KOLOS CHRYSTIA

Date and Place of Birth: June 16, 1962,  Windsor, ON Canada

Date of Interview: July 26, 2023

Place of Interview: Toronto, Ontario

Interviewer: Andriy Shwec

Length of Interview: 1 hour 34 min

(Excerpt):

Interviewer: If you could describe some of your trips to Ukraine and your work with Children of Chernobyl.

CK: I mentioned Zolota Bulava, I was involved in organizing Zolota Bulava camps. I was a leader of a camp for two years during that time period. I was doing training camps, so vyshkoly for a few years. Again, they would happen every two years or so and they would involve getting youngsters from across Canda to Toronto and basically not doing all the speaking or training myself but organizing other people to come and do specific parts of the training. That was my involvement. Right now, I act as a sort of consultant. People still want to hear “how would you do this?” or “do you have the records for that?”, so I’m still involved because I have the historical memory of how things were. At one point at the international level, I was also involved in…, because I could write I became a secretary as it was not really a loved occupation, and I didn’t mind writing minutes of meetings, so I often chose to be secretary at different levels of the organization (Plast).

Interviewer: You mentioned ZB (Zolota Bulava) and different vyshkoly that you helped organize. What in particularly did you want to get across to the different youth across Canada and what was the main emphasis of what they were being taught?

Kolos: They were being taught some ideology. Basically “why are you here?”, “what is it that you want to prove?”, as long as they were sure of themselves and they wanted to pass on, that was the important part, and to learn to plan and be consistent and a good vykhovnyk was very important. Ideology was important, we would speak about what’s going on in Ukraine, how things are going, why do we have this connection, “we’re here in Canada, is it important to have this connection?”. Yes, hopefully we were able to keep these discussions going. So it’s basically them having to realize what it is they wanted to continue with and hopefully by the end of training this was more obvious.

CROSS REFERENCES:

Plast 

Zolota Bulava 

Vesnivka 

Dzherelo