
In the early 1990s the Peace Corps started coming to Ukraine. Our town was visited by a group of farmers from the state of Kansas whose job was to give some advice on how to organize agricultural business in the steppe area. The Foreign Languages Department had to supply the visitors with interpreters, and I – as the Dean of the Department – used this opportunity to invite the Americans to our school. It would be instructive for the students, I thought, to listen to ordinary people who probably were not professionally trained to speak. Besides the language aspect, it would also be good to hear about the Americans’ daily life, their problems, their preferences, etc, etc.
The talk turned out to be interesting. Some two hundred students in a spacious lecture room conversed with the Americans freely. The representatives of the most powerful nation in the world were quite approachable and unassuming guys. It looked like agriculturalists in America were also dependent on the weather for their crops – just as peasants in Ukraine. Only in the U.S.A. they were more insured against possible whims of the weather than our farmers. One of the guests complained that none of his three sons remained on the farm after high school – the farmer’s work is not prestigious in America. His colleagues were nodding their consent.
When the talk was over I took the visitors to the Dean’s Office. After half an hour of our drinking coffee one of the Americans (the one whose sons had chosen roads in life other than agriculture) remembered that he had left his waist pouch with all the documents and credit cards down in the hall. I assured him that everything would be ok and asked him to follow me down to the same hall. I must confess I was not sure at all. There had been a few cases in my career as a dean when I had to investigate thefts among students: small sums of cash or articles of clothes were stolen at the hall of residence, from students’ lockers in the gym, etc.
I came to the hall and opened the door. The hall was empty. The pouch… WAS ON THE DESK!!! It was at the very edge of the desk– right at the chair in which the owner of the pouch had been sitting during the meeting.
I saw that the American was really happy. I kept a straight face. “You are in Ukraine, you know”, I said.