What We Are Doing

We are volunteers chosen for our a) experience with the program theme (in my case, historical and cultural preservation—my experience being, largely, that I’ve studied history and literature) and b) experience with Russian (I have some experience with Russian people). Obviously, considering my extensive expertise, it makes perfect sense that I be exiled to lovely Siberia by the sinisterly-named organization IREX (international research and exchanges board). This is the situation now. Of course the culture and language is not so inaccessible as it might at first seem, Buryatia is a warm place, as much in mood as in temperature, and cultural and historical preservation skills are not really what’s needed here. What’s needed are hands and tongues: booklets, websites, museum placards. What else: Providing valuable ideas and insight—essentially our impression of the way things work here, and what about it could be done differently. How can we get more people from around the world to volunteer and visit Lake Baikal? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal) What would happen if we were working on conservation near California’s Lake Tahoe, Baikal’s sister lake? (http://www.tahoebaikal.org/)

We give our opinions on how to get more visitors, more volunteers, more money, more members—we just came from a weekend conference for the Great Baikal Trail (http://www.baikal.eastsib.ru/gbt/index_en.html)—essentially the immediate goals of each of our organizations. The Laboratory for Active Tourism (http://lat.iatp.ru), the outdoor education and volunteer group run by our host family, wants (or papa Igor wants) us to create a tourist booklet for the Zabaikalsky National Park (http://ngo.burnet.ru/znp/index_e.html) heavy with our impressions. This seemed to be going too far—could our impressions of Baikal really draw tourists here?—and how would we even begin to translate its beauty to paper? Reading about the lake in the Russians’ literal translation, with its incredible hyperbolism and bizarre, almost unintelligible constructions and delightfully absurd rhetorical questions (“Who on Earth doesn’t know the amazing incredibleness of the pearl of Siberia”), is almost a more appropriate way to discover it—that is, with no pretense of expertise, no attempt at demystification. We are not the most qualified for this work, but we’re doing it anyway and I think we’ll do a fine job. But there’s so much more to do, especially in the area of the environment: more than we can fully grasp right now, more than the Russians seem ready for, but so much work that it demands some attention.

The Selenga and Uda rivers, which pass leisurely through the city, look sky blue from the bridges; up close, they are lined with a year’s worth of trash—forties, cans, cigarette boxes. The dogs scavenge here. It’s hard to walk in any public space in town without stepping on a bottle or kicking a bottle cap. A small group of college kids is trying to keep the river clean, and wants to encourage the city to dig into its modest pile of funds to provide better trash collection. More ambitiously, they’re trying to put a stop to littering. Yesterday we trolled the shores of the Uda taking photos of trash for a publicity campaign; it was pretty bad. It’s hard to know how best to make change, and though we’ve been encouraging the Russians to try tactics that work in democracies (don’t ask river-dwellers to pay for new garbage cans, sign a petition that can be delivered to the local governors), this is not a real democracy. Not yet. But perhaps these suggestions alone, no matter how silly they may seem in the context of “politics” here, or “activism,” (or, on the other hand, “tourism” or business), are the sparks of change. There’s so much to be done—legal and political reform, the stemming of corruption (Russians supposedly paid in bribes roughly half of what the government spent last year), more transparency and access, and more engagement between the politicians and the people, not necessarily in that order. Besides not knowing where to begin our work as “historical and cultural preservation” volunteers, the hard part is not knowing whether anything you do is going to matter. That was the question that the young head of the local, budding Green Party asked us the other day: “Tell us honestly, will any of our work make any difference?” They have a long way to go, like those few hoping for change here, but we told them that their hope and their work alone would matter of course. We hope so too.