On 11 December, when Lesya and I decided to go talk to people in the tents, we didn't even get to the camp before we encountered something of interest. Standing across the street was a single, flag-wielding Yanukovych supporter, surrounded by at least twenty Yushchenko supporters. We'd seen one or two such supporters wandering around in the crowd over the course of two weeks, but had not thought to approach them about their reasons. It was evident we weren't going to be able to approach this one either, if only because he was completely surrounded by the Yushchenko supporters.

So far away, all we heard of his opinion was the first few lines, which he shouted over the crowd.

"Yushchenko is the American Antichrist!" he exclaimed. Then a Yushchenko supporter cut in, and we were unable to discern the rest of the conversation. Instead, we took a few pictures, trying to see if we could see any Yushchenko misbehavior.

At one moment we thought we'd caught something, as a Yushchenko supporter grabbed his friend and carried him above his head, bringing him to the ground only a couple feet from the Yanukovych supporter. But even then, as soon as he got close, two other Yushchenko supporters with badges had approached and warned the two to back off immediately.

In the end, nothing happened, and the man with the flag moved on and eventually walked away.

We moved on and talked with the people in the tents.

Spartak from Odesa and Alyosha from Vinnitsya: Spartak came up from Odesa because he'd seen or heard about lots of activity to falsify the elections. Alyosha was originally from Vinnitsya, but studied in a university near Kyiv. He was worried, he said, because the rector of his university was a Yanukovych supporter, and if he went back to the university he expected to be kicked out. About the recent political compromise they were noncommittal, "Politicians talk," they explained, saying they were just going to stick around until victory.

We asked them what day had been the hardest. "The first," they answered, just like everyone else. At the beginning they went two days without sleep. All the people they'd met with then had become close friends, just from having experienced that tough time together. The levels of excitement and nervousness were so high that another volunteer they knew had gone the first SIX days without sleep. They say the camp doctors were literally hunting him all over the camp, worried that he would have a complete breakdown. When they first caught him, they gave him sleeping medication but it did nothing. So they caught him again, gave him twice a normal person's dosage and put him down... for a full two hours. Spartak laughed that he didn't go crazy, but he was bouncing off the walls with excitement.

We asked about the homeless people who stumbled by occasionally; had they always been with the camp? "Well, of course nobody here ever drinks. [it was one of the strongest camp rules] You know," said Spartak, "the first week NOBODY around the camp was drunk either, nobody. Now, the bums have come out. We send them down to get some food, I mean, it's sad," he shrugged.

Had they interacted with any Yanukovych supporters, had there been any provocations? "Once a couple guys showed up, not in the camp but out in the courtyard after midnight, when things had quieted down. They were both wearing Yushchenko colors and badges like the people in camp have. After a little while they started fighting. Well, the camp security went out and broke them apart and tried to figure out who they were. Both were from Donetsk, and when the camp guys asked, they said they didn't know where they'd gotten the ids."

Both Spartak and Alyosha were coughing, showing the effects of the cold and wet. They'd been in the cold for almost two weeks; both had been there almost form the beginning. They said they both had colds, but they had plenty of medicine, and enough food to survive. What they were really looking for were cigarettes, apparently a tough donation to come by.

Pavlo: a talkative student from Kyiv State University. Pavlo said the rector of his University was keeping strict neutrality on the question of the protesters. He would not avow any support for Yushchenko, but he had stated he wouldn't kick students out for going to the protests. Pavlo was therefore going to school every day, then sleeping in the tents at night. He said it made it tough to keep up with classes.

When we asked him what stories he had, he told this one of some friends of his from Luhansk. "They both really wanted to come to Kyiv to join the protest then, [right after the election] but tried a couple times and were turned back by the police. Finally, on the last day they decided on a plan. Both of them got a whole bunch of Yanukovych support material and banners and things, put them on and drove out of the city. Once they'd gotten out, they switched into Yushchenko colors and took the Yanukovych stuff into the forest, piled it up and burned it. They got the whole thing on film."

Pavlo also told about a busful of forty Yanukovych supporters that had come into Kyiv. They'd each gotten 150 griven for coming up, but once they'd gotten to Kyiv, they'd just been left to fend for themselves. The forty had come and spoken with the people in tent city, and had been so surprised at what they'd seen that a huge number of them had defected. They were now working in the opposition kitchen.

As for provocations, the scariest time for Pavlo had been around 1 AM during the first week. By that time things started to calm down from the day, and fewer people were out by the tents.

If something had happened, he said he at least knew how to deal with problems, "if someone tries any sort of provocations, that's alright, let them. You just have to deal with any of that stuff calmly. Just let them say it."

Alyona from Donetsk, Sasha and Sergei from Kyiv, and Roman from L'viv: We met the four of them when we were looking for the Donetsk folks who'd come over from the Yanukovych camp. They said the tent the folks were staying in was right nearby, but it would probably be difficult to talk to them, because most of them were afraid to speak to journalists. All the tent city residents had recently attended a safety meeting in which the camp officials warned them about the recent rumors of people coming to the camp with hidden cameras to record all the Yushchenko supporters with. Many of the volunteers there were worried that their families might get in trouble for their actions, especially those from the east. All of them assured me the Donetsk people weren't just hiding, they were trying to help out, but it would be tough to talk to them.

"Not our Alyona, though," said Sasha, giving her a friendly shake.

"You've got to understand," said Alyona, "here you've got news, out in Donetsk there's no television, no Channel 5, no fair newspapers, nobody knows what's going on."

She said lots of the people she knew in Donetsk and Luhansk had voted for Yushchenko, but when the numbers had come out, they'd been afraid to speak up. The rest nodded. Roman from L'viv said a number of his friends had had their teachers take away their passports at University just before the election.

When we asked them for a story, Sergei spoke up. We'd told them about the Yanukovych supporter, and he said, "You know, it reminds me of the Zaporizhiyan guys."

There were some volunteers in the camp from Zaporizhiya, and they'd been invited to church by some passersby. Sure enough, he said, as soon as they got to the service, the Zaporizhiyan guys found the church was trying to convert them.

Andrei from Kyiv and Sergei from Bravari: Andrei was a talkative thirty-year old, Sergei a nearly silent recent graduate.

We asked Andrei to tell us which had been the best, and which the hardest day. Andrei said the first day had been the worst, because there had been lots of people coming with nothing, needing boots and tents and everyone running around with little or no direction. "All these people were coming," he said, "and can you believe, there were families, and kids, and there was one couple who brought their six year old child with them. They were here all through the protests, and only left a couple days ago to help with Yushchenko's campaign."

The happiest day for him had been the 26-27th, whenever the Supreme Court decision had come through, though of course everyone had been excited when the Parliament had given their vote of non-confidence.  We asked him what he thought of the recent package reform bill that had passed, and which would reduce the powers of the President starting in September. We'd heard some of the volunteers were disappointed, not to mention Yulia Tymoshenko.

"Oh, I'm for Constitutional reform," he replied, "one person shouldn't have unlimited powers. And Tymoshenko, yeah, she's a radical or course," he chuckled a little.

Sergei, Sergei, and Bohdan, all from Sumi: We were only able to trade a few words with the three from Sumi, Lesya and I were both shivering, not from the cold, but from the wet rain seeping through our clothes.

The Sumers said they were feeling alright, though they coughed a little. The camp was pretty quiet, and they were going to be there a while longer, but all of them were signed up to be Yushchenko observers in Donetsk.

Two Maxes from Gorlivka: Both of the two of them spent most of their time talking about how they got out of their small city in Donetsk oblast. Both of them had had troubles getting out, they'd spent three days before they'd finally made a break for it.

One of the Maxes had been in a particularly difficult situation, he said. He'd been able to catch the town mayor taking part in the falsification of the vote in the town on video tape, and the tape had been his reason for coming to Kyiv. When he finally tried to get away, he'd been chased and had to lose his pursuers by running across a field into the forest.

When I took their picture and asked for his email address to send him his picture, he joked that his only address now was: Kreshchatyk, Tent City. Since he was worried they might even kill him if he went back to Gorlivka, he said he'd been in tent city a while, probably until about the 8th of March.

Katrina from Shapiyvka: Katrina was a sweet fifty-something year old woman with children in high school. She had been a member of the election committee in her town in Kyiv oblast representing Yushchenko. According to the rules of the election, each of the twenty-four candidate from the first round of the election got a representative on the committee. (this was true even though only about 6 of those candidates had had any hope of even winning a percentage point of the votes in round one, and only two of the candidates remained by round two)

Katrina had been the committee member bringing around one of the smaller mobile ballot boxes to the voters too sick or physically challenged to be able to make it to the polling station. When we asked her about why she'd come, we got a great deal of explanation, but first of all we got a story from collecting the votes.

The older people in the village were intimidated. She spoke of one woman. "This grandmother was ninety-two," she said, "and when I first came to her she asked me who everyone was voting for. Well, I had to tell her I couldn't say, because it was against the rule to tell her anything about the candidates."

"'Just vote for the candidate you want,' I said. But she kept asking, and I had to keep repeating myself. Eventually she said to me, 'You know, I want to vote for Yushchenko, but I'm frightened. A bunch of people came to me recently and said they'd beat me if I didn't vote for Yanukovych.'

"'Look,' I told her, because it had already been almost an hour, 'you don't fear about anything, you can choose whomever you want, this is secret, nobody's going to come after you. You vote how you want, because I have to move on to a lot more houses today."

"And she said to me, 'Well, I know you, and I know you're honest. And I also know you are for Yushchenko. So Yushchenko is probably honest, too.' And so that was that. That was just one person! They had lots of people scared, and I know that they were buying votes, too! Some people they paid twenty griven, fifty griven for votes. People would get cigarettes or bread and cast their votes, thinking they'd get something more for it. They didn't even know what they were selling." She went on to say they even had blank vote count protocols floating around that she didn't trust. Instead, she made up her own protocol and brought it to Kyiv to check against the results. It was from that protocol that she knew there'd been falsifications, and that was why she was here.

In the camp Katrina had of course immediately become a mom to the many young people there. She worked in the kitchen and had been in the camp since the very beginning. As with all the people who'd been there the first day, she said that day had been the hardest. The weather, which has been wonderful for most of the protest, was swirling with snow and ice on those first couple days. Katrina said there'd not been enough tents, not enough valyenki, the people were sleeping in cold, wet tents and wearing cold, wet shoes.

"On that first day I remember listening to Yushchenko in the square, and he said 'Look everyone, its snowing today, it's cold, please go find homes for yourselves for the night.' And we said "NooOOo. We're staying to the end. My kids tell me to come home, too, but I'm not going until victory. I want them to be able to live in a peaceful, right world. I want them to be able to start their own businesses, not work for crumbs at some big business owned by someone else."

She finished with these words: "I know Ukraine's a rich country, but that's all been wasted by bad leaders. But I trust Yushchenko and I think he's honest."