The Village – Part 2

I spent the first forty minutes of the trip trying to decipher the driver’s Russo-Ukrainian rambling. Ukrainian doesn’t have a soft “g” sound, so every time he encountered the sound in a Russian word, the driver would replace it with an “h”. He told me about the region’s history—how it was part of Romania and then the Soviet Union and now Ukraine.

Eventually we got off the main road and headed deep into the rolling countryside. I felt like we were in the Canadian prairies, which prompted my Dad to remark more than once that the Ukrainians who got off the boat in Canada a hundred years ago must’ve felt like they hadn’t actually gone anywhere. There was one significant difference: the soil. It was as black and rich as I have ever seen. No wonder they called this place the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

The narrow paved road we were on led us through small towns, by magnificently restored churches, and past bustling markets. We stopped to ask for directions every once and a while (the people just pointed us further down the road).

We soon found ourselves on a dirt road heading to the middle of nowhere. There was no signage, save for provincial boundary markers. Our maps didn’t provide the kind of detail we needed, so we had to rely purely on local knowledge. We stopped to ask a woman where the village might be and she said that we had already passed it. I guess the old joke of a town being so small that if you blink while driving through, you’d miss it completely rang true.

As it turned out, we had to turn, go through another small village before descending into a small valley and the village of Babin.