But it appeared to be not that easy.
Actually it took me three liters of water and three hours of time to get to the registration table through the long line in a hot school gymnasium where my polling station is located.
It seems to me that I have voted at least a dozen times since I turned 18. Every time the procedure was pretty much the same and absolutely much shorter: You take your passport and go to the polling station. There you meet a bunch of neighbors and spend approximately five minutes chatting with them in a line to get your ballot or two.
Then you show your passport, sign some papers and finally go behind the curtain to put your precious marks across the right names. Then you leave the polling station with a silly smile and go to eat a traditional Soviet cake in a school canteen.
The whole thing usually takes no more than half an hour where 15 minutes you spend eating a cake and greeting some more neighbors who do the same. Not this time though.
My Election Day started with worrying posts in my Facebook timeline about huge lines at the polling stations, so I decided not to hurry. The majority will vote in the morning and the rush will fade soon, I thought and was mistaken.
The line to the necessary table took several curls around the gym when I came to the location around 1 p.m. It looked like more than 100 people were standing there ahead of me with the determined looks on their faces. And that’s when I felt my determination to fulfill my citizen’s duty leaving me. The only thought of spending hours in the stifling room full of nervous people made me dizzy.
It was only my younger brother who made me stay by bringing in some cold water and fresh magazines for me to read.
Surprisingly people at the polling stations appeared to be comfortable to stay around them for hours. It wasn’t only a line that was longer this time, people in a line were different.
Not a single fight sparked despite almost three hours of waiting, not a single person tried to cut through the line faster than others, not a single rude comment was heard when an old lady kept the line for another 20 minutes trying to find her passport in her beg.
Dressed up men who just parked their expensive cars outside the school were helping families with kids take their baby carriages inside and to convince others in the lines to let those go first. Pregnant women were choosing to stand in a line “just as everybody else, not to look better than others.”
And it seems like not a single person brought a child to the polling station wearing something else but vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian traditional embroidered shirt.
After all, I made friends with some more neighbors, enjoyed some interesting discussions with some strangers and finally elected my mayor, my city council and my president.
And with Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian billionaire oligarch winning the vote with 54 percent in the first round, I am still not sure that Ukrainians know what choices are the right ones.
But I am sure that the desire of my compatriots make their choices has changed for the better. And this, I believe, is getting us halfway to where all of us want to be.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reach at [email protected]
