Word: shovelers
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Soviet television showed a worker in Kirovakan, where 60 percent of the houses were destroyed, bending a metal reinforcing rod in a collapsed concrete wall by hand. Another man moved mounds of broken concrete with a shovel...
When underground electric cables had to be laid in the Estonian capital of Tallinn this summer, a call went out for community help. Working mostly with shovels, some 5,000 volunteers dug a trench more than a mile long in one night. A Soviet television reporter asked a ruddy-faced young Estonian why he had come. "I want to help so that perestroika doesn't begin just up there," the volunteer explained with a wave of the arm, "but with me here, with this shovel...
Those must have been gratifying words for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has repeatedly pushed for less talk and more work. But they were double- edged. The shovel brigade was not organized by the Communist Party but by a new, pro-perestroika grass-roots movement called the Estonian Popular Front. Since the group first emerged last April in the most northerly of the Soviet Union's three Baltic republics, similar movements have taken root and flourished in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers. What unites them is the common goal of promoting greater regional autonomy...
When he is working, David's father drives a buggy in the mines and carries a shovel, which he derisively calls "an ignorant stick." To work in mining, David's generation will need to operate computers. In Prenter only four out of ten children graduate from high school. "I will either get a house here or build one on a big piece of land up there on the mountain," says David, imagining his future. Then the vista darkens: "But if there is no work here, I would have to move away, find a new job or somethin...
...efficiency but patience. Everything will come in its own time; just as spring follows winter, the first ! crocuses the first thaw. This is not an easy law to learn for people who think that everything can be bought. In the garden, virtually nothing can be bought, except a good shovel and good seeds, and time follows its own imperative. The second law, more subtle but no less important, is the value of proportion, of balance, what the French call mesure. Ideally, any gardener would like to serve nature, to participate and share in her mysteries, but he soon learns that...