12/4/22
Made it through last week with no new mass attacks.
12/5/22
More afternoon strikes. None landed in Lviv or Kyiv city [Kyiv is also the name of an oblast, or state] but extended period of electricity out even here [in Lviv]. _____s invited us for dinner – always nice. Streets dark like in Kyiv.
12/7/22
Still quiet here. Nothing big yesterday. Apparently UBTS [school Mark was teaching at in Lviv] is not used to having electricity out, so the plan to just do classes feels weird when that foundational thing is not steady.
12/8/22
Quiet day, 4am Zoom [for a class I was taking online originating in the U.S.], met with ____, knocked out end of school stuff while Mark taught his last day. Zelenskiy and Ukrainian people on TIME cover, Politico Man of the Year, etc., etc.
12/9/22
Heading back to Kyiv today (train). I just noticed (again) the tendency to go through something big, then to settle back down into a sense of more or less calm/just keep on, but also the tendency to forget what went before in any detail – just broad strokes, larger moments – like the strikes on October 10th. Even now I know that there were strikes after that, and the steady decline into limited daily electricity, etc., but the strikes on 11/23 have dimmed all of that detail (even the dates of what then were significant strikes in Kyiv and around the country. The following Monday? [in October] the 17th? then another, but not on a Monday? – I’ve already lost track).
The “new norm” of not scheduled outages [the city announced a change] but emergency outages has even become a blur. We weren’t really keeping the schedule before 11/23, but that has erased all memory of those.
Being in Lviv will impact my sense of the strikes this past Monday (12/5), but I know Kyiv is definitely feeling them; here, the seminary had electricity out for the first time (for them – maybe they’ve had a generator?).
12/11/22
It seems to be the norm to not have electricity at church on Sunday mornings now. The ability to do electronics and coffee at the same time is an issue [due to overloading the generator] – but people are consistently coming anyway!
12/12/22
We haven’t had anything new in Kyiv, but I’ve realized that in my focusing on Kyiv, I have not been seeing (and feeling) the fact that the losses and stresses grow in a lot of places, every day.
I was feeling pretty out of sorts Saturday and Sunday – wanting to be seen and even appreciated [by people who were present] and it wasn’t pretty. People outside of this can’t pull all the pieces together, or if they do, it’s a shock, and then it fades. The day in, day out is utterly incomprehensible. The desire to “take a break” was real, and then I see that no one around us has that option. Humbling.
McDonnels in Ukraine 