Ukrainians self-organize “to go to school”

These two stories, which occurred in Khmelnytsky and Kherson oblasts, really struck us and will surely strike our readers. They are valuable not only because they are examples of the Ukrainians’ self-organization in the regions (and, hence, the sign of an emerging civil society even on the village level), but also because they are not about the protection of somebody’s own savings or property but about the protection of their children’s right to education.

No one knows whether these people would go the Verkhovna Rada building to defend Yulia Tymoshenko, but they firmly believe that their children should have the right to a high-quality education in a modern-day school. This makes them European and shows what it means to offer ethic resistance to stagnation.

The village of Liutarka, Khmelnytsky oblast, will have a kindergarten in the autumn. This would be of little wonder but for the fact that people are reconstructing an old building for the needs of preschoolers with their own hands and at their own expense, using their extremely scanty funds. The root cause is already commonplace in Ukraine: under the state program of optimization, the village school faces a closure because a mere 14 children go to it today. Yet the Liutarka residents chose not to stage protest rallies or write complaints to the government. Instead, they gathered to seek each other’s advice and found a way to solve the problem – to set up an educational complex by adding a kindergarten to the school. A complex like this is not subject to the optimization procedure and will thus keep the children’s right to study at their native village intact.

“Villagers themselves showed the initiative to build this educational complex,” Petro HONCHARUK, Chairman of the Liutarka Village Council says to The Day. In his words, the decision to reconstruct an old building for a kindergarten was made in the middle of the year, when budgetary funds had already been distributed. But even this did not stop the villagers – they chose to build at their own effort and expense.

“Villagers are investing their own money in the building’s reconstruction. It is gratifying that some entrepreneurs are also engaged in this. Some aid is also coming from those who lease land in the village. A certain number of villagers are always working at the construction site – there can be 5, 6, 8, and even 12 people at a time there,” Honcharuk says. “They are the children’s parents as well as other people who are not indifferent. We are doing everything by ourselves now, but we expect to get some help further on.” Work is still underway, but the villagers are running short of funds. The village mayor told The Day that a TV crew had visited them to make a film and the local newspaper has been appealing for help in its past 15 issues. Yet, the mayor says, nobody outside the village has responded and helped.