A one-year mission to the former Soviet Union is an eye-opener for a Kingston couple:

At an age when most couples are content to start to enjoy a peaceful retirement, Cliff and Vyola Van Volkinburgh (Br 8) set out on the adventure of a lifetime.

January 23, 1994, they left the comfort of their Bayridge home to spend nearly a year among the people of Krasnodar, a city in the state of Russia in the former USSR, now the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The visit was under the auspices of CoMission, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based cooperative of about 100 Christian organizations. The broad mandate of the group is to teach Christian ethics and morals in society, and specifically to bring those values to a country where atheism held sway for 70 years under communism.

"CoMission provides the materials and the manpower to get the message to all the schools,"

says Cliff, who retired several years ago from the provincial transportation ministry.

Upon their arrival, they soon found that nearly the only thing Kingston and Krasnodar have in common is that they both start with "K."

For one thing, despite Russia's reputation as being nothing but a series of frozen steppes the year round, the climate is quite bearable.

The city of one million is in South Russia on the Black Sea, 900 miles south and slightly to the east of Moscow.

"They have a very short winter," Cliff says. "It gets as cold as it does here but not for nearly as long."

February is when winter is at its most intense, he explains, but it blows out very quickly.

"Roses are in full bloom by the end of March."

Accommodations were on the stark side, compared with what most Canadians are used to, he says.

Kingston to Krasnodar: (Continued)

The flat they stayed in was about 700 square feet, "relatively large by Russian standards," and came something less than fully equipped.

"It had a gas stove and that was it," Cliff says, "no cupboards, no nothing." Everything else had to be supplied.

Because of its location, Krasnodar does not have the food shortage problems seen in some other parts of the CIS.

"In most of Russia, food is pretty hard to find," Cliff says. In Krasnodar, however, there are few problems.

"Down south it's brought in from Turkey and elsewhere ... beef, pork, chicken." There are several large outdoor markets, he adds.

The cost of food is reasonable by North American standards, but galloping inflation is hitting the cost of everything hard.

He explains that one U.S. dollar was worth 1,530 rubles when they arrived. When they left in December, the difference had swollen to 3,400 rubles for every U.S. dollar.

For example, a one-month trolley pass that cost 700 rubles in January, he says, had risen to 6,000 rubles by December.

Language was not the barrier one would expect it to be. Translators were provided and, when it came to shopping in the markets, a "point-and-grunt" system usually worked, Cliff says.

He adds that it helped that the Russian words for some goods, such as meat, milk and potatoes, sound similar to the English versions. Also, they found a great deal of cooperation when translation problems arose.

"The people are very helpful," Cliff says. On the surface, however, they might not seem that way.

"What you see in public is an expression of passive disinterest, relatively expressionless."

He points to a photo of solemn-looking young men and women who, he says, were laughing and smiling moments before the picture was snapped.

"They call it putting on a 'face like a shovel.'"

But Cliff says that once you get beyond the stone-faced façade, "relationships develop very quickly. We were there for a short time and had limited exposure but there were tears when we left."

The people have no trouble in getting from one part of Krasnodar to the other, he points out. Public transit is highly efficient.

"They have the greatest variety of people-moving transportation," Cliff says. He cites large numbers of trams, trolley buses, diesel buses and taxis, along with a little private enterprise thrown in.

Pedestrians, he says, will flag down private vehicles and then negotiate prices with the drivers to get them where they want to go.

Russia is no place for the TV addict. Most of the programming Cliff says is "boring and repetitive" but has its high points.

"It's most interesting when it's all local. They have Cossacks and others with traditional and ethnic music."

Plus, there is familiar fare, such as reruns of 'The Streets of San Francisco" and "911", along with dubbed version of Peter Jennings' ABC News every morning.

The Krasnodar police presence is very strong, he says, with militia on foot and vehicle patrol in groups of four or five.

Cliff says the show of strength might have been because of the proximity of the city of troubled Chechnya, 300 miles away. Although, he says, they heard "no rumblings" of the unrest there.

Education is a high priority in Russian life, as evidenced by Krasnodar's 96 public schools and five universities. Kids attend the same schools from kindergarten through high school and even the day care centers for children two to six are geared more toward education than baby-sitting.

Cliff plans to return to Russia later this month for a two-month stint as a supervisor for the program. He says the Christian message is getting across.

"For 70 years the people denied the existence of God. Now they're finding they believed all along."

He quotes one Russian woman on her beliefs. "I always believed in God, even when I was getting top marks in atheism."

Commonwealth of Independent States:

Area: 22.2 million square km.

Population: 293 million (1991 est.)

Climate: Mostly temperate to Arctic, winters cool along the Black Sea to frigid in Siberia.

Language: Russian (official), more than 200 languages and dialects spoken.

Economy: Natural resources, capital goods and defense industries, agriculture. World's largest producer of oil and natural gas.