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	SHARING WITH THE UKRAINE *Peggy Peirson* *Benton County Emergency Management, Corvallis, OR* This past November, I had the great opportunity to travel to Eastern Europe as part of my work with the Oregon State University "Women's Neighborhood Emergency Training" project in Uzhgorod, Ukraine. This was the first of potentially three trips that I'll make over the course of the next year with my colleagues at OSU to assess emergency preparedness and response capabilities and help the Ukrainians develop their own version of our neighborhood emergency preparedness program. The project is the child of Anthropology graduate student, Naomi Weidner, at OSU and as the Linn-Benton Neighborhood Emergency Team Coordinator (two-county CERT program) I was contacted initially as a resource to the project development team.
At the core of the project is an introduction to the concept of neighborhood networking and mutual aid for solving community problems, particularly in times of disaster. Our November trip to Ukraine focused on Ukrainian participant selection and an assessment of the critical issues and community resources related to disaster planning, response and recovery. Next steps will include three weeks of intensive training for the participants in the United States and, if we are able to secure additional funding (pending US AID grant application), a mentoring exchange of Uzhgorod and some of our officials who are involved in the delivery of emergency services. After their training in the US, Ukrainian participants - with input from their emergency officials, will design and implement their equivalent of our neighborhood emergency program in Uzhgorod. In September, 2001, a community-wide exercise will help them test their new response partnerships and capabilities as well as identify areas for improvement. My work in Ukraine centered around meetings with community and regional officials who are involved in the delivery of day-to-day, critical services, or who are key players in a disaster response scenario. I met with city officials; military and emergency services commanders; the superintendent of schools; the heads of fire, ambulance, housing and the electric company and local and regional Red Cross. I also participated in some neighborhood (citizen) interviews conducted by the Ukrainian participants. I observed that there is: some infrastructure for responding to emergencies, albeit some of it fledgling such as their new Quick Response Service. The city has significant disaster response experience, a severe shortage of resources, great courage, creativity, and, a surprising openness to new approaches to problem solving.
Several of the officials I met with moved immediately from enthusiasm and support of the project concept to offering to contribute directly to the ongoing success of the Neighborhood Networks. Some of the officials also agreed to attend one or more of the participants' weekly English language meetings to begin talking about what they do and how they can work together. The director of ambulance services vowed to rewrite professional medical first-response training for our program participants and to begin training them immediately. He will even provide "ride-alongs" with his professional staff so that they may be better prepared for real medical emergencies. So these may seem like relatively minor commitments -- but remember, this is a country not so far from communism where government and citizens trusting each other, let alone cooperating, was not necessarily the norm. Likewise, citizens and officials tell us that the citizens were accustomed to having the government "do" for them as opposed to necessarily doing for themselves in some situations. More good news is that there has apparently already been interest expressed for expanding the program to rural Ukrainian villages.
In August I met with FEMA Region X staff in Seattle and outlined a proposal for funding to expand the core OSU project to include a mentoring exchange of emergency services professionals between Benton County and Uzhgorod. The grant has subsequently been sent to US AID for consideration and, if approved, will fund the exchange of emergency services officials between our two cities. The Ukrainian program participants are scheduled to be in Corvallis in April, and with any luck, they will be accompanied by their local emergency response officials. While in Corvallis they will receive information about our program and approaches to emergency preparedness, leadership skills training, mentoring with US counterparts and some cultural exchange experiences including home stays and a trip to the Oregon Coast. Project staff will help the Ukrainians design their neighborhood emergency training program to address their natural and human-caused hazards, vulnerabilities, response capabilities and cultural realities. It is my strong belief that we are making an important contribution to the long-term health and vitality of our sister City, and potentially the countries of Ukraine and Poland. I am pleased and very proud to offer our experiences in Benton County as a model for them to consider. I must add, too, that Uzhgorod has much to offer us in terms of creative solutions in an environment that is seriously resource-limited.

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