A bungee jumping experience at Kamyanets-Podilsk is but one "eureka!" moment for this energetic Master's student from Buffalo, New York.
Buffalo, New York native Dianna Derhak had just finished her bungee jump off the bridge at Kamyanets-Podilsk this past summer when a thought came into her head: Fear is a choice.
The former civil and criminal defense attorney said the scariest part was when she was upside down and hanging there at the end of her jump, waiting to be pulled up. She jumped not out of some commitment to extreme sports, but on a whim – to test herself. “You either fear the moment or you enjoy the experience.
“Here I was in this canyon hanging upside down – the perspective is like flying. You feel free because it’s not a natural position to be in. It’s only a minute or so that you’re suspended like that, but it feels like a lifetime. It’s amazing.”
Derhak smiles easily and often at Nobel restaurant while chatting about her life and sipping her Vittel mineral water (Hr 15). She’s doing a Masters concurrently in public health and in business administration, so she hasn’t got much time for anything these days except school. But her life, as it turns out, has been filled with many “eureka!” moments, as she calls them. The bungee-jumping experience was one of them.
While attending the University of Buffalo as a political science major, Derhak became involved in a student government initiative to promote campus events. It turned into a decade-long relationship with Belkin Productions (now Clear Channel Communications), a major concert promoter. She toured the northeast with the Rolling Stones for several weeks in 1982 during the Tattoo You tour, with Bruce Springsteen in 1984 for his Born in the USA tour, and with Neil Diamond in California the year before that, when he did seven concerts in seven days and had 500 VIP guests for each concert. Derhak was responsible for the VIPs. She got to meet Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor and John Travolta.
“It was just plain fun,” she says before diving headlong into her vegetable salad (Hr 38). Derhak even met O.J. Simpson at the concert series, but she’d known him from years before in Buffalo, where the outgoing football star often interacted with the local community. She even lifeguarded at a local pool where O.J. used to often swim.
Moving On
After Buffalo, Derhak moved to Houston. She completed her law degree at the University of Houston in 1985, set up a successful private practice, and got so good at representing her clients that, within five years, she decided she needed a change. She wanted to do something other than cut deals with prosecutors to spare criminals jail time.
When Ukraine became independent in 1991, it was another “eureka!” moment for Derhak.
“‘I gotta go,’ I said. I was finding ways to get there at a time when the Peace Corps wasn’t yet in Ukraine,” she says. “When a door opens and moves me, I feel obliged to go through it despite not knowing what lies beyond.”
Derhak is cutting into her steak Florentine (Hr 41) when she relays that, in April 1992, she landed a job teaching English in Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil. Her Ukrainian roots and language skills made her adjustment to life here easier, as did her positive attitude.
She left teaching at the end of the 1992 school year and became involved with the Medical Clinic on Wheels, a Lutheran mission-funded program that brought pediatric and dental medicine to families all over western Ukraine. By the fall of 1993, she was formally invited by a television producer in Lviv to come to that western Ukrainian city and do a children’s TV program in which she taught English. “Shkole Pane Dianne” (Mrs. Dianna’s School) was the first program of its kind in Ukraine and aired for two years. Weekly lessons were printed in local papers in advance of the show, which aired before Saturday morning cartoons and up to three times per week.
“When I go to Lviv, I feel there’s a shared history [with the people], but there’s a very sweet connection,” Derhak says. “To this day there’s this recognition I get.” Years later, at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, she was teaching a Masters-level class in English and everyone remembered her.
“All the other English students asked to attend the class,” she says.
After TV, Derhak moved to Kyiv and started a successful consulting and project-planning business. Now that she’s studying full time, she has little leisure for anything else, though she still goes for walks across the Pedestrian Bridge to Hydropark or gets out of town, like she did to Lviv for a day recently. She started meeting up with friends as soon as she got off the train and didn’t stop until she got back on the train that night.
“Life is about doing meaningful, fun things,” Derhak says. “Passion is the underlying thing, and you can’t live your life with regrets. I don’t want that for anybody,” she adds.
“When I came to Ukraine, I wanted in my own small way to help people follow their dreams.”
Nobel (65 Chervonoarmiyska, 238-6971).
Open daily from 11 a.m. till the last customer.
English menu: Yes.
English-speaking staff: Yes.
