck!”

Then I go to my room and cry – silently so that I don’t wake up K––, who’s exhausted from the morning hike, and also from being adorably, hysterically manic since the campers arrived, and heaping manic adoration on the kids. Maybe it’s also partly from his medication to help with anxiety, which has gotten worse recently, since Ukraine lowered the age of required military service to 25 this year – the same year K–– turned 25.

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As an outsider, unable to understand the language, it’s easy for me to float on the surface of joy that permeates the camp, to rest in the feeling of this bucolic utopia. There’s even value in doing so – M–– says the kids are fascinated with me not just because I’m an American, but particularly because I’m a grown man who’s kind and gentle and goofy, and that’s quite unusual here. Also because I’m a grown man, and there aren’t as many of those around, they’re mostly in the Donbas, fighting for their children’s lives.

 So I try to be a balm to these kids, as I try to understand what it could possibly feel like to be growing up in a world where two years of Covid lockdowns segued immediately into “the Invasion” – that’s terminology to differentiate the current war situation from the previous eight years of ongoing conflict in the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk) after the 2014 occupation of Crimea.

 Some of them lived abroad for a while – Poland in one case, Japan (!) in another. Others lived in occupied territory before deciding to move back behind Ukrainian lines. At least one of them lives in a dormitory at a residential school. Most of them are “IDPs”: internally displaced people. Almost half have parents on the frontlines. They all know people who’ve died in the war, and several shared in their applications to the camp that they’ve lost close friends or family. They’re also all, in a basic sense, “normal kids” – excited about music and movies and comics and sports and making art and dying their hair and making new friends and frolicking in the afternoon shower that cooled things off briefly yesterday, before totally clamming up 10 minutes later in our first Movement Lab when I asked them to dance like that in a classroom setting.

 I can feel how all these opposing things fit together. There’s no conundrum or contradiction, of course these things can all exist at the same time in a person’s life and situation. But what I’m in awe of, and listening hard to understand, is how they hold it all at once, with equanimity and common sense and moments of joy and devastation and frustration, without all these jumbled experiences and emotions canceling each other out, or exploding… It is a beautiful, excruciating thing to witness, and to experience alongside them.

-PATRICK