Barack Obama on Ukraine

I've been on a voracious reading kick lately, primarily non-fiction. The last couple of days I've been reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, which contains his views on American politics. It's been a good read, and probably deserves its own post with my reactions to it, but that will have to wait until I've processed my thoughts a bit more.

However, there was a hilarious passage about a trip he took to Ukraine as a senator in 2005 that I want to share with you. At least, hilarious to anyone who's been in Ukraine for any length of time... (I should also mention that a meal he had in Russia consisted of borscht, vodka, potato stew, and a "deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold." I didn't know that kholodets had a fish version...)

And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine's version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice, we were guided to a small freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A middle-aged woman in a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the freezer, waving them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.

"That is anthrax," the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman's right hand. "That one," he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, "is the plague."

I looked behind me and noticed Lugar [another senator] standing toward the back of the room.

"You don't want a closer look, Dick?" I asked, taking a few steps back myself.

"Been there, done that," he said with a smile.