On Friday, after waiting a few hours, my wife and I got to visit with one of the organizers of Tent City.

Walking through the mass of people and tents to the big forest green headquarters tent reminded me a little of military movies, especially walking by the four fellows hanging around the entrance before ducking through the final tunnel of fabric. But if this was a military movie, it was one of the zany comedy ones. The bustling of people was too chaotic for true military order.

Inside the tent was one small card table surrounded by people. The rest of the tent was occupied by a huge mounds of clothing, electric teakettles, boxes of medicine, and jars of this and that. Throughout the time we were there, volunteers were constantly walking in and asking for equipment or clothing, then slogging into the mountain of stuff or going off to look elsewhere.

"Here is the director," we were told, and pointed to a man sitting at the table.

"E...se .e," he tried to apologize. After that he gestured towards another fellow standing by, who came up and introduced himself in an only slightly less tortured voice. All of the men in the tent either spoke in horse whispers or not at all, and every five minutes one of them would pour or squirt medicine down his throat.

His name was Andrei. He was wearing fatigues, with two orange scarfs wrapped tightly around his throat to try and keep it a little warmer. He had a little nametag that said "Narodna Varta" on it - People's Watch. It was not an official title, the Tent City organizers had creating the nametags for the ad-hoc collection of people with management experience who are trying to run the camp. Officially Andrei worked in the Ukrainian equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security in Luhansk. He said his whole family for three generations had been protesting against the government, since his grandfather fought against the Communists in WWII (as well as against the facists).

My wife and I wondered if, coming from Luhansk, he had horror stories from the election. After all, Luhansk and Donetsk form the center of Yanukovych's power, and the place where there was an obviously fraudulent 88% voter turnout, with 95% support for him as the administration candidate. Andrei said no, there was no actual intimidation, though they were astonished he was actually wearing Yushchenko colors to the polls.

However, in his grandmother's little town, one of those in which everybody knows one another, there were large numbers of people turned away because they were told they'd taken out absentee ballots, which was news to them. At his own polling station, he had witnessed a man standing around the ballots during the count who had leaned over and dumped out forty more from inside his coat when few people were watching. At another station he knew about, the whole polling commission had gotten up and gone to a government-prepared feast at the closing of the polls, leaving the ballots untended.

Andrei's voice would often fail as he said this, and he would try to drip medicine in his throat from a broken squirter every few minutes. He also mixed apologies into the conversation every couple of minutes.

"I'm sorry for the way my mind is wandering," he said, "I've just had no time to sleep. I had two hours yesterday morning, but that's been about it since Saturday. I've been talking to journalists and people at the rallies, and new people with tents since then."

"Do you need anything?" we asked, hoping we could add something critical to the hills of stuff behind him.

"Nothing, really. People have given us everything we could ask for. It's been overwhelming. I mean, look at this," he reached into a random bag and pulled out brand name Fila ski pants. "This isn't knock-off, it's expensive," he put it back. "We try to give all the extra stuff to orphanages, but it just keeps coming."

"The other day, a little old grandma came up to me and made me cry. She didn't have a thermos, sho she was shuffling along with a 3 liter pot of tea, wrapped in aluminum foil, and black bread with butter on it. I'm used to thinking of Ukrainians as usually just getting by giving the minimum required, these people are giving everything they can. A little grandma."

"How long can you hold out here?" we asked, thinking that it took Georgia 2 1/2 weeks before the people overturned a fraudulent election result with their mass protests.

"Well, we've got heaters and tents enough. And you've got to think, 'the Eskimos off in Siberia live out their whole lives in worse cold than this'. What we really need now is not stuff, it's discipline. Maybe 70% of the folks here are just kids with their friends, celebrating their birthdays, or just having fun. If the government ever starts to really follow up on their intimidation tactics, they'll scatter, or their moms will come drag them home by their ears. They've got lots of energy but they're not a real revolutionary camp. 

"The last 30% is solid, but we're really tired and we need to get better organized," he finished.

Shortly after that we thanked him profusely and headed for the door, a little embarrassed at how much we'd made him talk.

"You couldn't use any food could you?" he asked hopefully, eyeing an enormous garbage bag stuffed with loaves of bread. Before we managed to escape out the door, Andrei pulled one of the scarves from his neck and thrust it into my hands.