Yushchenko and Larry King

Ukraine's president is in the USA now and yesterday gave a speech at the UN. He's going to receive some kind of Medal of Freedom and is supposed to be on Larry King Live on CNN sometime soon. It's not on their website yet, but those of you in the USA may want to look for that. The government is still trying to figure out what to do. No big breakthroughs yet. And if Yushchenko has time to run all over the USA, I guess things aren't too bad.

Today I went downtown to pay the UEC phone bill and eat lunch. I made the mistake of taking one of the little mini-buses. The traffic just gets worse and worse. It's not the Kyiv it used to be when you could walk down the street in the middle of the day and not worry about being hit. Now it's bumper to bumper almost everywhere.

Yesterday was supposedly my day off but somehow I spent several hours in the Center. Since we haven't hired a part-time student worker yet, there are more desk hours to work so I have been trying to help out. Sergiy is trying to figure out how to move some of the computers around (we bought two new ones this week). One of them sounds like an airplane about to take off, so we are going to have to work on that. We also got a new shelf installed this week which frees up some space in the UEC office.

Yesterday I received a very encouraging, hand-written note from one of the UEC board members. Real mail is such a rarity and so it sort of shocks me. We don't get all the junk mail like in the US.

Tonight we had another of our combined cell meetings and had more than 25 people. Some of the students are back. Others arrive on Sunday. Saturday night is a planning night for the student outreach, and we are debating whether or not to go. It's too bad that it's so hard to meet with people during the day. It seems we are always busy at night and on Saturdays.