A tale of how ice cream and coffee would bring people back to the museum
Let us tell you a little fictional story.
Once upon a time, the authorities decided to shut down a great Kyiv hospital. They drove out the doctors, silenced the operating rooms, and locked the wards. And then, with much self-congratulation, they reopened the building as a “museum,” complete with exhibits celebrating how splendidly people used to be treated there.
It had been one of the finest hospitals: modern equipment, brilliant specialists, patients arriving not only from all over Ukraine but from abroad. It was always full. But once treatment stopped, the people vanished. For after all – who in their right mind goes to a hospital that no longer heals?
The museum curators, however, were heartbroken. Their “hospital-museum” stood empty, abandoned. And so the director conceived a dazzling idea. Not to restore medicine, not to invite the doctors back, not to heal the sick again. No – he had a better trick. They would set up ice cream stalls at the door, brew gourmet “hospital-museum” coffee, hawk souvenirs, and even offer embroidery classes. Surely then the patients would come rushing back – and the halls would once more be crowded, though not with the sick and suffering, but with tourists licking ice cream.
Absurd, isn’t it? A fairy tale.
And yet – a parable of our own times.
