Let me first say, that I will send some kind of small Ukrainian gift/souvenir to the first person* who recognizes the movie I'm alluding to in this post -- by yourself without Googling it or anything -- and names the movie in the comments below.

*Excluding our Kharkov mission team members and my mom and stepdad, all of whom have either watched this movie with me or heard me talk about it.

Our good local friend, Valeriy, works with a couple of Christian camps every summer.  One of these is unique in that the camp is primarily for orphans, and although the camp is publically-funded, they allow Christians from America to come and serve the children and teach them from the Bible.  This is a great work.  Part of Valeriy's job is to round up local Ukrainian translators who can translate for the Americans who come to work in the camp.  For this year's camp, for example, he needs around ten translators.

I already knew several of the translators, and Valeriy invited me to a meeting a couple of months ago to meet a couple more of them.  Then a few weeks ago he asked if I'd be willing to drive the translators who are from the Kharkov area to the camp, which is near Poltava, a city about a two-hour drive away.  Some of the translators Valeriy lined up are coming to the camp from other places in Ukraine, but four are from Kharkov.  Two more are from Kramatorsk, a city which is a few hours from Kharkov the opposite direction.  Those two, Sasha and Lena, came into Kharkov by bus yesterday.  Denyce and I hosted them in our home last night and had a good time getting to know them.  So that made six translators in total, plus me, for a vanload of 7 from Kharkov to Poltava today.

Now, a few of these translators had worked in this same camp last year, and as Valeriy wasn't aware of any written directions of how to actually get to the camp, they were supposed to be my primary guides to find it.  All I knew going into this was the name of a tiny village -- Golovach -- located near the camp, and an approximate location of that village on a road map.  And outside of major highways and roads, road maps in Ukraine should be considered approximations at best.

However, I was the driver, and didn't want to be frequently taking my eyes off the road or pulling over to scrutinize the map, so I decided to just let my translator friends guide me.  

The drive from Kharkov to Poltava went completely smooth and fine.  Enjoyably, really, and along the way we were treated to passing panoramas of pine groves and sprawling fields of wheat, corn, and -- my favorite (especially in light of the movie I'm referencing) -- sunflowers.  Pictures in a minute, but first things first.  Once we got to Poltava, though, it was clear that the translators couldn't even figure out where we needed to turn off the main highway, let alone what route to take through the myriad tiny, unpredictable, often uncharted little roads that snake through the countryside beyond the city.

Thus began our very rigid search.  (These words are to be spoken with a thick Ukrainian accent).   

After making a u-turn and backtracking some, Andrei ventured a guess as to where we should turn off the highway, and at first he and Anya seemed to think we had chosen correctly.  The road crossed some railroad tracks, left the city, and wound through a beautiful pine grove, by which time it had sold me on the idea that the camp must be somewhere down this road.  

Then we emerged into some village that I never saw a sign or name for (even now don't know what it was), and with Andrei's blessing I pressed on through the village.  Its little brick houses tapered off on the other side, and all of a sudden the road more or less dead-ended in a forested area near some other railroad tracks.  Hmm.  "This is not the way," Andrei quickly acknowledged.  By this time we were a good 15 minutes from the highway turn-off that turned out to be wrong.  I turned around and suggested we ask someone.  

A couple of minutes later as we were entering the village again, we came upon a fellow walking along the road with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.  Weathered skin, a bristly mustache; he looked pretty local.  Through my open window Andrei asked him how to get to Golovach.  I was given immediate relief by the fact that he knew right off what Golovach was.  He started by saying the most direct route is to continue down the road in the direction we had been going (before turning around), but that the road is in pretty bad shape so he wouldn't recommend it.  Yeah, no kidding, we'd hardly have guessed that there even was a road much farther than where we turned around.  So he proceeded to tell us a pretty long and involved alternate way to get to it.  It involved lots of turns, multiple railroad crossings, and some other things that I didn't catch in his quick cigarette-in-the-mouth Russian.  But hey, I had a vanload of translators with me.  Not a bad set of circumstances all around, eh?

We proceeded to the village until the corner where, he said, there would be a store.  Well, there was an old gutted building with no windows that looked like it could have been a store sometime in the past.  I guess that was it.  We turned, left the village on a different road from the one by which we entered it, and wound through another pine grove.  Several minutes later we emerged to the sight of railroad tracks and a crossing.  I guessed that was a good sign.  Immediately after crossing the tracks we turned again.  More countryside, more bumping down an unidentified road with no lane markings of any kind (did I mention that's how they all were?).  Eventually we came upon another crossing over the same set of railroad tracks we had last crossed a little while before, and Andrei told me to turn and cross.  

We entered and exited another village, passed through more countryside, zipped by a sign or two, even, though never for anything familiar.  Then all of a sudden there it was -- a road sign for Golovach, pointing to the right.  We turned right.  After a few minutes we entered a village called Zavorsklo.  I wasn't sure what happened to Golovach but I trusted that it existed somewhere nearby.  In the middle of Zavorsklo, just after passing some pretty dignified looking building with a statue out front of what I think was Karl Marx, we came to an intersection.  A sign indicated that the right-of-way was for traffic veering right, but Andrei told me to go straight.  

So on we headed.  After a couple of minutes it seemed like the houses were tapering off, and I was feeling like recent history was about to repeat itself.  This time the road didn't dead end, it just abruptly turned from aged asphalt to sandy dirt, with grass poking up in the middle.  For some reason this did not deter Andrei and at his direction I continued on.  The road was lumpy and rutty and at times covered entirely by a huge puddle.  In those spots, thankfully, there were sandy tracks already cur through the grass showing me where I could drive up and around the puddle and then rejoin the road.  We passed a pretty gaunt looking cow grazing by the road, and I suggested we stop and ask the cow.  Andrei is such a guy, not wanting to ask directions from the locals.  He declined.

Finally the road approached the edge of a pine grove and forked into two even-lesser-traveled variants.  I stopped the van and Andrei once again succinctly concluded that this was not the way, so I did a 3- or 4- or maybe 5-point turn to wiggle out a u-turn among the sand and grass.  By this time I was well aware that we were in the midst of a very rigid search, and so I couldn't resist getting out the camera and taking a picture of the dirt road we were about to begin backtracking our way along:

Once we were back on asphalt in the village, I pulled to a stop where a woman was standing by the road with a little girl.  I have no idea what they were doing or what they might be waiting for; I'm just glad the little girl didn't let the air out of any of my tires.  Same question as before, except this time Andrei asked not how to get to Golovach, but how to get to Camp Mayak.  Getting more specific now, and as with the last encounter, I was glad when she immediately seemed to know what in the world Camp Mayak was and where it's located.  

The directions this time were much shorter and simpler.  Once again we were to go to an intersection where there is a store and turn.  Turned out we should have stuck with the right-of-way at that intersection.  This time the road stayed asphalt, even as we entered a pine grove.  After a few minutes the pines parted and there were railroad tracks.  Surprising, I know.  But we went ahead and crossed them, and there, mere meters past the tracks on the other side, was none other than the entrance to Camp Mayak.  

I still never saw Golovach.  But like Trachimbrod, I'm sure that it really does exist out there somewhere. 

And now for more pictures.

The six translators who rode with me, from left: Masha, Lena, Sasha, Anya, Andrei, Tanya.

And this time me with five of them; Andrei took the photo.

Once at the camp we unloaded and met a couple of Valeriy's other translators who had already made their way to the camp from other places. But it turned out that the lady who is the camp director was not there at the moment, so all the translators ended up sitting around because no one knew who will stay in what room. Here are several of our group killing time with Dasha (left), one of the other translators:

After a while they decided to go show me around the camp since I was going to need to leave pretty soon, so we set out to walk around. It seemed like a nice place, cozily situated under tall pine trees, which was a welcoming atmosphere for this native Northern California kid:

After a little while I said goodbye to my friends and headed out. It was not too hard to leave because I'm planning on taking Denyce and the kids out there to visit sometime while they are in session the next couple of weeks. This is something Valeriy and I have been talking about doing for a long time, and I'm looking forward to us all getting to spend some more time out there here before long.

The rest of these pictures I took while on my way back from the camp to the main highway in Poltava. Along the way I stopped and took notes so I'd be able to get back to the camp without a very rigid search.

"We are searching for Trachimbrod."
"You are here. I am it."

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