The night before I cooked up the super garlic sausage to give to the homeless man we see in the square everyday and the other girls wrote up notes that said “You are beautiful and God loves you” in Ukranian. Ukrainin uses a different alphabet then we do, the “G” looks like “r” , “R” isn’t a letter unless it is backwards or if you take the top off its a “k”, and the word for beautiful is written rapHa (this is as close to the cyrilic as I can get, this will be important later).
So in the morning we went to the town square with our cooked sausage in a tin and 80 or so hand written notes. We prayed about our endevor then I went with Logan and 100 grivna of my personal money that I could afford to spend (I have $42 to last the next 10 months as of my last statment) and went to the flower vendors. The flower vendors are mostly babushkas(grandmas) with a few young women and men in their ranks. The day before Logan and I had determined the price for the huge daisy looking flowers were 2 grivna a piece and the slightly smaller daliah looking ones were 1 grivna, so I was thinking we could get 50-100 flowers. Something told me to go for broke so Logan and I counted the flowers in the bucket and when we counted to over 75 with a good amount more left to count I offered the 100 grivna for the bucket. The two vendors spoke to eachother in Ukranian for awhile, the lady who had taken a picture with me the day before was obviously lobbying our cause, and then we had a deal. They pulled up 5 bunches of daisy dahalia mix with dripping stems and handed them to me. I marched off triumphantly with my nose in the air like I have probably always done and handed bunches to our team.
The girls went out with the notes and the flowers and just like the vision we handed out white flowers to women as they passed and told them they were beautiful. At first many were nervous but once they saw we weren’t after money or anything more than giving to them, they smiled and many looked almost excited as they came near and saw a flower out for them. A young man came up and got two flowers from Logan which he gave to the two young women he was with, as they walked past his hesitation was very evident and then he turned and asked “where are you from’. It turned out his name was Anton and he spoke very good english, he had been studying in Canada for several years and was home on vacation. He eventually invited our whole team to piroge dinner with his university professor grandparents, and left his number so we can make a dinner date. As Anton, Anna and Julia (the young women) went on their way Logan and I looked over to see a Babushka in tears trying to speak with Sydney and Brittney, obviously moved by their offering and note. We ran out of notes in well under 20 minutes. Emily set about writting more, we all came and wrote notes and some point and began passing them out again. After a few more minutes we ran out of flowers as well and Logan and Sydney each donated 100 grivna to buy more. One babushka came up obviously confussed, I thought it was my lousy ukranian penmenship, but another woman who had recieved a note earlier and was on her way back through explained the note and the babushka immediately blessed and thanked us and gave me a kiss. Several more people asked us questions which we did not understand at all causing them to eventually give up, before we realized there was a typo in our note and it had changed from rapHa to RapHa, as this new revelation occured we ran out of time and went home to have an early dinner so we could make our tea meeting with Masha and Laura.
At tea with Masha and Laura, Laura shared with us how religion and superstitions are so deeply ingrained in this society, that something a simple as giving even numbers of flowers is tantamount to wishing death upon the receiver. Masha brought us chocolates with different letters of the alphabet on the wrapper to teach us our letters. As we told our stories of the day I remembered the typo, Lili handed a copy of the note to Masha and we asked her what the it said now, “KapHa is like you are cursed or you are punished” she said. To which we all responded with dropped jaws, shock and horror. As far as we knew we had been telling women “you are punished and God loves you”. Masha later explained that The “R” is not really a letter and that even if they took it as a “K” the sentence structure was kind of off so it didn’t really make a lot of sense. She said they probably didn’t get much out of it other than the “God loves you” which was the important part anyway, lol.
P.S. The homeless man ate his sausage dish and shared it with another homeless man, Logan totally called that one, the rest of us were nay sayers but Logan was right 🙂
