It is 7am on election day and I am in a car heading to our first polling station: Slobodka, in Odessa Oblast in the south of Ukraine. My team leader, Bohdan, a Canadian paramedic trainer, is navigating. Igor, the driver, and Slavik, our cameraman, is catching some sleep.
Sleep and food have been rather intermittent these last 36 hours. I travelled down to Odessa on Christmas Eve on the overnight train. When midnight came I cracked open a bottle of champagne from home with Adrian, a civil engineer from Pennsylvania and fellow election observer, and our two Ukrainian cabin mates.
We arrived at 7am in Odessa and spent December 25 in group briefings and Q&As amid the chaotic organisation into appropriately mixed teams of some hundred international observers assembled by the observer group I have joined. It was stressful but there was a sense of camaraderie. As the day progressed we set off in taxis in groups of three or four to voting precincts throughout the region.
My group headed for our designated region around 4pm after grabbing our first food of the day. We drove through sunset and darkness, good roads and then potholed roads, reading further instructions by torchlight and coordinating by mobile phone with two other groups heading to neighbouring areas.
We arrived at Balta polling station at 7.45pm, just in time for the election committee's scheduled 8pm meeting at which they are supposed to agree and sign off on the list of voters. Walking into a school room in a town of 20,000 we found what we hoped to find everywhere the following day: a group of dedicated individuals performing their civic duty with care, questioning their chairwoman, a maths teacher, when they did not understand or disagreed with an interpretation of the electoral requirements. They expressed the hope that we would visit again today.
We were to stay in a hotel in a town near the Moldovan border, but were advised by someone we stopped for directions that the hotel was very cold. We met our local contact and he arranged for us to stay in the home of a local couple, who provided a midnight supper of perogis and borscht, vegetables and cake. They toasted our good luck and health with homemade vodka, and I responded with a toast of thanks.
At 5am we were awoken by another team arriving to agree strategy. Observers cannot visit all of Ukraine's more than 30,000 polling stations, so we have planned to visit some with known problems from the last round of voting and a sample of new ones. We hope to have time to return to Balta.
Andrew Newton
