Continuing our train journey from Zaporizhzhya to Kiev, we leave Pyatihatki at fifteen minutes after midnight, and travel north-northwest for two hours to Znamyanka, then on to a town that bears the rather eccentric appellation: "In the name of Shevchenko."
We know that Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko was the foremost Ukrainian poet of the nineteenth century, "the father of modern Ukrainian literature," but why such a grandiloquent eponym for the town? Anyway, after a short stop, we continue northwest for an hour and a half to Mironivka and then north to Kiev.
We arrive at the Kiev railway station at 6:25 a.m. It is -8°C, and snowing lightly. Kanu Prabhu is there to meet and greet us, and drive us to the apartment of Ramananda Prabhu and Hemangini Devi Dasi (our hosts) in his "green Lada," a dilapidated Izh Kombi that has an "I may be slow but I'm ahead of you!" sticker on the rear window.
I had asked Hemangini Devi Dasi to try to contact Aleksander and Oksana — a sincere couple that attended all four of the programs held here the last time I was in Kiev — but she had been unable to do so. At my insistence, she calls once more this morning, and is successful.
Aleksander and Oksana come over right away, at 10:00 a.m. They attend the informal gathering of devotees at the apartment and stay until the early evening. I am very happy to see them again, and pleased to see that they are still very much interested in Krishna consciousness, as evinced by their sincere, earnest questions.
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