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 :)