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.