Today we began enjoying a significant upgrade in our internet service, here at the nursing home in the village of Cokilets, Khmelnytskiy oblast, Ukraine, where I am doing voluntary humanitarian aid work.
Like everywhere else in the world now, internet access is perhaps a more coveted utility than running water. After all, without piped water, one can still find alternatives (like carrying water in pails from a well or a cistern), but without internet connectivity, you are immediately back in the Stone Ages, when your only source of entertainment is interacting with real people or reading printed material. For better or for worse, most people I’ve met (myself included), would rather go without a hot shower for a week than without internet access for a day.
When I arrived here at the nursing home last autumn to begin my first stint as a volunteer, of course the first thing I asked, right after my hosts showed me where to put my luggage, was whether I could access the internet. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it works pretty much the same way here as anywhere else I’m familiar with. Internet access is provided to the building through a cable, and then distributed within the building through a wireless router. All good!
Except, the router is located on the second floor at the west end of the building, and WiFi was pretty much unavailable in the residential area on the ground floor of the building. No WiFi on the ground floor was a big problem for me. Because of the language barrier, I rely a lot on machine translation apps like DeepL and Google Translate to communicate with the Ukrainian staff and residents. But those apps only work when connected to a server through the internet. So when I’m upstairs in the building I can ask questions and have conversations, thanks to the magic of machine translation. But when I’m downstairs working with the housekeeping and nursing team, I can’t even ask simple questions like “where is the soap?” or “may I borrow the mop?” Lack of verbal communication really reduces working efficiency. Even though people here are generally very good-natured, it would still not be reasonable for me to simply snatch a mop out of someone’s hands without any explanation.
On one of my trips to Khmelnytskiy I bought a new wireless router. According to the literature, it could be set up as a range extender when paired with the original router. I was very excited to set it up as soon as I got back to the nursing home. But after doing my best to follow the vague set-up directions and patiently tinkering for a couple of hours, I couldn’t get the new router to pair with the old router. So frustrating! I even tried calling the manufacturer’s customer service hotline, but after spending 45 minutes on the phone with the service rep, the problem was still unsolved.
Not to be defeated, next time I went Khmelnytskiy I bought another, fancier router. I figured maybe the reason I failed the first time was because the new router wouldn’t pair with the old one, and if I had two new routers, maybe they would pair, as promised in the literature. Leaving nothing to chance, I even took the first new router back to the store with me, and asked the sales staff to actually pair the two new routers in the store. I figured all I would need to do then would be to carry them back to the nursing home and plug them in. They would already be set up and ready to use.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work. I gave up in disgust and stashed the routers in the bottom of my suitcase. I figured perhaps there were some configuration issues that could only be solved with the help of the ISP. But because of the language barrier, I was in no position to follow up on that hypothesis. I also didn’t want to ask Gennadiy to help with this problem, because he is already busy enough dealing with more important issues affecting more people here at the nursing home.
However, one afternoon a few days ago, Gennadiy and I were casually chatting about various projects and plans for the future, so I asked him if he remembered who had helped set up the wireless router when they moved in a year ago. To my pleasant surprise, he told me he had actually been thinking about those new routers himself (of course he knew that I had been trying to install them), and had an idea to order a service call from the ISP. He had the additional idea of connecting the TV in the residents’ hall to the internet so residents could watch live-stream programming instead of relying on a conventional aerial antenna to watch the local television channel.
So, sure enough, this morning a team from the ISP appeared on our doorstep. They had a big roll of cable, and with yeoman’s assistance from our facilities manager Sasha, they quickly pulled a cable from the original router location upstairs right to the television station on the ground floor. They also successfully installed both of the new wifi routers I had purchased, one upstairs and one downstairs, so now we have pretty complete wifi coverage throughout the building.
I won’t claim this is a slam-dunk game-changer, but certainly it is a great convenience. Now I can “talk” to my co-workers on the housekeeping staff so we can work more with better coordination and efficiency. Also, instead of going upstairs every time I want to use my computer, now I can sit with the computer in one of the dorm rooms.

Now, once the daily showering and basic housekeeping routine is finished and all is quiet I can work on the RAYA blog, but at the same time, whenever someone needs assistance with anything, I am right there on the floor where I can respond right away.