Asakiyume mita

On Monday, the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov, "said ... his investment company would exit its vast media business to conform with a law designed to curb the influence of 'oligarchs,' a move cheered by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office" (quoting this Reuters story). This involved turning over Media Group Ukraine's print and television licenses and stopping all online media.

"All online media" includes the volunteer effort I've been part of since March, proofreading translated Ukrainian tweets, Facebook posts, and TikTok videos. All of a sudden, about 12 hours before I was going to do one of my 3–5 am shifts, the program stopped. Just like that.

I've been so intensely grateful for the opportunity to use my skills, such as they are, for a good cause. Isn't it what we're always craving, when we hear of something that we want to help with--to be able to actually *work*? So often it feels like the only way to be helpful is to give money (not knocking that! Money is tremendously useful! But there are limits to what most of us can do along those lines, and it's not very personally involving) or else to do rote work of some sort, like phone banking. (I'm not knocking that either; it's just something that I happen to dislike.) It was a very disorienting surprise to have the Ukrainian project suddenly disappear.

I always wondered, when I was doing my proofreading, how the output was affecting public opinion, if at all. The tweets and videos and posts encompassed both stories/headlines you could find from mainstream US news sources and human-interest stories from the daily lives of ordinary Ukrainians--inspiring, enraging, and heartbreaking/heartwarming by turns. I liked the ones about brave dogs and intrepid cats. Here is a sample tweet: a girl raising money with a little market stand, and here is a thread I was the proofer for.

Regardless of what effect the effort was having on the world scale, I feel like it had a big effect on a personal scale. The team of proofreaders, translators, and editors really became friends. A friend who also was involved as a proofreader wrote this in a blog post:

I think it’s safe to say, that grateful as we are to have been part of the collaboration, it also meant something special to our Ukrainian partners running to bomb shelters that strangers across the world were donating hours of their time, expecting nothing in return — just wanting to say, “You are not alone.”

We're still connected by a group chat. One of the Ukrainian editors is involved in an effort for refugees, and some of the Americans who have experience with aid work are offering suggestions for contacts. We'll see where things go from here.

Two exciting things!

First, Strange Horizons is doing a special issue featuring Southeast Asian writers, and on Twitter they mentioned especially that they'd love to get someone from Timor-Leste. So on Facebook I posted about that and one of my acquaintances from when I went there in 2013 messaged me! He wanted details, and he said he'd try writing something if I could help him translate it. I said yes! And the other day he sent me a 3,500 word story. And now I'm working on translating it!

I can't convey sufficiently how exciting this is for me. I daydreamed, when I was over there, about how great it would be to hear local stories and tales--or even to read them. But it seemed worlds away, requiring so much study, and was I likely to do all that work for a place I might never go back to? But I did it! And now I can help someone share his stories with the world! So there's that thrill, but then there's the thrill of the tale itself. It seems very folktale-esque so far (I'm not quite a third of the way through it), but all the little details! Details about how to clear a patch of forest to make a field (bring your axe and your machete--which, amusingly, in Tetun is called a katana), put little stones around the perimeter, cut all the grass, weeds, and other plants, let them dry, then burn them. It was the tools and the little stones that I was especially excited about. And then details about what they eat for lunch, and bathing in a stream... all of it. Now maybe these are just folktale elements, but they're new-to-me folktale elements. I love them.

Now I'm waiting for a promised magical eel to appear.

Second, my ESL tutee and I are going to experiment with making Salvadoran chicha! She was telling me her mother sometimes makes this alcoholic drink to sell to people, and I was asking how she did it, and I thought... why don't we try it? So we're going to. Ingredients are seed corn, panela (unrefined sugarcane juice, condensed into a brick), a pineapple rind, and water. And time ;-)

I'll let you know how it turns out.

The ninja girl has a question about Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest series. I read some books in the series and enjoyed them, but I have a notoriously bad memory, and I didn't read all of them, so I'm putting the question to you.

The magician character [quick Google search... ], Mendanbar: the ninja girl remembers an occasion where he (or possibly someone else??) creates a duplicate person/doppelgänger of someone, using magic. Does anyone remember such a thing? And if so, can you situate that plot piece? Also, what was the double called?

What I'm up to is I found a way to volunteer my skills (such as they are) for Ukraine. I don't know that it makes much difference at all, except for this: I get to work directly with people in Ukraine, and I feel like having sympathetic strangers step up and be a presence is something-not-nothing. If I was about to die and someone sat down next to me and smiled, that would be better than facing it alone. I do the volunteering in the morning hours, Kyiv time, which is the wee hours, my time, so I'm on a kind of sleep-deprivation high.

No posts for nigh on two weeks and then two of them come in one day. NOT GOOD BLOG MANAGEMENT.

I'm training to do tutoring with an organization that helps immigrants and refugees, and part of the training was watching this one-minute video on the iceberg model of culture. Spoiler: Culture is like an iceberg, with only a small portion visible.

I was telling the ninja girl about this, and the conversation unfolded like this:

Me: Culture is like an iceberg: only a small portion is visible.

Her (sagely): Yes, as with an iceberg, most culture is underwater.

Me (giggling): With climate change, we can expect more and more culture to be underwater. Hey: what if we expanded on this analogy?

Her: Yeah--introduce the Titanic of our assumptions. We think they're unsinkable...

Me (excited): But if they strike the iceberg of culture horizontally across five compartments, each one will fill and send water into the next, and our assumptions will be doomed to sink! IN TWO HOURS! "I wish I'd built you some sounder assumptions, Young Rose."

Her: I wonder which of our ideas will make it onto lifeboats?

Me: Primarily the women-and-children ideas. And primarily ones in first class. Our assumption-ship was so classist.

Her: Think of all the ideas that just fling themselves into the freezing waters of... what do the freezing waters represent in this analogy?

Me: Not sure. But least *some* ideas will make it onto lifeboats. Later, England and the United States can pass laws later to ensure there are enough lifeboats for ALL ideas.

Her: Yes, definitely.