Happy Labor Day!

Ukraine celebrated May 1 (Labor Day) today with a day off. Tomorrow, we will have a day off for Easter which was also on Sunday. So happy Labor Day to everyone. The Communists and Socialists marched in the streets of Kyiv Sunday to remember Labor Day. Some carried posters of the mass murderer Stalin. Their crowds are getting smaller it seems. As Ukraine ages and older people die, there just aren't as many enraptured by the Communist ideal.

I just finished Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. The novel (if you can call it that) is set in the mid to late nineteenth century in the old Southwest and focuses on episodes of the lives of two French Catholic missionaries sent to the Southwest to create order in a newly created diocese. I read this work as a part of my project of reading fiction about missionaries. I can't really recommend this book since it grows tiresome with almost no plot to hang the novel on. Since the episodes themselves aren't very engaging and with nothing else to keep you interested, it took me a long time to finish this book since I was reluctant to go back to it. It does, though, reveal some of the ethnocentric attitudes of Europeans toward indigenous peoples. It also demonstrates how some religious workers were genuinely concerned about indigenous peoples, unlike the missionary of legend who seeks only to civilize, westernize, and Christianize.

Tonight our friend Oleg who now lives in Uzhgorod came over for dinner. More banana bread. What else can you do with old bananas? He returns to Uzhgorod on Tuesday and we will all go back to work on Wednesday!!