I bought a jar of mini-pickles today and the expiration date is May 17th, 2010. If all goes according to plan, I'll be finished with my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer when those pickles are officially deemed inedible. Oddly enough, there are 23 pickles (yes, I counted them because I could...I also ate two to make it exactly 23) in the jar. One for each month of remaining service. It seemed so small sitting on the shelf, 25 little pickles packed into my one jar amongst rows and rows of other jars, some with more pickles, some with peppers, some with beans, a few peas. Some will be purchased this week, some next week, some next year, but all of them will go to a person who will do with them what they can, whether they go towards a spaghetti sauce, a minestrone soup, or a chicken enchilada. I'm not sure what I can make with a jar of pickles, but I'll do my best. I've got two years to figure it out.
Maybe you're curious about how the camp with the kiddos went. It went well. I did the Time Warp for the first time in about 7 years, didn't catch the ball once during a vicious game of kickball, nervously narrated a native American legend, convinced some kids that I can understand EVERY language, even Martian, and ate the best food I've had since swear-in. Also, I saw an awful lot of staggering beauty, played cards with a Birds of Pray deck in a room that felt like Dracula's personal bar, said Jo Reggelt/Napot/Estet (good morning/day/evening) to every unexpecting soul who passed me and my group of lovely friends. I'm pretty sure I learned more than the kids did, but that's how things work in this pickle jar.
There's another package at the post office awaiting my open arms! I'll be able to pick it up on Tuesday, from 10 to 12. It's all about waiting here.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
being american
Tomorrow through Wednesday I'll be helping out with a youth camp and will probably have very limited access to the internet and email. Not that anyone will notice. I'm a little nervous about working with kids again. Haven't really spent much time around them since I was a Latch Key day care leader, and my memories from that involve alot of boogers, mopping up some barf, and being asked whether I was a boy or a girl. But that was ten years ago and I can hopefully handle all situations with a bit more grace and dignity. At least this time around, I won't really be able to understand what the kids are saying because they're Hungarian, so if they're questioning my gender, I'll just smile and nod and give them a pat on the shoulder. No hard feelings whatsoever.
When I was little, I remember walking around and saying random, nonsensical things to myself and wondering "wow! I wonder what language I'm speaking!" and being fascinated by the thought that somewhere out there was a country, maybe a planet, full of people who would understand my "bing boop sluie bop" to mean "this cookie is delicious". Only when you actually try to learn a new language do you realize how silly you were as a little kid. Seriously, I want to learn Romanian so badly, but the more I learn, the harder and more convoluted it seems. During PST, we didn't get into the confusing grammar too much, just brushed the surface, but now...nothing makes sense. There are about ten different ways to say "this", depending on the gender and the number and the location of what you are referring to. No bing. No boop. And there isn't an exact translation for cookie, which makes me sad. Add on top of that very little time to actually study and co-workers who speak English very fluently and nearly refuse to speak Romanian with you (because they're Hungarian) and gladly translate every little thing for you and you simply don't progress. If anything you regress. And the two different languages thing is getting annoying. I don't know how to greet anyone and I feel bad if I talk to someone in the wrong language and I feel guilty that I'm not learning Hungarian. Bah.
Yesterday, towards the end of my Romanian tutoring session, we some how got onto the subject of ethnic background (in English, of course...cause half the tutoring session is in English) and I mentioned that I'm about 3/4 German. "Really?" my tutor asked, "Do you speak German?" This took me by surprise, nobody has ever asked me about the language when I proudly state that I'm part German. "Uh...no. Nein." I said, feeling clever. "Why not?" She asked and put me on the spot...I suddenly felt that I needed to justify my German-ness. "I've never studied it," I said, honestly. "Didn't your parents speak it at home?" I almost laughed at that question because the idea seemed so strange. "No...not at all. My dad studied it in college, I think." "And you? They didn't offer it at your school?" "Well...they did, actually, but I took French instead..." "What about your grandparents, didn't they speak it?" And this is where it hit me as to why I had no clue about the German language. "I don't think they were allowed to." My response stopped her flow of questions, to my uncomfortable relief, but has been bothering me ever since. Either my grand parents or my great grandparents immigrated here from Germany long ago and I'm sure they maintained their heritage in their cozy German house and kept up their daily German routines and spoke in their native tongue, until a war came along and made them unpopular. They no longer wanted to appear German so they ceased all German activity in public and became so ashamed of their heritage and the horrible things their people were doing that they stopped being German, even at home, refusing to respond to the children when they said "guten morgnen". Now, generations later, I proudly state that I'm 3/4 German and yet I have NO clue what that means. I've had so many ethnicity conversations with friends in the past, where we all sit around and one by one go around the circle and share our heritage and I would say my usual, "I'm 3/4 German, nearly 1/4 Irish, and a tiny bit of Cherokee", and I was so proud of this, my background, my roots, it was something that invoked images of a different time and life, milking cows in the German mountains, watching the waves crash on an Irish shore, listening to the wind sweep across the open plains. All of which I now realize has nothing to do with me. All of which has been lost over the past generations and the never ending, dehumanizing wars and the ongoing loss of heritage. War both creates and destroys history and thanks to it, I'm now simply American and clueless.
When I was little, I remember walking around and saying random, nonsensical things to myself and wondering "wow! I wonder what language I'm speaking!" and being fascinated by the thought that somewhere out there was a country, maybe a planet, full of people who would understand my "bing boop sluie bop" to mean "this cookie is delicious". Only when you actually try to learn a new language do you realize how silly you were as a little kid. Seriously, I want to learn Romanian so badly, but the more I learn, the harder and more convoluted it seems. During PST, we didn't get into the confusing grammar too much, just brushed the surface, but now...nothing makes sense. There are about ten different ways to say "this", depending on the gender and the number and the location of what you are referring to. No bing. No boop. And there isn't an exact translation for cookie, which makes me sad. Add on top of that very little time to actually study and co-workers who speak English very fluently and nearly refuse to speak Romanian with you (because they're Hungarian) and gladly translate every little thing for you and you simply don't progress. If anything you regress. And the two different languages thing is getting annoying. I don't know how to greet anyone and I feel bad if I talk to someone in the wrong language and I feel guilty that I'm not learning Hungarian. Bah.
Yesterday, towards the end of my Romanian tutoring session, we some how got onto the subject of ethnic background (in English, of course...cause half the tutoring session is in English) and I mentioned that I'm about 3/4 German. "Really?" my tutor asked, "Do you speak German?" This took me by surprise, nobody has ever asked me about the language when I proudly state that I'm part German. "Uh...no. Nein." I said, feeling clever. "Why not?" She asked and put me on the spot...I suddenly felt that I needed to justify my German-ness. "I've never studied it," I said, honestly. "Didn't your parents speak it at home?" I almost laughed at that question because the idea seemed so strange. "No...not at all. My dad studied it in college, I think." "And you? They didn't offer it at your school?" "Well...they did, actually, but I took French instead..." "What about your grandparents, didn't they speak it?" And this is where it hit me as to why I had no clue about the German language. "I don't think they were allowed to." My response stopped her flow of questions, to my uncomfortable relief, but has been bothering me ever since. Either my grand parents or my great grandparents immigrated here from Germany long ago and I'm sure they maintained their heritage in their cozy German house and kept up their daily German routines and spoke in their native tongue, until a war came along and made them unpopular. They no longer wanted to appear German so they ceased all German activity in public and became so ashamed of their heritage and the horrible things their people were doing that they stopped being German, even at home, refusing to respond to the children when they said "guten morgnen". Now, generations later, I proudly state that I'm 3/4 German and yet I have NO clue what that means. I've had so many ethnicity conversations with friends in the past, where we all sit around and one by one go around the circle and share our heritage and I would say my usual, "I'm 3/4 German, nearly 1/4 Irish, and a tiny bit of Cherokee", and I was so proud of this, my background, my roots, it was something that invoked images of a different time and life, milking cows in the German mountains, watching the waves crash on an Irish shore, listening to the wind sweep across the open plains. All of which I now realize has nothing to do with me. All of which has been lost over the past generations and the never ending, dehumanizing wars and the ongoing loss of heritage. War both creates and destroys history and thanks to it, I'm now simply American and clueless.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Small Dent
I just posted 21 photos for your viewing pleasure on my flickr site (link on the right). Still have about 500 more photos to go through. Squee.
Today was awesome and perhaps I will write something more about it when I'm not so tired, but I will say that it involved jogging, hundreds of frogs, charging wild boars, fleeing deer, intimidating men with chains and chainsaws, a rousing game of "how many pinecones can you get in the boot?", an amazing swamp-bog-woodland-lake-type place, and cheese puffs.
Today was awesome and perhaps I will write something more about it when I'm not so tired, but I will say that it involved jogging, hundreds of frogs, charging wild boars, fleeing deer, intimidating men with chains and chainsaws, a rousing game of "how many pinecones can you get in the boot?", an amazing swamp-bog-woodland-lake-type place, and cheese puffs.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Routine
I can sleep in tomorrow morning so I'm going to splurge and stay up till at least midnight! Bwahahaha. Just for fun, here's a break down of what I did today:
6:15 alarm goes off, I hit snooze repeatedly
6:30 get out of bed, stumble around for a bit, brush teeth, wash face, hair and the necessities, dress
7:15 eat breakfast, which consists of yogurt and granola
7:30 pack myself a lunch and wash dishes
7:45 leave for work
8:00 arrive at work and say "buna dimineata" or "servus" or "jo reggelt" to any staff that I run into
8:30 drink coffee and check the 15 emails that somehow accumulated overnight, take care of any internet or peace corps-related things that need to be done
10:00 the main guy in the biodiversity department asks me to show him how to do a few things in ArcMap; I agree, happy to fulfill one of the peace corps goals: transfer of skills
10:30 realize he doesn't really want me to show him how to do stuff, just wants me to do it. So much for that "transfer of skills" goal
12:30 create 931 randomly generated points that represent possible locations of Carpathian Brown Bears, buffer the points by 1km and 5km, intersect the buffers, dissolve the intersection, calculate the area of the dissolved intersection, dissolve the 1km buffer and calculate the area of the dissolve, add fields to the attribute table, digitize a few roads, and make a map of everything done for the day
3:15 leave work, drop computer off at home, head towards tutoring
4:15 arrive late for tutoring because my knee hurt from running the day before, tutor doesn't seem to mind
6:00 finish tutoring, stop and get an ice cream cone on my way home from the only place in town that makes the ice cream in the store
7:00 arrive home, make dinner
8:00 start mixing 2 batches of cookies to take to a party this weekend
9:30 finish mixing, start baking
10:00 decide to fiddle on my own internet while cookies bake
11:00 cookies finish baking, internet still fiddling
Same life, different country. Why am I here? To bake cookies and make maps? Just like I did in Reno? I have a washer, a water heater, internet in my apartment, a cell phone, ArcGIS at work, I ride in a car every other day to the nature reserve, where I strap on my water boots and have a good time looking for frogs and taking GPS points. I buy big jugs of Danon yogurt and packets of Nestle's hot chocolate from the supermarkets. I take colorful pictures of interesting buildings with my shiny Digital Elf and I listen to the music I find enjoyable on my iPod while I sweep my laminate flooring and scrub my porcelain sinks. Isn't there something else I should be doing? Aren't there stories waiting to be written, kids waiting to be taught, trees waiting to be saved? I know there are, but I haven't had time to find them and I'm scared I won't have the perseverance or ability not only to find them, but to help them. If all that Romania wants from me are some cookies and maps, maybe I could just ship them over from home.
No, I'm not thinking about coming home, I'm just questioning my role here. I thought this was going to be different and as broad as I try to keep my expectations, sitting in an office all day working on maps has never been high on my list of volunteerism goals. How do you tell someone who asked for your help that you don't think they're asking for the right kind of help? Is there a right kind of help? Would my time really be better spent presenting information on how to save the forests to classes of highschoolers instead of making hypothetical Brown Bear territory maps?
Despite all these rhetorical questions, I am quite happy here. I can't describe the feeling of community I get when I walk around downtown in the evenings. People are everywhere, children running around giggling without a care in the world, parents watching with careful eyes and high hopes of a childhood brighter than their own, teenagers trying to find their name in brand clothes and interesting hairdos and indulging in their freedom, bunicas resting on the benches and watching a world that must look indescribably different than the world they knew only 20 years ago. The memories they must have. I watched out the window today as it poured harder than I think I've ever seen it pour, settling the dust from the never ending road construction, washing the dirt from the sidewalks, and fueling the green sprouting through the cracks in the pavement. A world in transition in every way and all I can do is watch.
There's been some commotion about volunteer blogs being insensitive or offensive to host country nationals (i.e. Romanians) and, although I truly hope mine is not one of them, I'm going to password protect it on July 1st. The password will be Sfantu24. Once service is over, I'll open it back up to the public.
6:15 alarm goes off, I hit snooze repeatedly
6:30 get out of bed, stumble around for a bit, brush teeth, wash face, hair and the necessities, dress
7:15 eat breakfast, which consists of yogurt and granola
7:30 pack myself a lunch and wash dishes
7:45 leave for work
8:00 arrive at work and say "buna dimineata" or "servus" or "jo reggelt" to any staff that I run into
8:30 drink coffee and check the 15 emails that somehow accumulated overnight, take care of any internet or peace corps-related things that need to be done
10:00 the main guy in the biodiversity department asks me to show him how to do a few things in ArcMap; I agree, happy to fulfill one of the peace corps goals: transfer of skills
10:30 realize he doesn't really want me to show him how to do stuff, just wants me to do it. So much for that "transfer of skills" goal
12:30 create 931 randomly generated points that represent possible locations of Carpathian Brown Bears, buffer the points by 1km and 5km, intersect the buffers, dissolve the intersection, calculate the area of the dissolved intersection, dissolve the 1km buffer and calculate the area of the dissolve, add fields to the attribute table, digitize a few roads, and make a map of everything done for the day
3:15 leave work, drop computer off at home, head towards tutoring
4:15 arrive late for tutoring because my knee hurt from running the day before, tutor doesn't seem to mind
6:00 finish tutoring, stop and get an ice cream cone on my way home from the only place in town that makes the ice cream in the store
7:00 arrive home, make dinner
8:00 start mixing 2 batches of cookies to take to a party this weekend
9:30 finish mixing, start baking
10:00 decide to fiddle on my own internet while cookies bake
11:00 cookies finish baking, internet still fiddling
Same life, different country. Why am I here? To bake cookies and make maps? Just like I did in Reno? I have a washer, a water heater, internet in my apartment, a cell phone, ArcGIS at work, I ride in a car every other day to the nature reserve, where I strap on my water boots and have a good time looking for frogs and taking GPS points. I buy big jugs of Danon yogurt and packets of Nestle's hot chocolate from the supermarkets. I take colorful pictures of interesting buildings with my shiny Digital Elf and I listen to the music I find enjoyable on my iPod while I sweep my laminate flooring and scrub my porcelain sinks. Isn't there something else I should be doing? Aren't there stories waiting to be written, kids waiting to be taught, trees waiting to be saved? I know there are, but I haven't had time to find them and I'm scared I won't have the perseverance or ability not only to find them, but to help them. If all that Romania wants from me are some cookies and maps, maybe I could just ship them over from home.
No, I'm not thinking about coming home, I'm just questioning my role here. I thought this was going to be different and as broad as I try to keep my expectations, sitting in an office all day working on maps has never been high on my list of volunteerism goals. How do you tell someone who asked for your help that you don't think they're asking for the right kind of help? Is there a right kind of help? Would my time really be better spent presenting information on how to save the forests to classes of highschoolers instead of making hypothetical Brown Bear territory maps?
Despite all these rhetorical questions, I am quite happy here. I can't describe the feeling of community I get when I walk around downtown in the evenings. People are everywhere, children running around giggling without a care in the world, parents watching with careful eyes and high hopes of a childhood brighter than their own, teenagers trying to find their name in brand clothes and interesting hairdos and indulging in their freedom, bunicas resting on the benches and watching a world that must look indescribably different than the world they knew only 20 years ago. The memories they must have. I watched out the window today as it poured harder than I think I've ever seen it pour, settling the dust from the never ending road construction, washing the dirt from the sidewalks, and fueling the green sprouting through the cracks in the pavement. A world in transition in every way and all I can do is watch.
There's been some commotion about volunteer blogs being insensitive or offensive to host country nationals (i.e. Romanians) and, although I truly hope mine is not one of them, I'm going to password protect it on July 1st. The password will be Sfantu24. Once service is over, I'll open it back up to the public.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Internetul
I am proud to announce that finally, after two and a half weeks of impatience, I have internet in my apartment. But I'm not sure why exactly I was so impatient...what did I do on the internet before? What should I do now? Hmmm...what. to. do. I'll figure it out tomorrow, noapte buna!
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Antici...........pation!
Ooooohh! I got a slip on my desk today that says there's a package at the post office waiting for me to come and pick it up!! I can only pick it up on Thursday between 10 and 12, though. Why? I don't know...but there's a package there and I have no clue who it's from because my mom hasn't sent hers yet and I'm not sure who else would have sent me one in such a short amount of time and I wanna know what it is and who it is from! SQUEE!
My colleague caught a really stinky snake at the reserve today. I think his hands have been permanently tainted because I can smell the nastiness from here and he's washed his hands about ten times and is sitting 10 meters away from me. Bleh. Who knew that snakes stink? In other news, I'm getting better at catching frogs. I've only caught three, but it's getting easier each time. It's all about the sneak and surprise method. Sneak up and hunch quietly and still over the frog for about 15 seconds, then SURPRISE! smack you hand (cupped, of course, as to avoid hurting the poor thing) over the frog and carefully scoop it up and play with it (nicely, and only for very short amounts of time). Then release back into the wild and watch it leap, terrified, away.
I've got Hungarian tutoring in about 5 minutes, so I better go...just passing a few minutes in the office. I've decided that today's going to be my last Hungarian lesson for a while and I'm going to focus on Romanian for the next 6 months. Two languages at once? That's just nuts and counter-productive. Besides, I'm picking up random Hungarian words with my work and everybody's very supportive of me switching to only Romanian.
My colleague caught a really stinky snake at the reserve today. I think his hands have been permanently tainted because I can smell the nastiness from here and he's washed his hands about ten times and is sitting 10 meters away from me. Bleh. Who knew that snakes stink? In other news, I'm getting better at catching frogs. I've only caught three, but it's getting easier each time. It's all about the sneak and surprise method. Sneak up and hunch quietly and still over the frog for about 15 seconds, then SURPRISE! smack you hand (cupped, of course, as to avoid hurting the poor thing) over the frog and carefully scoop it up and play with it (nicely, and only for very short amounts of time). Then release back into the wild and watch it leap, terrified, away.
I've got Hungarian tutoring in about 5 minutes, so I better go...just passing a few minutes in the office. I've decided that today's going to be my last Hungarian lesson for a while and I'm going to focus on Romanian for the next 6 months. Two languages at once? That's just nuts and counter-productive. Besides, I'm picking up random Hungarian words with my work and everybody's very supportive of me switching to only Romanian.
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