Today I was in transit between Warsaw and Przemyśl. Przemyśl is the town near the Ukraine border where the refugee reception center I will be working is is located.
The trip from Warsaw to Przemyśl was a 6-hour train ride. The first half or the ride was an express (non-stop) train from Warsaw to Krakow. In Krakow I transferred to a different train which made about half a dozen stops before arriving in Przemyśl at about 3:30 in the afternoon. The Ocalenie Foundation employee here in Przemyśl has a car, so she picked me up at the train station and brought me to the apartment where the volunteers are quartered. We also swung by the reception center to pick up the apartment keys from one of the volunteers, but I wasn’t allowed to enter the center because my name hasn’t been registered with the Polish Red Cross yet. Anyway, I got a couple of photographs of the outside of the building. The reception center is housed in a former Tesco shopping center that was closed a couple of years ago when Tesco ended it’s operations in Poland.
After we got the keys, we zipped over to the apartment, and I spend the rest of the afternoon getting oriented and unpacking.
When I first decided to volunteer with Ukrainian refugees, I began practicing some Ukrainian, using the Duolingo app. Duolingo is a great way to practice foreign language in spare time. It’s almost as much fun as playing video games. The app challenges you to pass hurdles, and each time you advance, there’s this little endorphin rush. So I spent a couple of weeks (or more, I can’t remember) just learning the Ukrainian alphabet, which is essentially the same alphabet used in Russian. Then, before I really began learning any Ukrainian grammar or useful phrases, I received confirmation that I’d be working for Foundation Ocalenie in Poland, so I started studying Polish too. Then, once I arrived in Warsaw, I stopped looking at Ukrainian at all and focused on just learning as much Polish as I could each day. Now today on the train from Krakow to Przemyśl, a woman travelling with her small daughter asked me to help her lift some of her luggage off the high overhead rack. Turns out, she’s Ukrainian and doesn’t speak English or very much Polish. Just from this little incident, I can see the writing on the wall — very soon (i.e., starting tomorrow), I’m going to be struggling to work in two different languages, each of which I only started learning myself about 2 months ago.
This sounds like a job for . . . Superman? Well, no, I’m just being silly there. I don’t know whether Superman is tri-lingual or not, and in any event, I believe he’s out of vogue these days. Let’s call in Googleman instead. Yes, armed with Google Translate, there are now legions of Googlemen and women roaming the world with reasonable ease and security. I am quickly becoming one of them. It is amazing what smartphone translation apps (Google Translate is just one of several good choices) can do. I can literally talk to my phone in English, and the person I actually want to be talking towith can read what I just said in Ukrainian, or Polish (or almost any other language I could name). The process is a bit clunky, but it allows for basic communication sufficient to embolden greenhorns like me to up stakes and head off to another continent that we’ve never visted before without any serious concerns about getting lost or being stranded on the street with no place to sleep (just remember to not let your phone battery go dead).
The same technology enables me to effectively publish this blog in any language I wish. And it allows any reader to read it in any language they prefer (in the event I haven’t published it in their preferred language).
Say what you may about trends toward populist nationalism, impatience with alternative viewpoints and dissintegration of the “global village”, the simple fact that people anywhere on the planet can now quickly and effectively share importan ideas encourages me to hope that people will work out ways to see beyond the “fake news” and continue to “wage peace”.
To be sure, the fake news phenomenon is a powerful force to be reckoned with. As The Washington Post dourly proclaims, “democracy dies in darkness.” An important implication is, if people are indifferent about what’s going on in the rest of the world beyond their own local communities, then they are easily lulled into agreeing with whatever perspective on the world the agents of information serve up, whether those agents be government-controlled or commercially-controlled news media. This too often results in a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing narrow-mindedness and denial, with eventual catastrophic results. A corollary is that every citizen of democracy ought to be excited about finding opportunities to probe for mutual understanding and common ground — even if that means having to learn to use digital prosthetics to carry on conversations with people whose languages we don’t speak.