Adjusting

Here's some stuff from the past couple'o days.

27 May 2008

Man, I can’t stop judging myself. Every little thing I do, from baking up some chocolate chip cookies to hiking with a colleague through one of the nature reserves to drinking tea with some new friends to getting out of town for the weekend, I keep the question “is this what it’s supposed to be?” in the back of my mind. One of the main goals of every peace corps volunteer is to integrate into their community, but just what does integration mean? I feel like I can survive here for two years, but does survival have anything to do with integration? And now that I think about it, just how integrated into Reno’s community was I? After living there for nearly 18 years, was I anything to Reno? It didn’t depend on me nearly as much as I depended on it and I doubt it’s taken any notice to the fact that I’ve left. Just one less car plugging up the interstate bowels.
Is community integration less likely to occur for somebody who relishes baking cookies “singura” (alone) and curling up with a good book in the evenings over someone who is happier hanging out in smoky bars with friends and snapping up new “contacts” every few minutes like they were gummy drops. Who’s more likely to fulfill the goals of peace corps? Me or Mr. Gummy Drop? Should I really worry about this or can I get the go ahead to live my life how I’m used to? I’m not saying I don’t like social contact, I thoroughly enjoy it, but I know if I get too much of it, I shut down. The occasional evening “singura” is necessary and if it doesn’t happen, I turn all icky and no-fun.

29 May 2008

I don't think I was in a very good mood on May 27^th, but it’s something I felt at the time (and, honestly, am still thinking about), so I’ll keep it as is and put it out there for the world to enjoy. Actually, this past week has been a bit rough mainly because I have not been feeling well. Ever since I got back from Onesti, my tummy has felt the need to cramp up every 20 or so minutes in a really weird, quite painful way, luckily without emitting any solid (or liquid) results, but still making me not want to smile at the clerks or even think about how to ask for a bottle of coke in Hungarian. Feeling just a little bit ill in an unfamiliar place is like being a kid who’s lost his binkie - a very minimal, no-panic-necessary problem that evokes nail-biting fear, a sense of helplessness, and a pinch of woe-is-me. Today, finally, I am feeling a bit more in line with my properly operating stomach and can once again smile at the lady I buy a coke from nearly every day.
Part of my heightened spirits may also be due to the fact that I just bought a kilo of strawberries that were grown in this region for 4 lei (somewhere around $2 – a kilo! That’s like 50 strawberries!). I also spent the day wading through water at the nature reserve (which I found out is where parts of Cold Mountain were filmed) looking for frogs (my sister should be here) and taking GPS points that actually, after hours of frustration and adjustments, lined up correctly on the map (nothing in this world will ever make me understand or enjoy working with projections. Nothing.), ate ice cream and drank tea with “the girls” from the office, had someone ask me if I’d like to go to a couple of plays with them, came home to a drying rack full of finally dry clothes and a bag full of sugar cookies that I forgot I had baked, and, last but not least, realized that the word “elephant” is phonetically the same in English, Romanian, AND Hungarian. It’s my new favorite word. This was a good day. I like these good days. And no matter how difficult it is for me to do, the busier the day, the better it seems to be and the less I feel like judging me and my volunteer abilities.
Something really cool happened last week. I was finishing up a tutoring session when one of the girls who occasionally helps out asked me where I was from. I responded with the usual: “Nevada, it’s on the west coast next to California. About a seven hour drive north of Las Vegas” (EVERYBODY knows Las Vegas…grumble grumble). She responded with “Really? Which city?” I said Reno and her eyes immediately lit up with a big smile across her face and another girl in the room looked astonished and said something high-pitched in Hungarian that I couldn’t understand and I suddenly felt my eyes water up a bit because obviously Reno meant something to them and usually people just vaguely smile at me when I tell them which city. Turns out she lived there for two years, all of 2003 and 2004, with some friends and worked at various places around the city and I probably crossed paths with her at some point. Funny thing, too, because she looked familiar the moment I met her, but I never even thought to say anything because it’d sound silly. We then proceeded to chat about different places around Reno and what we enjoyed doing there and how curious it is that our roles are now reversed and even though it was pouring rain outside, everything felt right with the world.

I think I’ll go for a walk. Pa for now.

From the first week

Below are two posts that I've written at home and saved to update when possible. I'm really tired today and it's cloudy out and I just feel like napping. It's been too busy. But busy is good.

16 May 2008

New plan. Because I don’t have internet in my apartment yet and I would like to update a bit more frequently for your possible enjoyment and my future reference, I’m going to start typing stuff up in Word at home and then taking one or two minutes to upload the saved entry from my work site, where there is internet. Since I’ll be using my laptop to hook up to their internet and do work for them, I think it’s fair to take those two moments for such purposes. Right? Not illegal or anything, right? We will see.

That phrase, by the way, has become my new motto in Romanian, o sa vedem. We will see. I’ve said it probably thirty times in the past week (as well as “poftim?” which means “can you repeat that?”). “We will see” is in the future tense because everything is very unclear right now and difficult to distinguish, but I’m hoping over the next few months, these cloudy waters will clear up…and we will see. What will we see? If I knew, it’d be in the present tense and the knot in my stomach would dissolve. I hate not having a clear path to follow, but this is volunteering in the Peace Corps and I’ve known the whole time that a well-defined project would not simply be handed to me and I’d go on my merry way, I know that instead it will take some searching and lots of self motivation, not to mention time, but it’s scary when you’re sitting at a desk in a room with people whom you can barely hold a five minute conversation with in their own language and whom you can’t help but think are watching to see how much you, the American who’s supposedly well qualified and able to solve problems, maybe even move some mountains, will be able to accomplish. But that American is just sitting there. Timidly flipping through some environmental brochures that she can’t really understand because they’re in Romanian and she doesn’t know much Romanian, but she’s flipping through them anyways because she doesn’t know what else to do.

That sums up this week in the office. Yes, there was the occasional minute or two where I felt slightly purposeful, but on the whole, I have no stinking clue what to do. And they’re unsure what I should do, too. But it’ll be ok. It’s only the second week here at site, the first week in the office, and there is time. Time to search something out.

On the upside, I visited the nature reserve that falls under Covasna EPA’s protection twice this week and it’s beautiful there. Both times I forgot my camera, of course, but I’ll be spending lots of time there in the future and can’t forget my camera every time. I keep getting these random ideas that just bubble mercilessly into my brain and I play them out to their fullest and most dramatic extent, an example of which is creating a summer camp at the nature reserve where kids will come from all over the county to learn about nature and participate in clean up activities and learn how to make their own compost and realize how awesome and underrated worms are and learn the basics of growing their own fruits and vegetables and, after the camp, they return to their city and go on to start up their own environmental clubs, spreading all the information they received to others, and thus initiating the environmental revolution here in Covasna county. That was my vision during my first five minutes of walking around the nature reserve. The intensity of the vision slowly faded away and now it’s just a pleasant thought in the back of my mind, a thought that I hope I remember when the time comes to get serious about a secondary project. We will see.

There is something that the organization needs my help with and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it. To meet the standards of the European Union (which Romania joined in January of 2007), it is necessary for each county’s EPA to establish a network of nature reserves, known as Natura2000, which will consist of well-documented and protected areas of biodiversity importance and Covasna County has already determined which areas to place under this EU protection. Now they just need to document and protect those areas and that, supposedly, will require a bit o’ good ol’ GIS. I very nearly let out an audible sigh of relief when I found out that I’d be working with ArcGIS again because it wasn’t something I was really expecting to use over here and it wasn’t something I had expected to miss…is it weird to miss a software? I think so. I also really miss Adobe Illustrator. It's such a friendly, intuitive, and helpful program. That’s what a life spent on a computer will do to you. Anyways…four of my new colleagues will be attending training sessions for ArcGIS 9.2 next week (they have some experience with ArcView), after which they will (hopefully) receive the software, and off we go. With our one little Garmin GPS unit that we haven’t quite figured out yet and a whole bunch of old paper data…and maybe a backpack full of cookies. We will see.

I’ve been at site for nearly two weeks. They were right; it is a different world after PST.

17 May 2008

Something that I’ve really started to miss over here is music. There’s music everywhere, from the man singing to himself as he drives his horse-drawn cart home, to the local flavor of machismo-filled manale bumping out of run-down dacias, to everybody’s favorite Justin Timberlake tainting every restaurant and bar atmosphere in town, but so far nearly none of it has been my cup of tea (except during that funeral procession a while back…and when our language professors serenaded us with Romanian Christmas carols). There has been some traditional music people have played for me on their computers that sounded awesome, and I know great music exists here somewhere, I just haven’t found it yet. It’ll be a small project of mine over the next two years. Where is all the music?

Oh, whoa…I forgot about the symphony I went to about half-way through training in Ploiesti. It was one of the most moving concerts I have ever been to. Ever. That’s the problem when you don’t update often, the intensity of all these great experiences starts to fade until you forget what it really felt like to be there. Won’t go into detail about the whole shebang, but I will say that my eyes watered up in the first ten minutes of the program. My ears had forgotten what live, intense music sounded like and for a few minutes the fears and anxieties that had been crowding my brain found something meaningful, beautiful, and familiar to focus on and shut up. I was me again. Especially during the 1812 Overture :)

Here Goes

Oh boy. It's been a while. Tomorrow I and the rest of group 24 will be "sworn in" at the ambassador’s residence in Bucharest as official volunteers (unless they've been toying with us about passing the language test) and we will emerge from the ceremony no longer meek and timid trainees, but strong and confident volunteers, prepared to go on our merry ways and make positive impacts all over the country. Or so we hope. Honestly, it’s been difficult to look beyond training and prepare for something other than classes for eight hours a day, studying for another two or three, and spending the remaining with my gazda or other trainees, but starting on Tuesday it’ll be a whole new enchilada all over again and we’ll have to take it in stride, one bite at a time.

The counterpart conference was interesting. I spent a bit of time in the bathroom, which really isn’t all that unusual for me, as my mother can confirm. When presented with a difficult and slightly awkward situation, like meeting a stranger (my counterpart) for the first time whom I’m expected to make a strong bond with and spend the whole weekend with and alot depends on this initial meeting and the impressions that go with it, I get nervous and occasionally need to disappear into a quiet zone for a moment or two, which, when in a pinch, can be found in the confines of a bathroom stall. I have many clear memories of the interiors of particularly calming bathrooms, especially the one inside Bela Caroli’s Gymnastics camp in Texas, where I spent a couple hours every day during the camp because Bela and the staff scared me a little bit and because I really wasn’t that good at gymnastics, nor did I particularly like participating in the sport, but my sister was going to the camp and I didn’t think it would be fair for me to stay home while Renee got to have all this fun at a camp. So I went, and strongly disliked just about every minute of it, except the few delightful moments of serenity found in the bathroom, with the crooked posters of Nadia and Mary Lou Retton and other famous gymnasts posing proudly alongside the ever-smiling and ever-intimidating Bela on the wall and the disturbingly bright fake flowers in a vase on the floor and the smell of sweaty gym socks mingling with chalky residue. Serenity. Now I sit in a conference building in Bela’s home land and stare at the inside of a stall and ponder how my methods of stress management have and have not changed since the days of gym camp. I still retreat to the bathroom when necessary, but for no longer than a couple of minutes, and it’s more to take a few deep breaths than to hide, and I certainly did not dislike every minute of the counterpart conference. It was just stressful and slightly awkward at times. On the whole, I’d say I managed all right. I liked my site and am excited to go back, but I still know so little about the city, the people, and the work I’ll be doing, that it’s hard to know for certain if it’s the “best match”. Guess that just adds to the adventure.

At my site, there’s an apartment that’s nearly ready for me to move into. It belongs to one of the employees at the EPA and her daughter was going to move into it, but they’ve decided to postpone her move in for (what luck!) two years. The apartment has one large room where I’ll sleep/eat/jump rope/read/crochet/yoga/write/practice my backflips/etc, one very snazzy bathroom with a standup shower (not too common), and a small kitchen. It’s recently been renovated and it’s small, but that’s fine by me. I’ve lived in a smaller apartment before (the apartment in Eugene was about half the size) and it can be quite cozy at times. It’ll just be a bit difficult if there are several people visiting me at once. A big plus is the view. Because I'm on the edge of town, I can see the mountains, the little river that runs through Sf. Gheorghe, a church AND a circus. Serenity.

Easter was great. Lots of food, lots of visitors, lots of work for my gazda. She was cooking constantly for about three days, but she seemed to enjoy it immensely. Both of her sons and their significant others were there and it was nice meeting them and getting to see the whole family interact. The ladies do all the work, the guys hang out, but that’s what I’ve heard is the norm. Maybe I’ll work on changing that up some while I’m here :) One tradition that I’d like to bring home with me is the cracking of eggs. Two people crack their eggs together and the egg that cracks gets eaten, while the egg that doesn’t crack goes on to crack with other people until it does crack. Each person you crack eggs with is a person you will be with in the after life and anybody you don’t crack eggs with you won’t see after you kick the bucket. So crack your eggs wisely.

I’ve also visited Targoviste and Slanic. They were awesome and very beautiful. Look ‘em up in Wikipedia if you’re curious…I’m sorry I don’t have time to give them a decent description right now. Maybe when I get to site I’ll do a really big and long blog about all the stuff that’s been going on, but for now this’ll have to do. My next entry will hopefully be from my new apartment in Sfantu Gheorghe.

What's shakin' in Reno besides the ground? How about in Boise?

O zi buna!