Keeping Dietrich dry

Before we left America, many people asked whether disposable diapers were available in Ukraine. Thankfully, the answer is yes. The three main brands sold here are Huggies, Libero and Pampers. Libero diapers are Italian; the others you’re already familiar with. Pampers evidently win the brand-name recognition contest: all diapers are popularly called Pampers in Russian – just as Americans call all facial tissues Kleenex and all plastic foam Styrofoam.

Pampers also win my loyalty by offering a jumbo pack of 88 for 83 hryvna – a little less than 20 cents per diaper. Other brands come in at just over 20 cents per diaper – not a big difference, but I’d say we save about $2 a month by using Pampers.

The Pampers sold in Ukraine do not depict American cartoon characters. Instead, we get a big picture of an animal (elephant, bear, donkey, dog, cat or koala) at the waistline while leaves and butterflies decorate all the other bits. Surrounding the animal is a drawing meant to represent its food of choice. For the elephant, peanuts. For the bear, honey. For the donkey, apples. For the cat, birds. But, oddly enough, for the koala, the sun and for the dog, flowers.

Today, buried in the jumbo pack we’re currently cruising through, I found a little piece of Pampers promotional material. It reads, “You fall on your bum at least 300 times before you learn how to stand and walk.”

“Ah-ha,” I thought, “Our diapers are British.” Until I turned said piece of promotional material over and found a version of that phrase translated into no less than 22 languages. Among them: Czech, Polish, Georgian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Slovakian and Hebrew. Fifteen use some version of the Roman alphabet, while four use Cyrillic letters. And Georgia’s alphabet is the loveliest – if you’re not familiar with it, you can check it out here.

And the biggest lesson I learned from today’s pack of Pampers: the Russian word for “bum” is popka.


The elephant is my favorite. Which one do you dig?