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ANGELS AT BORYSPIL by MARTA ZIELYK Marta Zielyk holds the position of Diplomatic Interpreter at the State Department. She is not a political appointee. All views, thoughts and ideas expressed in this article are her own and do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other body of the US government. A very popular topic in our culture these days is angels: whether they truly exist, how they inspire people, whether they really keep people safe from danger. One has look no further than the pheno menal success of the television show “Touched by an Angel” which every week presents us with a situation in which angels help change a life. Books about angels pop up on the bestseller lists, angel calendars are hot items, and one spots little gold angel lapel pins on even the most sophisticated of women, who believe that wearing such adornments will protect them from harm. All of this focus on angels reminds me of an incident in my own life in which the word “angel” figured prominently. It occurred in November of 1993, when I and a friend (coincidentally, also named Marta) accompanied the first group of US military representatives, generals and civilians ever to visit Kyiv. During my nine years as diplomatic interpreter for the State Department, I have traveled with countless US military delegations all around the world. What made this particular trip unique was what happened shortly after we landed at Kyiv’s Boryspil Airport. It was an unusually cold November day and Boryspil was still the decrepit, Soviet style airport that it had been during the Cold War. Air Ukraine International had not yet been born, and as Marta and I stumbled out of the Aeroflot plane after a fourteen hour journey from Washington, we noticed a group of extremely clean cut, cheerful, very polite young American men ahead of us in the passport line. They struck me as somewhat unusual for they did not look like the typical seekers of investment possibilities who were trickling into Kyiv in those days, nor did they carry the bulging briefcases and laptop computers which would have identified them as official representatives of some Western government. I speculated that they might be tourists, yet thought it odd that they would choose to start their vacation in Ukraine in the middle of November with winter coming on. My curiosity was sated when Marta and I started chatting with them, commiserating on how slowly the line was moving. As it turned out, the young men were missionaries from the heartland of the United States, come to preach the word of God to a society which, they rightly guessed, was starved for spiritual direction. They assured us that despite the fact that they did not know a single word of Ukrainian, they would get across their religious message with the help of local interpreters. As we inched our way to the head of the line, we learned that they were members of a youth ministry from a church in Kansas, that they planned to stay a day or two in Kyiv and then gop to Dni- propetrovsk where they would spend two months preaching. We also learned that even though they had not taken a vow of poverty, their pockets were certainly not filled with dollars or “kupony” as the interim Ukrainian currency was called at the time. When the first of the missionaries stepped up to the very young soldier serving as passport and visa reviewer, we noticed much hand waving and pointing and head shaking on both parts. Appa rently, the young missionary’s visa was not in order. I suppose Marta and I could have waited patiently and silently in line, but knowing how dif ficult it can be to get through the very dense and tangled airport bureaucracy, we stepped in to help. The ’’mytnyk” was demanding $50.00 from the young man for a new visa because the one that had been stamped into his passport was valid from February 15, 1994 to November 11, 1993. It was very clear that someone at the consular section of the Ukrainian embassy had simply transposed the two dates. The visas of his companions were 16 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 1998 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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