Friends Till the End

Do you ever feel like you've missed some important life step? A step that everyone else around you has taken or is in the process of taking, but somehow you skipped it and are now left outside the loop, jogging on a different track. Wondering where everyone went. It happens when the inside jokes formerly close friends post on facebook make zero sense to you and feel more like messages of "you don't know me anymore" than silly gags. Or when the entire sphere of people you know seems to be pairing off into happy little couples, dining and dancing and marrying and multiplying, with or without you, in the face of your bewilderment. How does it happen? How could you miss so much of the lives you once felt close to? I guess it's an easy question to answer. You leave for two years. It's more than that, though. I don't feel like I've known someone, really known someone and been a more or less daily part of their life, for more than two years. Ever. Best friends, boyfriends, whoever. My mom, dad and sister being the only exceptions. My friends back home who I consider close are the ones I correspond with through some sort of medium maybe once a month, tops. I know the very simple, surface basics of what's going on in their lives. My close friends here will all be scattering to different parts of the world in four months, myself included. And even now I rarely get to see them. I'm horrible at staying in touch. How do people do it? How do people keep their close friends close? Is it something none of us can do? Is it something only the loners slash wanderers struggle with? Am I missing something important?

Gosh.

Religion for many Romanians is a pretty big deal and it's often one of the first things a total stranger will ask you about, especially if they're a little older. "Hello, I'm so and so. It's nice to meet you. What's your religion?". As someone who doesn't identify with anything, this kind of conversation always makes me squirm and has elicited the most bizarre responses that I can not explain. I've been Methodist (which I was actually, once upon a time, confirmed as), Protestant, Catholic and Buddhist. Once, I even said I was Mormon. I wasn't trying to lie and I wasn't trying to have fun. But I didn't want them to dislike me for not having a religion, so I said the first thing that came to mind. The one time I said that I didn't belong to any religion, I received worried looks and heard an exasperated "how can you not have a God?!", followed by the cold shoulder. I don't want to paint Romanians as judgmental or super hyper religious, but it's very strange to them if you don't belong to ANY religious sect at all. You can say pretty much any religion, and they're satisfied and will continue with the conversation as normal. In fact, many do not actively participate in or attend their church because in the past, particularly under Ceausescu's reign, churches were used as spy mechanisms for the communist party and the people quickly lost their desire to attend mass after their conversations with priests were used against them. The lack of trust remains, but they still believe. They still cross themselves three times whenever coming anywhere near an Orthodox church. They still whisper a prayer while settling into the driver's seat, even though the seat belt remains untouched. They still exclaim "Jesus has risen, yes he has risen!" on Easter morning, while the candles lit just a few hours before by the same holy flame slowly burn out. This is where I find myself liking religion, in whatever form you please. It may have no logical sense, but I feel comforted when the bunica sitting across from me on the train crosses herself and whispers her prayers for our safe travel. It reminds me to take a moment and just hope that it all goes well. Not to necessarily pray to some sort of God, but to think about where I am, what I am doing and how undoubtedly fragile life is, especially when speeding masses of metal are involved. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with stopping once in a while during the day to think about a sick friend or a family member who's overseas? God doesn't have to be a part of any of it, or can be all of it. Does praying necessarily have to be religious? Can't I use the calls to prayer that I witnessed in Istanbul as a time to think about my family, acknowledge the fact that they're thousands of miles away and hope that they are all doing ok? I'm not charging one super being with the power to protect my loved ones, but really what's the difference between saying "please protect them" and "I hope they are ok"? Perhaps this is what Romanians are getting at when they can not believe that a person has no religion. Maybe it's not just about God to them, but about hoping, too. Hoping and praying and crossing all mushed up into one.

Ack, I need to go to bed.

The Wind Down

Despite the fact that I still have more than four months to go, I can already feel myself detaching. I don't know if I'm ready to detach, but it's happening. In the evenings, I spend my time researching grad school programs for next year instead of baking cookies for my tutor and friends. I don't feel the need to go for two hour walks to explore my city anymore. I feel little guilt when I spend a full day indoors doing my own thing. While I look forward to next year and pursuing a new path, a peculiar sadness is taking root. Something I don't think I've felt before. Perhaps it could be defined as the recognition of a dissatisfaction that has spanned nearly two years of trying. Last night I went through some of my old computer files and came across a word document saved as "ProjectIdeas". It was last modified on June 30th of 2008, back when I was a different volunteer. Upon opening it, I found a list of all the little project ideas my brain came up - building a trail and sign system through Reci, forming a sister park relationship through the National Park System in the US, creating and conducting outdoor educational classes, developing a theater and music in the park program, establishing a pedestrian and bike path between Sfantu Gheorghe and Reci, on and on the list goes. There are about twenty ideas. The final being to build a welcome sign and some picnic tables and trash cans at Reci, which was the only project I was able to pursue with the EPA and which, as previously mentioned, failed. Peace Corps always stresses how much they want their volunteers to feel successful. How can you state with certainty whether or not two years of your life have been successful? I may not have accomplished a single item on that old list of mine, but there are certain things I've done and am proud of that aren't on the list. Perhaps it's too early to reflect on the past two years, but I'm struggling with this peculiar sadness taking root and pushing back the urge to start feeling dissatisfied. I've had choices to make every single day and each one has led me to where I now sit. That's all there is to it. It is what it is. I've tried. I may not have put every last little bit of energy into everything, but I have tried. And now I'm starting to move on. When the time comes, I know that I will dearly miss this place and the friends I've made here, and I'm comforted by this fact. It means that I have done something right.

The Real World

Of course, when I type "the real world" into the Google search engine, I am offered nothing but links to information on the MTV hit reality show of the same name. A small part of me had hoped for a link that led to something intriguing. Something more deserving of the title "the real world". Over the course of my soon to be 29 years, the term "the real world" has usually had a negative connotation attached to it. Something along the lines of a damp and dreary cubicle with a bleary monitor displaying never ending numbers that are attended to by tired, dark-ringed eyes and hands burdened by carpal tunnel syndrome. A little bit of hell in exchange for being able to pay the bills. It's something that I've wanted to avoid at all costs, even after MTV glorified it, but it seems to be an inevitability according to the masses. Volunteers frequently toss the phrase around when referring to going back home and finding work. "It's time to go back and join the real world..." I wonder when the term was first used to mean "a boring job" instead of "the Earth unadulterated". If you look simply at the words and not at the current use, the phrase The Real World would, to me, evoke images of far off places. Of the African Savannah and the distant, icy reaches of Antarctica. Of the depths within the Marianas Trench and the sharks of the Great Barrier Reef. Of the red and gold striped Grand Canyon walls and the windy steppes of Mongolia. Not of computers. Not of the nine to five routine we all frequently fall victim to. I feel like being here is the most real thing I've ever done and I hope that in forty years from now, when I look back, I'll feel like I've managed to experience at least a little bit of the real world. The real real world.

The Daily Battle

If you could eliminate the biggest source of stress from your life, how would your life be different?

A while ago, I heard about a couple of volunteers who received a score of Superior on their language tests at Mid Service Training. Superior is the highest ranking you can get, indicating a nearly undetectable accent, impeccable grammar, huge vocabulary and the ability to understand everything said in a natural, free flowing and rapid conversation. All of this at MST, the half way mark of service. As I keep my goal set high on a score of Advanced Low for my Close of Service test three months from now, I can't help but wonder what it must be like for those volunteers. How different my daily life would be if I didn't have to plan phone call conversations in my head before dialing, if I didn't have to use Google Translate on a daily basis, if I could understand every single conversation going on around me, if I could converse naturally with my coworkers, if I could confidently go into every store knowing the terms for exactly what I wanted, if I didn't have to rely on an English explanation for all the "advanced" stuff. What would the difficult part of my day be, then, if I could do all of these things? If I could eliminate the stress of sucking at both Romanian and Hungarian from my life, what other worries and inadequacies would occupy my mind? I can't even imagine anymore what it would be like to live in a foreign country and speak the local language fluently. I used to think it'd be simple. "How can you live in a country for two years and not learn the local language? That's ridiculous." My, how wrong I was. Why can't my daily battle be negotiating fair vegetable prices at the piatza instead of trying to remember the word for pumpkin? After a year and a half, I feel suddenly anxious to have this nagging worry out of my life. I wish I could eliminate it by being at the Superior level, but it seems that I am mentally incapable of accomplishing that. For shame.

I'm gonna go eat a slice of carrot cake now. Phooey.

Graffiti I Like

As I made my way from the hostel where volunteers usually stay when in Bucharest to the metro station, some graffiti caught my eye that I hadn't noticed before. It was very simple, just three words: Noi Vrem RESPECT. Noi Vrem was in black and RESPECT was in red. We Want RESPECT. On either side of this piece of graffiti were political signs promoting certain presidential candidates. The political signs said things like "You and us together" or "Come on, Romania!" or some other meaningless pleasantry. The red was dripping down the wall beneath the RESPECT, as if the person spraying had gritted their teeth and pushed down on the nozzle as hard as possible, using up the entire can to get a solid RESPECT on the wall. Perhaps it took all their might to keep from turning the spray towards the silly sayings and the dowdy faces peering at them from the nearby political posters. Good words combined with the right actions speak louder than anything.

The Dog Story

There are two dogs in Reno that I would like to think I saved. The first one was this big rottweiler running across McCarron Blvd, looking lost but sniffing out something tempting and heading right into swiftly approaching traffic. I pulled over, called the obviously friendly dog to me, checked his tags, and called the owner. A few minutes later the owner showed up, apologized profusely and said thank you. I saw the second dog jumping over a ridiculously high brick fence as I drove to work on Bering Avenue. After he landed, he raced immediately into the middle of the street and I barely missed hitting him. Slamming on the brakes, I pulled over, got out, cautiously called over the huge pit bull (who turned out to be a little love bug), and drove around with the guy drooling in the back seat until I found the address because no number was given on the tag. Both times the owners were really embarrassed, apologetic and grateful. If they hadn't been, I would have been worried. I saw a few other dogs running loose in Reno, but wasn't able to get to them or was pretty sure they weren't in much danger.

Cut to today and I don't give the scrawny stray passing me on the street a second thought, other than please don't bite me. I don't like that I've grown accustomed to ignoring the plethora of roaming dogs here. I don't like that I cringe out of fear as a big dog approaches and I don't like that I pick up rocks as I jog just in case the stray dogs by the river decide to take a toothy interest in me. The animals that I would pull over back home to save I now want nothing to do with. Instead of saying that I've lost some sort of tenderness towards animals, I'm going to say that the animals here, the dogs particularly, are different. They're smart. They'll wait at a crosswalk to cross with people. They'll look both ways before stepping into a street. They'll stay out of your way if you'll stay out of theirs. And in times of dire need, they will even take the bus, to the amusement and fear of all passengers.

It's survival of the fittest, not to mention smartest, working its magic. Our American house dogs wouldn't last five minutes here on their own and perhaps the stray dogs of Romania should feel proud of their ability to integrate into society and make it on their own. They do, however, cause many problems, especially in the forms of possibly-rabies-laden bites and car accidents, but the situation is by no means their fault. Stray dogs form yet another reminder of the communist past, when landowners were forced to give up their homes in the countryside and move into apartments in the city, where dogs were not allowed. The only option, other than to kill the family pets, was to release them into the wild, where they bred and bred and bred into the iron tough and quick witted dogs we see today.

There are very few programs here like the SPCA or the humane society, so there is simply no place for stray or abandoned animals to be sheltered, meaning they remain in the wild where they breed and breed and breed. A few programs have started up recently that take in stray dogs, neuter or spay them, put a chip in their ear, and then release them, which will eventually start having an effect if enough counties and people start supporting the procedure. Therein lies a large part of the problem. Getting several people who are still recovering from a traumatic past and who are still trying to find their feet in a global life to care about the status of animals in their country is, understandably, tough. And getting several people to believe that spaying and neutering animals is a way to prevent hundreds of unwanted animals from being born, not a form of cruelty that takes away an animal's machoness or femininity, takes time. Thoughts and ideas will have to change before the packs roaming the city outskirts start to shrink. The dogs can't be expected to do it all on their own.

I think of those two dogs in Reno once in a while and wonder how they are. I hope their owners are taking good care of them and they aren't jumping over any tall fences. I hope they pause from time to time and recognize their good luck, even though that's not a possibility for a dog to do. I'd still like to think that they're aware.

Din Nou

Again, or anew. The Drama Club met for the first time today since May and I was pleased with a turn out of 17 students, most of whom were eager to participate. As I made my way from work to the meeting, I questioned my nerves. Last year at this time while I prepared for my first encounter with the Drama Club, I could hardly sleep at night. The notes in my hands trembled as I delivered my cheesy little spiel and I wondered why on earth somebody so self conscious actually thought she could teach drama. Today was different. I felt nothing but excitement as I passed through the school's gates and crossed the cement yard. I made my way up the stairs and down the stairs and through the winding corridors that now feel rather homey with nothing but bursts of glee and the unnecessary paper-copy plan for the session. A symphony of hellos greeted me as I entered the room and we started year two of "Teach the Volunteer", also known as Drama Club.

Hearts and Other Polygons

I was just beginning to think that Romania, as beautiful as it is, doesn't really vary a whole lot visually and, in all honestly, was starting to get a bit boring. Not the people, not my time here, not the culture, just the landscape and the scenery. Even so, it was a very beautiful boring that I could stare at through the train window all day - like watching the clouds changing shapes and sizes. Clouds are all pretty similar, fairly fluffy and some shade of white, but watching them slide across the sky, spotting an occasional heart or dinosaur, is never a disappointing way to spend an hour or two. But after you've seen a couple of clouds, you've seen them. Just like after you've seen a few tree speckled rolling hills dotted with quaint, pastel painted cottages and their little wisps of chimney smoke curling into the sky, like a postcard you wish you could step into, you've seen them. And after you've seen a few centuries-old, boldly painted and Jesus adorned churches, you've seen them. I don't want to say "you've seen them all" because each location and each church is unique and who am I to lump them all together? They've just gotten redundant enough now that I know what to expect and as much as I love staring out the train window, little surprises me. Then, like finding an impossibly detailed replica of starry starry night in the clouds above, I take a trip to the Danube Delta. Instead of a train, my friends and I board a tiny seven person boat, and where the tree and cottage dotted hills once filled the view, our gaze is captured by the open waters lined with lush beaches, reed-roofed houses and subdued boat docks. The grazing cows are replaced by rare species of birds and the incessant roar of the train engine is completely absent, as is nearly all sound. How silent a group of people can be, especially as they carefully approach a floating sea of pelicans. Hundreds of them bobbing gently, quietly with the waves. All sound is gone, except for the quiet lap of water against the boat, the occasional stifled sound of awe and the light swish of wings taking to the air. Romania still has more than just hearts and other polygons to show me and I'm glad I still feel like looking.

Whew!

My name appears in a local news article. Craziness! My sister comes tomorrow. Awesomeness!

The Pancake Date

This is my 101st post on here. Cool.

Tonight marked the occurrence of my first pancake date. It wasn't really a "date" in the traditional sense because it was with my friend Anca, her husband and their daughter, but I like how the phrase "pancake date" almost rhymes, so I'm sticking with it. Despite having lived here for a year and a half, tonight was the first time ever that I invited people into my apartment and prepared food for them. This might seem surprising, but considering the fact that I can not recall a single time when I did such a thing for friends in the states, it's pretty status quo for me. I just don't invite people over, and I particularly don't cook for people, unless it's with them (I secretly love cooking with people). I don't know how to cook and have little desire to learn. But, I can do pancakes. I really like Anca and her family. They have invited me to their home countless times and shared their food with me, they've taken me on hikes in the mountains, on trips to Brasov (where Anca's mom feeds us copious amounts of goodies) and on strolls through the city, they've played ping pong with me, taught me how to paint eggs, helped me run part of the drama week and written an article for the local newspaper about me and the Peace Corps. All of this, and the most I've done to reciprocate has been to produce a bag or two of cookies at dinner time. It's tough, even for a non-entertainer introvert who relishes an empty apartment and a silent phone, to take in so much kindness without doing something more significant than cookies in return. Well, tonight was the night. My little mediocre pile of pancakes and sticky saucer of "mock syrup" hardly make up for what Anca, Doru and Dodo have done for me, but it's a start. A start that I was nervous about all day, but will remember for a long, long time.

On a side note, pancakes are called clatite here and are cooked super thin and rolled up with jam or chocolate in the middle, more like the French crepe than our puffy version. The family was very curious about the process that goes into making and eating American style pancakes, so it turned into a pleasant little cultural exchange, as well.

Trust in Strangers

Every time I see an unattended yet occupied baby stroller, I feel slightly disturbed and wonder how on earth a parent could trust all these random people milling about to leave their child alone while they idly browse the second hand racks. A stroller parked in the middle of a busy Monday morning sidewalk, with tiny hands and feet flailing about inside, and no parent anywhere in sight...it's something I've never witnessed before and something the movies use to create an atmosphere thick with suspense. I fight the urge to label this action as bad parenting because it has become apparent that the definition of good parenting depends on which country you were brought up in.
In elementary school, my mom and I followed the advice of the local news station, which faithfully and thoroughly and redundantly reported on every possibly-abducted child case, and made up a "code word" that I would request from strangers in the event that they tried to coax me into going with them. The word was, fittingly, "muffin". One afternoon, my mom couldn't pick me up from school and asked a friend to fill in. We had arranged this beforehand and she told me to use the "code word" and I, thrilled at the opportunity to use the "code word", waited anxiously at the designated corner until a white jeep pulled up in front of me. The passenger side's tinted window slowly rolled down to reveal a nice looking lady with sunglasses, curly hair and a baby seat in the back, but I was skeptical. "What's the code word?" I asked as sternly as my seven year old voice could handle. She pulled her sunglasses down to reveal her eyes and whispered "muffin", followed by a kind smile. Feeling a bit disappointed that she actually knew it and I didn't get to ask for the "code word" from anymore strangers, I opened the door and got in. I still didn't feel totally convinced, though. What if this stranger had somehow overheard the conversation with my mom? What if the person who was really supposed to pick me up was tied up and gagged in the back? What if this was the CIA? My rising panic didn't ease until I reached my front door and the nice lady with the sunglasses was driving off down the street, concluding the one and only occasion in which I put "muffin" to use.
As silly as this story seems to me now, it has a grim undertone and strategies and fears like this are becoming more and more dominant in American parenting, and those fears are by no means unfounded. When a parent feels the need to create a code word that may prevent their child from being kidnapped, some sort of societal innocence has been lost. And each time I pass by a baby sound asleep in a stroller without a parent nearby, I am at first startled out of habit, and then I am envious. Envious of a society that is still capable of one of the deepest forms of trust. Your government may be corrupt and your neighbor may steal your money and your spouse may be out on a date, but your children are safe.

Conscience Cleared

Remember the mountain bike that was going to take me to all the lovely nearby villages around Sfantu Gheorghe? Well, I haven't touched it since discovering the fatal faulty back brake and the sinister swing of the cute little handle bar basket, and that fact has been eating at my conscience. Having a potentially perfectly usable bike chained up and gathering dust during the summer months when so many other volunteers (not to mention locals) could use one just seemed flat out selfish, so I sent out an email a week ago looking for any takers. Surprisingly, only one person out of nearly twenty responded (slightly clearing my guilt, slightly) and yesterday she claimed her prize and my title of "evil bike hording monster" was renounced. I feel much better. Another thing I won't do in Romania: become a biking pro. Eh, whatev.

Oops.

It just hit me that I've been lying to people. Every person who has asked me how old I am in the past few months has been told utter nonsense, though unintentionally. And I realized my inaccuracies by looking at my profile on here, just now, and was shocked to discover that I'm 28. Not 27. I do indeed remember that I turned 28, I even wrote a stinking post about it, but somehow forgot that the day even occurred. Is this when things start going downhill?

What it is.

It isn't the work nor the hours spent in the office. It's not the teaching, the explaining, the advising nor the assisting. It's not the projects and it's certainly not the progress. It's not what you were thinking it would be.

It's the first roasted marshmallows and the shared peanut butter M&M's. It's the preciously rare smile from a stranger and the curious, jaw dropped stare of a toddler. It's the little girl who eagerly lets you practice your lousy Romanian with her and holds your hand while doing so. It's that one woman in the piatza who tosses in an extra tomato and a comforting wink for free. It's the homemade zacusca and the hand delivered blueberries and the watermelon break during tutoring and the gift of freshly baked nutty cozonac. Cheers of tsuica, sips of afinata, saluts of polinca. It's the drama kids saying hello to you on the street and the office ladies who always smile when they see you. And if you can train your eye to look at it the right way, it could be beautiful.

The Romanian BBQ

One thing that people nation-wide seem to enjoy here is a warm Saturday afternoon spent grilling and picnicking in the forest. It's called gritar, which I'm guessing translates to grill. Although many aspects of the average gritar remind me of the typical American BBQ, there are subtle differences that took me by surprise at first. Because I like lists, here's a list of differences.

1. One of the first things that struck me last year was the sheer number of people who do this on the warm weekends. As you drive along any forest-lined stretch of road, every few meters there's a car parked with a family out with their gritar smoking and their beer pouring. Everybody does this at the very least once a summer. At least around here.

2. What they're grilling. Pork is by far the most popular meat here and it's what's for dinner when you go to a gritar, instead of the typical hamburger/hotdog American fare. Mici is also common...little tasty sausages of cholesterol doom. Delicious sauces are often prepared on the spot to accompany the meat.

3. The equipment. Gritars seem to happen with a minimalistic approach - people tend to bring only the meat, the beverages, a few plates and a wire wrack for a grill with them, everything else they collect from the forest. The wood for the fire and the stones to build up the grill and make the circle are gathered. No fancy shmancy outdoor cookers here. I kinda like that.

4. Attire. When it's sunny and warm, people strip down to the bare minimum. Yes, speedos do exist in abundance. As well as thongs.

5. Duration. If it's a nice day out, chances are you'll be there all day, so just relax and enjoy it.

6. Alternative activities. Before or after the main activity of grilling, in addition to taking walks or just sitting around and chatting, people will fill the time by hunting down edible fruits, nuts, mushrooms and herbs from the forest. I love how much the average person here knows about the edible bits of wilderness. Makes me wish I knew more.

7. Clean up. Unfortunately, many people leave their trash behind. Some people are kind enough to pile it into the fire pit, but many just leave it scattered around. It's definitely an eye sore in an otherwise beautiful forest, but I sense that things are changing. The last two groups I went with did a thorough clean up and I enthusiastically helped out.

Last weekend I went to a gritar with my new landlord and her family and I had an excellent time sharing the joy of roasting marshmallows with them. You can't find marshmallows here, so it kinda blew me away that I had to show the adults how to pick out a good stick, sharpen the end, jab it through the marshmallow and get that just-right crispy brown exterior with the gooey white interior. Surprisingly rewarding. I did, however, leave the bar of Hershey's chocolate at home...to be devoured at a later date and time.

Down Times and the Thought Process

Just about every volunteer I have talked to has said that the second year is by far better and easier than the first. This makes sense to me. You are integrated into your community, you're more comfortable with the language, you've figured out how things like train and bus schedules work and you've most likely made some progress work-wise and have a clearer idea of what you'll be doing for the remainder of your service. You're on the downside of the big two-year mountain. That all makes perfect sense to me. So I am left wondering why, a quarter into my second year, my experience is turning out to be the exception. This second year has been nothing but disappointing in regards to integration and work so far. Yes, I've done a multitude of summer camps and traveling over the past three months, which I've thoroughly enjoyed, but that has little to do with what I feel like I should be doing. But it does makes sense to me as to why I'm so disappointed and frustrated with myself and my placement right now. I've moved. I love my new apartment, but I didn't really think about how a new location would require another mini-integration. The friendly fruit-and-veggie-stand guy is now out of my way to visit. The little old lady on the second floor is probably still wandering around the hall all day, but I wouldn't know because I no longer climb those stairs. The kind lady with the sweet little dog is not my neighbor anymore. I almost never see people in this new building and there are just so many...I rarely see the same face twice. Even if I did, I feel like I've lost that fresh PCV motivation to try and talk to everyone I bump in to. My new apartment is bigger and nicer and requires climbing seven flights of stairs to get to, so convincing myself to stay inside is that much easier. So I'm back at square one, minus the motivation. Bad combo. As for work, our frog study didn't happen because there wasn't enough gas money to pay for our visits to the nature reserve. So no population density study. We received the funding for the SPA grant I applied for, but because the agency is a governmental one, there are all these extra steps that need to be taken before we are able to use the money. Currently the project is waiting to be approved by the Prime Minister or something. It has been waiting there for three months now and has no sign of moving. For 1,500 dollars. The project should be wrapping up right now, but hasn't even started. So the two main projects I've tried to do with the agency have essentially failed. Plus, we recently got a new director and things just feel different there. Less stuff seems to be going on, especially with money being so tight due to the economy. So...motivation? Rock bottom. If I were to go home right now, I'd feel like I'd done my best and it's the first time I've thought seriously about how I'm spending my time here while I'm missing my family so much, especially after my mom's lovely visit. It was wonderful to wake up in the morning, knowing that she was just a few meters away. This is the first time I've really realized that going home IS an option.

No. Stop. Refocus. Things will get better. This has been a long, three month stretch of down, but when school starts back up and I have the drama club and American corners to reign in my satisfaction, things will feel better. I'm going to continue the English classes with the EPA in September and will consider that my main contribution to my assigned agency. I'm going to call up the local friends I've been neglecting and go out for tea or possibly a hike. And maybe I'll even say hello to the people in my new building. I'm going to focus more on my volunteer friends who are still here and not feel so sad about the ones who've left. Time to pull on the maturity cap and do my best to follow through with the trend and make the second year better.

Starting tomorrow.

What To Do.

Back to the wondering. I never really left it, I suppose, but I'm definitely at it in full force again. Back to questioning what my life will look like at this time next year. It's always a delightfully scary treat to think about the future and feel so many possibilities flood through the brain. Any suggestions for my future endeavors? Cause I currently don't got a clue.

Calling All Brain Studiers

I'm starting to get a little worried. I've talked to a few other people about something I've been experiencing here, and no one else has experienced it, which worries me, despite my enjoyment of feeling unique. I frequently doze off while traveling on trains, buses and maxi taxis - not enough to be considered asleep, but enough to do the head-jerk thing every few seconds. When this happens, every conversation I hear is in English, even the conversations of my Romanian or Hungarian compartment-mates. As I start to doze off, the foreign language conversation will morph into English, but an unintelligible English. An example: Person 1 "The cat's bread went for hair but did it go under something yesterday?" Person 2 "Well I don't swim and there people break into holes and turkeys. Do ladders make songs with sidewalks taking pictures." and so on. It's very confusing. So confusing, and a bit startling, that I'll snap out of it and try to figure out what they're talking about. But, the moment I start paying attention and open my eyes, poof! Back to Romanian or Hungarian. The conversation's too hard to follow, so I drift back into doze mode and the weird English returns. "Becky's car split but your mom's drinking the lamps. They said wait without holding a note and I can buy the whole blue for reason." Stuff like that. Nothing that makes sense. I think it might be similar to how I saw people I knew in the faces of strangers when I first arrived. English is so imprinted on my brain that it takes the first opportunity to turn everything into something somewhat computable. Maybe my brain misses English, though I do hear it fairly regularly. Maybe it can't handle learning a foreign language. I'm jealous of all those volunteers gushing about the dreams they're now having in Romanian or Hungarian, or those who are speaking it in their sleep. I can't even hear Romanian when I'm asleep. What's wrong with my brain?

Behind Door Number 1

I spent last week sleeping in a tent, barely showering in a wooden box with unheated water and contorting my body to find an un-lumpy patch of earth to curl up on. Despite the discomforts, I've never felt so ok with camping. As mentioned in previous posts, I often count down the days until such events are over, but this time around, I somehow managed to simply enjoy the newness and slight adventure of it. Maybe some things do change.

One of last week's tasks included making a map of all the traditional homes in the village Grosii Tiblesului (don't ask me how to pronounce it) and I, being of the map-making type and feeling a bit unenthusiastic about the remaining scrub-the-dust-off-the-house task, jumped at the opportunity. It took me and my two friends two days to walk down every street, determine the traditional-ness of every single house, take a picture of those deemed most traditional and briefly chat with whomever happened by. In all, we recorded 296 houses. Just as we finished up our final street and started heading back to the museum, a man approached and asked us to come with him to his house. There had been a tv newscast the night before about what our group was doing and he had heard about the project and wanted us to see something, but I couldn't understand what. Now, I try not to be a judgmental person, but when a man with red eyes, sour looking clothes and alcohol on his breath starts pulling on my arm rather forcefully and telling me that I have to go with him, I get unhappy. We all said that we were tired and we needed to get back to the museum because our friends were waiting for us and we couldn't go with him, but he wouldn't have it and his grip on my arm tightened as his persistence increased. Reluctantly, we let ourselves be led away from the trail towards home and into a strange man's yard. He led us past the house and to a small, padlocked shed in the back. With slightly shaky hands, he undid the lock and opened the door and, as he fumbled for the light switch, gestured for us to step inside. Still feeling uneasy, but knowing that, with the help of my two companions, I could easily kick this guys butt, we stepped inside the little, plain shed. If you have read the Harry Potter series, you are familiar with the magical tents they use for camping, the ones that look simple and small on the outside, but are vastly ornate mansions on the inside. This felt a little reminiscent of those. Though the shed did not increase in size once inside, its beauty was the utter opposite of the plain, white outside walls. The man is a wood carver and stores his crafts in this shed. Intricately carved wooden chairs, tables, cabinets, frames, spoons, plates, coat racks, toys, etc covered every square inch of wall space and as much floor space as possible. In an instance, my unease sheepishly fizzled away and was replaced with awe. He's hoping to turn his little shed into a museum and bring tourists in to see his work, which I think is a great idea. He'll just have to work on his greeting and tourist hook a little. No arm-pulling allowed.

Two years seems like a long time

Over the past year, I've been bottling up my homesickness into a small chamber located a little above my stomach and a touch below my heart. It's a decent sized chamber that has been able to hold quite a lot of the tar-like homesick goo, but it has recently reached its limit and has begun to overflow. At first, the goo seeped from the bloated walls of the chamber slowly, releasing its toxins into my chest cavity at a manageable rate. At a rate that allowed me to press it down and to the side, into a place where I could digest it when the lights went out and no one could see the goo seep from my eyes. But it seems to be overflowing at a faster rate now, poisoning my stomach and piercing my heart and pressing against my throat. And it no longer always waits until dark to seep. I hope that either the chamber bucks up and increases its capacity or the goo cuts me some slack soon because I like it here and I want to make it here and I don't want to be a failure.

But I no longer feel like me.

All The Other Me's

I have internet now! Woo! Here's something I wrote during my un-internet week of doom:

Occasionally, I get glimpses of myself living different lives. Lives that were brought up by different parents, with different friends, different morals and ideals, and different experiences and cultures. I’ll see these lives in front of me, either in the form of an actual person who had the necessary experiences to equate one of the different lives, or in the form of a group that is missing one member – the other me. As I meandered along on my destination-free walk the other night, I found myself trailing behind a father in the act of teaching his son how to ride a bicycle. At first, they were going far slower than I would have liked and I had to purposefully keep my pace calm if I wanted to venture unnoticed with them for a while. The bike occasionally swerved straight towards a parked car or a pesky wall and, even though my heart did a little jump every time a crash was eminent, the dad was quick enough to prevent any major disasters. This was a good thing because I didn’t want my little 10-minute stalking spree to end in tears and scraped up knees. Each time the handlebars made a crazy pivot towards doom and the father methodically straightened things out just in time, I couldn’t help but smile from behind them and wish that I could somehow partake in, instead of just witness, this simple parent-child moment. The father started trotting ahead, making the son go faster to keep up. That’s when it happened. That’s when I glimpsed a different me there, running ahead on the other side of the bike, cheering for the kid as he caught up with us and then laughing with the father as he started pedaling ahead, picking up speed and confidence. My own pace quickened as I realized that the father, son and other me were now sprinting, racing eachother down the sidewalk, pedaling and striding with friendly competition, leaving the real me decidedly behind. I could no longer follow without looking loony for trying to keep up with two strangers. They reached a corner and turned right and a few beats later, I was crossing the intersection, accepting defeat and going straight. As casually as possible, I glanced down the street and saw that the boy was now several meters beyond the father, slowing as he reached another intersection and looking back over his shoulder to make sure his dad was still there, huffing and puffing and laughing. Two minutes later, as I tripped and stumbled and tried to avoid a rather wild and persistent three-year old on a tricycle, nearly failing at saving my shins, I noticed that the other me was nowhere in sight.

The Perks of the Cartoon Network

Twenty years ago, just after the fall of communism, one of the first stations to show up on the freshly freed television waves here was the Cartoon Network. I am continually amazed at how well many of the young people here speak English and am often reminded that I should thank Tom and Jerry for the English impact they had on the students here. Whenever we talk about their first exposures to English, the students I work with speak about Tom and Jerry with reminiscent little smiles, remembering their tot days in front of a colorful slew of mischief being emitted from the tube. At first, I thought it very bizarre that the first station brought in would be the Cartoon Network, but it was probably the safest, least informative and ideally influential station possible. I wonder if they foresaw the learning benefits of this for the children growing up during that time. One boy from my drama group told me that the first word he learned in English was door. He was four years old and was watching Tom and Jerry and one of the characters complained about the door slamming and Gabi put two and two together and from that point on regularly picked up new English words through cartoons. There's a special generation here of kids from about 13 to 20 years of age who acquired a set of vocabulary, albeit interesting, at a very early age and are now excelling at their English studies. Unfortunately, they recently started dubbing the cartoons instead of subtitling them and all the kids groan about the lack of original language in their cartoons. I must agree, subtitles are hands down better than dubbing. You actually get to learn something about a different language and perhaps if we all grew up with a foreign Cartoon Network teaching us new languages, the world would be a bit better off.

Alright, I'm stealing internet time from my favorite tea shop and I really don't want them to hate me. Hopefully I'll have internet next week. Later!

Fourteen Peaces

I've moved recently and currently do not have internet in my new apartment, but hopefully it will be up and running in a week or two. It's funny how dependent I am on the internet. I feel anxious without it, and yet am so much more productive. I read, clean, cook, walk, work in the free evenings instead of dwindling away the hours on this thing. It's actually kinda nice not have the draw of the net at my fingertips. Anyways, as a peace corps volunteer I suppose we occassionally think about peace and what it means to us and how we can bring it to other people. Last night, as I tried to think of something to do that didn't involve interspace, I decided to create a list of the things that bring me peace. Here it is in no particular order.

1. The texture and taste of chocolate chip cookie dough (this came up first because I had just made cookies...).

2. The idea that I could, at any moment, discover that I have a super-natural power. I hope it's the ability to fly or time travel.

3. Watching an intense down pour of rain or snow from my apartment with no where that I need to go.

4. Listening to the wind move through the tall trees and shake up their leaves.

5. The brief excursion elsewhere that my mind takes when I play one of my favorite songs without messing up.

6. Entering my apartment for the first time after I've thoroughly cleaned it.

7. The silence and contentment that follows a good concert.

8. Holding a sleeping animal in my arms or on my lap.

9. The exhaustion and slight ache that follows a good work out or a day of physical labor.

10. Hearing TJ excitedly shout "Bear! Bear!!" when he realizes I'm nearby, and the little-armed hug that follows (when possible).

11. Baking cookies for people and knowing that they like them.

12. Thinking about all the possibilities this blue-green pearl holds.

13. Feeling like I've earned my right to sleep at the end of the day.

14. Dreaming up all the wonderful worlds that await us when we die and looking forward to seeing all of my family, friends and pets there. We'll eat ice cream and stroll along the beach and laugh at the bizarreness of it all.

Roost

I feel like shaking things up a little. Hence the new layout. I just put on my flickr page some pictures from the past month and a half of random and planned trips around Romania, amongst other things...like veggies, origami and cheese. Oh, and roosters.

What's in a bike

There's a bicycle chained to the rail just outside my front door. It's nice. Of the mountain type, blue with a white basket on the front and light reflectors and a little bell. A kickstand, even. It's been out there for two months now, neglected and bound to the rail by a bright orange, snaky lock. It's mine. I got it in March from a former volunteer and since then, I have been giving it a sad smile every time I walk by, which is at least twice a day. I finally tried yesterday to take it out for a ride, envisioning the breeze in my hair (through the pc required helmet, of course), a smile on my face and my eyes, closed, turned up towards the sun, coasting along the smooth dirt road to one of those random little villages I've been wanting to check out. It was a lovely illusion. Before I could embark on this adventure, though, I needed to spruce up the bike a bit by scouring off the rust that had accumulated after a winter spent outdoors and fill up the tires some, for which I needed a tire pump. Not knowing the Romanian words for tire or pump, I headed to the store, confident in my ability to pantomime. I had been to this store before when I purchased the orange bike lock, which only took twenty seconds to gesticulate. The same lady as before sat there, chin in hand and leaning bored against the counter. Her expression turned a little fearful as I approached and she stood up straighter, removing the chin from hand. I got as far as I could with Romanian. Bună ziua, am nevoie de ceva sa pun aer în asta. Hello, I need something to put air in this, as I point to a handy bicycle's tire. I openly admit that I have a really hard time pronouncing air in Romanian and my statement was obviously unclear. With a confused expression, she rooted around behind the counter for a while and came back with a tiny black nubbie that caps the air thingy. Not a tire pump. Hmm. I shake my head and repeat, not sure how else to say what I need. More rooting and out comes an inner tube. I start to get nervous. This is tougher than I had imagined. I smile shyly and shake my head again and start looking around the store for a pump. She follows my every move, trying to figure out what I'm looking for, but clearly annoyed by my lack of communication skills. She makes an Ah-ha! sound and darts into the back room and triumphantly returns with something shiny and tiny and not remotely pump-like. I shake my head again and her face falls with disappointment. Another customer comes in and as she helps him, I work out in my head how to pantomime using a pump to fill a tire, even though I never imagined I'd have to stoop to such levels to express myself after being here for a year. As the customer leaves, with his simple 30-second purchase comfortably in his hand, the clerk turns her attention back to me. I smile and go for it, squatting, I act out screwing the pump onto the nozzle of a tire and I lean back and pretend to pump up the tire for a few seconds, a bit sheepishly. I stand up, hopeful as she still gazes at me in confusion. O pompă? She asks. Finally, I get to nod. O pompă. A pump. There are many words in Romanian that sound very similar to their English counterparts and I've successfully guessed at several translations, but it never crossed my mind to try a guess at pump. And it sounds nearly exactly the same. A minute later, I'm headed home with 13 lei less in my wallet and a tire pump in my hand.

Back home, I successfully pumped up the tires, lugged the bike down three flights of stairs, fitted the helmet to my head, rolled up my pant sleeves and walked the bike to the dirt path along the river. In the states, I always felt weird walking with my bike because I almost never saw anyone else doing that. People walk their bikes all the time here, maybe cause they're sick of riding it or something's wrong with it or they're just using it to tote a 100kg bag of potatoes around. Nobody stares at you strangely for walking your bike, which soothes my already high strung nerves. After a few minutes of walking, I found a decent stretch of dirt road that was sufficiently void of people, so I hopped on and started peddling after maybe 4 years of not riding a bike. At all. It felt pretty alright, but two things swiftly became apparent to me. 1) The back break doesn’t work and 2) the cute white basket swings wildly each time I make a tiny handle bar adjustment, making me feel like I'm going to biff at ANY second. I continue shakily on for about five minutes, but then decide my heart can not handle such stress. I hop off and walk the bike back home. As I walk, the breeze still blows through my hair, my face enjoys the sun and I feel a smile. I'll make it to one of those mysterious villages next time, after just a few more minor adjustments.

Ch ch ch ch ch changes

One of my least favorite peace corps moments occurred during staging, way back in far-off Philadelphia. We had to split into groups based on our creative interests and come up with some sort of artistic representation of a volunteer's experience. Writers, dancers, artists, story-tellers and musicians are the groups I can remember and, although writers tempted me, I could think only of my already missed piano keys and found myself suddenly standing with the musical group. I had alot of fun with the group up until the moment we were standing in front of all the other trainees and staff members, playing our little 30 second ditty based on Bowie's "Changes", as I tapped the rhythm with a pencil against a coffee cup and tried to sing. Up until that moment, I'd like to think that I had succeeded in fooling the others. Up until then, I had padded down my self consciousness with as much friendly conversation and outgoingness as possible, but I can still envision myself up there, from the point of view of the audience, and see the red tinge filter into my cheeks and the little wall of confidence break down as I stared fixedly at a stain on the floor. My desire to abolish shy Erin withered away and died within those thirty seconds, ironically while singing "Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes".

There were indeed things that I had hoped to change about myself while here, but am finding it so much harder to do than originally planned. I had half-way expected to be a different person the moment I set foot in Romania, like magic. And when that didn't happen, I thought maybe after swear-in. Maybe after settling in at site. Maybe after a year. But no. I'm still an introvert. I still love being alone. I still have to pump myself up and give myself pep-talks and lectures about how good interaction is just to go to coffee with a friend. And I do it, gladly, but it'll never be natural for me. I'll never be a natural PCV. Why is it so difficult to be the person one badly wants to be?

I do have to wonder, though, how my lack of outgoingness sits with others, especially my local friends. I often think about my own expectations for my time here and what I'm doing now as compared to what I thought I'd be doing, but what about the people who applied for a volunteer and went out of their way to bring a stranger into their lives? Did my landlord envision a second daughter who would come over every weekend to bake cookies and chat? Did my counterpart expect a capable colleague to sit by her side and share in the woes and gossip of working in the agency? Am I anywhere near what they had hoped for? I have no way of knowing, but based on my own experiences, which vary massively from my expectations, the answer is no. But also based on my experiences, that isn't such a bad thing.

Laughing Out Loud

My landlord is a pretty funny lady, or so I've gathered by the amount she and the people around her laugh due to something she said. I typically understand about 75% of her conversations (in Romanian), but much much less when she goes into her entertaining I-want-to-tell-you-a-story-whether-you-understand-it-or-not mode and talks fluidly and quickly, brilliant hand gestures and dramatic pauses included. I've gotten used to just enjoying her presence during these tales and trying to understand as much as I can, but the most awkward part always comes at the end. That's when she reaches the punch line and leans back to let out a big laugh and puts her hand on my forearm, as if to balance herself from laughing so hard, and I'm left kicking myself for not understanding, not being able to truthfully join her in those pleasant belly laughs and the amusement she takes in her stories. Of course, I chime in and make myself laugh out of respect, but to me there's something sad and wrong in laughing when I don't really mean it. No matter how hard I listen nor how many stories she tells, I just don't get it and it's something that nags at me. The difference in humor and how difficult it is to understand in a foreign language. Yesterday, as we walked away from work together, my landlord dove into a brief recount of some mischief she witnessed over the weekend. I can't recall exactly what went down, but I got it. I got it. Her story was at long last funny to me and I started laughing before the punch line because I could see what was coming. She laughed more brightly than usual, too, probably because she could tell that I finally understood something. We continued to chortle for a good block or two and had to dab at our eyes a little bit before we went our separate ways. The humor from the joke had evaporated, but the silly outbursts that accompany joy were swift to replace it. Laughing with someone feels so much better than laughing for someone.

erin does romania

Sorry about the past month of vast nothingness on here. In all honesty, I feel a bit sheepish now because my blog has been picked up by this thing: http://www.peacecorpsjournals.com/?showcountry,ro@blog. My blog is no secret, I just don't want it attached to some other website without my knowing it, but whatev. I'll get over it.

Greece was great (see pictures found at the flickr link to the right). MST was ok (I got horribly ill one night and spewed my brains out, but I also got to see some good buddies). Now I'm back at site and startled by the fact that tomorrow is our official one year swear-in anniversary. All during PST and for a long time afterward, I told myself not to go nuts traveling all over the place because I'd have two whole years to see everything, but it's becoming painfully clear that two years is not nearly enough to both be a good volunteer by peace corps' definition and see as much of Romania as humanly possible. It occurred to me on the train yesterday as we wound along the snakey tracks from Drobeta Turnu Severin to Bucharest, passing a particularly pretty valley being overlooked by a tree specked mountain, that I will never be able to see as much of Romania as I would like. I wanted to see that valley, with all its vineyards and cows and leaning houses and hobbling, hardworking inhabitants, from the top of the mountain, but I never will. I will never see the vast majority of this place. Even in a life time, it wouldn't happen. I had this goal back home to walk the full length of every street in Reno, but after pulling up a detailed street map on google earth, the goal withered away into a silly idea, one that couldn't compete with the ever pressing need to work and produce things and participate in society. A wanderer internally battling it out with a workaholic, but losing more and more every day. Bit by bit.

I like to think of travel in terms of scale and if you zoom out far enough, say to 1:1,000,000, you're looking at the entire world. In those terms, I've seen Romania. Erin has been to Romania and can check that puppy off the list. As well as England, Germany, France, Greece, Ireland, Canada, the US. But if you zoom in more, to see Romania in its entirety, that solid field of "check" turns into a few simple lines showing the trains I've taken to the few cities I've wandered around in. Zoom in even more, over the north western corner of Romania, and I've seen nothing. I don't know what their traditions are, I don't know what their dialect is, I don't know how their food tastes or what their mountains smell like. It's a Romania I haven't been to and, for the most part, will never experience. It makes me sad to think how little we really get to see and do in the 80 odd years we're allotted, give or take a few.

Wassup

Kill a minute or ten.

For a few summers of my teenage years, my dad, sister and I would go with some family friends to Lake Powell to camp, boat, relax, swim, eat, etc. Looking back on those trips, I recall the steep, sandy red canyon walls that made winding rivers just wide enough to let a boast pass through and create some astounding echoes, the way the sun bounced off the little waves of water and reflected itself back out onto my face, burning even the underside of my chin, the feeling of sandy grit in my hair, on my teeth, coating my skin and never fully washing out and the wobbly woozy feeling of jumping from the boat to the shore after a few hours at-lake. I like those memories a whole lot and I often wish I could revisit them, not just in thought, but actually travel through my mind and go there and feel the grit covering my skin and see the vibrant red canyon walls and shout, in unison, "Bless you!" to a far off stranger's sneeze that echoed over and over and over. But I also know, while I was there, I counted down the days until the trip was over. It was the first thing I did every morning, as the people around me started unzipping their sleeping bags and stumbling about and murmuring, with the hazy gray of early morning starting to turn yellow, I would count. We got here 4 days ago and we'll be here for 15 days all together. That means I only need to go through 11 more days of this. "This" being much more difficult in my mind than it actually was. I have never been able to figure out why I don't enjoy things as they are happening and only when it's over do I look back and think "that was really cool". As you can probably guess, it's something that I think about here and tell myself to be cautious of. Don't focus on the things that seem unpleasant because they're meaningless, focus on what's making this worth it. Years after Lake Powell, I can hardly recall the foul taste of warm lake-water koolaid, our only beverage (other than wine), or the never ending itch of mosquitoes and wind-burned skin or the seriously queasy effect of choppy water or the annoyance of a sand filled sleeping bag. They are memories that surface when I dig deep enough, but when I think 'Lake Powell', I think of those towering red walls and never ending echoes and sneaky sun rays.

Wassup. Whenever I want to say "what's up", I think to myself "wassup", which was a logo printed across a girl's shirt at Lake Powell. She wore the shirt every day and one afternoon, one of the guys pointed at the emblem and shouted "WAY SOUP!". We were eating soup for lunch and the saying stuck in my brain. It's funny how one little incident can give words a new meaning that no one else would understand.

What's up: the immediate future.
I'm on quasi-vacation now. Almost officially. We're doing the first step in the frog study tomorrow night (listening for the frog calls at our study ponds so we'll know which side of the pond to check for egg clumps) and because I'll still be here, I told them I could help out. But the frogs are only active at night right now, so we'll be stumbling around the reserve, which confuses the heck out of me during the day, in the dark. With headlamps and Wellingtons. With 45 ponds to check in a 4 kilometer radius, it's going to be a long night. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss the rest of the study because of the below activities. But I helped them set everything up and prepare, so I feel ok with taking off.

On Monday I'll leave for our mid-service conference in Sinaia, which means I'm half way done with life as a PCV. Although I was talking earlier about counting down the days, I've stopped counting the number of months I've been here. I think that's a good thing.

The conference ends on Thursday and on Friday I leave for Greece, returning the following Thursday. While there, we'll spend a day in Athens, 2 days on the island Naxos and 2 days on the island Santorini. Pictures will abound, I assure you. The day we get back, I have my mid-service physical and dental check up in Bucharest. Woo. Then it's back to work on the 20th.

What's up: the recent past.
Yesterday, Friday April 3rd, all applications for SPA (Small Project Assistance) grants were due. At 5pm. I turned ours in at 3pm. Phew. I haven't said too much about it because I honestly wasn't sure if we'd get it done. The way things work around here is to wait until the last minute and then take care of everything. Luckily, I had finished nearly all of the writing, it was just scrambling around to get price quotes, donations and support statements from the project's participants, which was up to my colleague. I sincerely am impressed at the amount he was able to do in one week, on top of his normal job. We'll hear back from the SPA committee on the 17th. It's the main thing I've been working on for the past month and last night I slept soundly, which hasn't happened in a very long time.

A couple of weeks ago, the English teacher who occasionally helps me with the drama club asked if the club could do something for a conference that was coming up. I said yeah, as long as the students showed up regularly enough to put something together and they seemed into it. So we set to work on a couple of fairy tales - Little Red Riding Hood for one group of four and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the other group. The way it worked was as one person told the story, the other three members acted out the words with pantomime. At some point, the narrator would go off into a strange tangent or start telling a different fairy tale, and one of the other three would kick them out, take their place and continue the story. It turned out really well and little did I know that the conference, which was on Wednesday, was for all English teachers in Covasna County. After the students performed, several teachers came up and asked me for more information about incorporating drama into their class room, which is totally awesome. I'm going to send them the manual I've been working out of. I'm really proud of and impressed by the students. It was their day off from school, as a teacher conference day, but they were still excited and happy to show up and perform in front of dozens of teachers. I lucked out by having great students to work with and unexpectedly having access to every English teacher in Covasna County.

Funny how things work out sometimes.

What's up: right now.
It's sunny and warm outside and I already took a jog and a walk today. I think I'll read for a while and bake some cookies. Not to mention snack on some Mini Eggs. Which I received in a package. From my awesome mom and sister.

Lucky, lucky.

Decisions

I have been thinking this entire time that I would be coming home for a visit around Easter to see friends and family and just take a break from this life. And stock up on Mini Eggs. I thought that way up until a few weeks ago, when the hour came to plan it and set the dates and buy the tickets. I realized that I felt no pressing need to go home and, actually, did not really want to. And when I say I did not want to, I mean that I did not want to say goodbye all over again. Once was tough enough. I'm doing ok here, I miss people but it's manageable and I'm used to it now, especially with these modern day contraptions of skype and web cams and blogs. If I come home, it might mess up this pattern of ok and make me realize just how badly I miss everyone and everything Nevada. Plus, it's stinking expensive and I would like to do a little bit of traveling around this region while I'm here. So, instead of coming home for a visit, I'm going to Greece. Greece! Wow. I balance out not experiencing the joy of seeing all my lovely friends and family and familiarity with seeing the cradle of modern civilization. A reasonable trade? We shall see.

In other news, I have quarantined myself to my site, Sfantu Gheorghe, for the past month and I actually have no plans of staying a night anywhere else until our mid-service training, which goes from April 6th-9th. The next day (the 10th) I will leave with my pals Susie and Megan for Greece. Greece! Wow. We shall return on the 16th. I decided to stay an entire month at site for a few reasons:

1. I wasn't getting enough rest on the weekends by traveling to see friends and not sleeping in my own bed and was turning into a creepy zombie lady who couldn't think or speak clearly (not that things have improved that much...)

2. By working all week, being busy in the evenings and spending the weekends in other cities, I wasn't making any good friendships. I don't think I'll ever feel as close to the locals as I do to some of the volunteers, but I should certainly give it a try. During this month of self-quarantine, my landlord invited me to an opera in Brasov, I've quasi-hosted a baby shower, a friend invited me to Saturday tea at her house, another friend is teaching me how to paint eggs and I was invited to attend a couple of church services. These were all just one day events and don't really add up to a whole lot, but if I hadn't been here on the weekends, they wouldn't have happened. On the other hand, I know I'm missing out on happy fun times with my volunteer friends, but I already feel like I have a good bond with them. It's time to focus on the local side of things.

3. Traveling is expensive.

4. Stuff has picked up a bit and I could easily work all weekend long on projects now (not that I do (at all)) and I feel like I need a bit more down time on the weekends, while I used to have more down time during the week. I really am a lazy person at heart.

I am both sad and relieved that I won't be home next month. Sad to not see everyone again and relieved to not have to go through the farewell process once more. I said this a long time ago, but it's still true. I miss you. Come visit.

A quiet person's escape

I miss my car for three reasons.

1. Ease of travel
2. The ability to listen to loud music without headphones or pestering the neighbors
3. 80 miles an hour on the freeway, putting every ounce of extra energy into the loudest, widest scream possible and not a single person knows

relief.

The Driver and The Witness

I heard a man get run over by a van on Tuesday, after the drama club. I would have seen it if I hadn't been turned towards one of the drama kids, asking her some stupid question about the weekend, as she watched the old man in the cross walk fall beneath the tires. A dull thud-thud. Like speed bumps. As simple sounding as a car going over speed bumps. One thing I have not been able to get used to is the reckless way the majority here drives. I no longer mind if you don't smile at me on the street or make room for me to easily pass on the sidewalk. I don't care if you push in front of me in line or give me chewing gum instead of correct change. But, for the love of anything, slow down. After it happened, the man immediately started trying to get up, looking embarrassed and in the way. Like it was his fault. He rolled from left to right, trying to figure out which side he could easily get up on. A small crowd had formed, including the driver of the van, and within a few minutes the man was standing and, very very slowly, moving towards the sidewalk. His leg was obviously broken. One of the kids I was with had already dialed the police (112 here, not 911) and soon enough, sirens and swirling lights were flooding the area. Things were going to be ok. Now, a few days after it happened, I like to think of the old man sitting in a warm bed with a fresh cast around his shin and a relieved family doting over him. Vanilla ice cream speckling his smiling chin and his favorite movie playing in the background. At the same time, somewhere in the city, at least two people are hearing a thud-thud in their dreams, disturbing their sleep and disrupting their thoughts.

Searching...

Admittedly, being placed in a city where two languages are commonly spoken has had it's frustrating moments. I know I've talked about it before, but it's one of those things that comes up daily - the question of which language to address someone in, the panic of not understanding a word of what a stranger on the street is obviously addressing to me, the fear of disappointing colleagues for focusing on one language over another, and the sorrow of being surrounded by good friends who are deep in a conversation that I can not partake in nor remotely understand due to my Hungarian inadequacies. As time goes by, however, I'm discovering that the divide running through my city reaches much deeper than just language. It involves culture, history, religion, food, everything. Of course, growing up so close to each other, there are definite similarities between the ethnic Hungarians and the Romanians, but in so many ways the two groups lead separate lives filled with different truths and who is to know which truths are more accurate. While eating dinner with a Hungarian family, I am told stories about how this land was originally theirs, how Romanians were brought into the region during communism to dilute the Hungarian potency and their collective power. How the teachers they hired were forced to teach lies disguised as history, further decreasing the Hungarian legacy. The next day I have Romanian tutoring and am told about how the Hungarians who ended up here were merely passing through, hundreds of years ago, and a few groups decided to stay, claiming stake to a land they had no right to and no connection with, prying it from hardworking Romanian hands. I'm sure I could look up what is considered the real history in some book out there, but I've always been under the impression that the best way to learn history is to hear it from the people whose ancestors actually lived through it. Even if I read it in a book, it would be the author's version of history and no matter how unbiased a person tries to be when looking at a situation, there is no way to erase themselves completely from their research. Who knows how many different histories exist for this region, let alone Europe, let alone the world. When you really think about it, it's difficult to believe anything, and easier to believe everything. It all happened, according to someone, and when you're an outsider talking to that someone, just listen to them and agree. Take in all the different histories possible and maybe one day you'll be able to put some pieces together and make something of it.

Silly Memories

If I had to select the day that was the most terrifying of all my days in the peace corps so far, it would be this day one year ago. In fact, I'll tell you the exact moment. I am standing on a curb with my new gazda mother, waiting for our taxi to arrive. A few straggling trainees are shoving their over-sized bags into the trunks of family cars, cramming themselves into tiny spots in the back seats, and one by one are being swept away to new destinations while I watch their faces disappear out of the back windows. My brand new safety net of friends is dissolving and disintegrating all around me and I'm still standing on the corner with a complete stranger, no taxi in sight. Minutes pass and the visible level of exasperation on my gazda's face increases, though her words make absolutely no sense. Just keep smiling and shrugging. Smiling and shrugging. Finally, the last car load of familiarity goes by. The staff car. The people who are supposed to wait around until everyone is taken care of has given up and is driving back to Bucharest. The guy in the passenger seat waves at me as they go by, with a look of "It'll be ok, just keep smiling" on his face. I feel my eye lids swell with tears as their tail lights disappear and the car is put into motion, heading away from where I am standing, diluting the comforting wave and the friendly look. I am standing alone with a stranger on a busy corner, every possession I brought from the states is somehow attached to me, like ridiculous, poorly planned and painful appendages, barely keeping balance and now choking back unwanted tears while the gravity of what I have done begins to sink in. I am terrified.

A few hours later, after the taxi finally arrived and my gazda mom picked up my heaviest bag on her own and hoisted it into the trunk, after I took off my shoes and put on my first pair of papuci, after we reeled all my luggage into my room and I unpacked and she gave me a tour of the house, after she took out pictures of her granddaughter and pulled down her English dictionaries and showed me the mementos of her dead husband, after her face lit up with delight as I gave her a hand made sock puppy from Reno and a deck of playing cards from Tahoe, after all that, we sat down at the kitchen table to share a plate of cakes and some coffee and the terror of two hours ago was nothing but a silly memory.

Zooooom

A very common topic for discussion amongst volunteers in Romania is "why are we here?" I'm sure I've already touched on this before, but with our washers, our internet connections, our TVs, our European Union funds, our fast food, our electronic billboards, our flushing toilets and our lofty offices with ArcGIS, it's tough to say "I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer", and really feel it. Feel like you belong to that community which, two years ago, sounded so hard core and selfless and true. But you take what you get and you make something out of it. So what if my projects don't involve building latrines in my neighborhood? Or educating mothers about AIDs? Or establishing the first library in my village? If I was in a place that needed it, I'd like to think that I'd be working on it. But it's difficult to say to the volunteers who did those things, "I teach English to adults at the Environmental Protection Agency and hold a drama club with teenagers", and feel like you've been involved in the same Peace Corps or have had any sort of comparable impact. Every assignment is different, no doubt about that. And every volunteer would handle each assignment differently. That's the beauty and the pain in Peace Corps. It's an experience that leaves me constantly questioning everything about it. What if I had gone to Africa instead? Would I be feeling more fulfilled or would I have already ET'd? What if I was placed in that tiny village up north? Would I be speaking fluently and eating dinner with a little old bunica each night and really feeling it? Feeling like a PCV? Who the hell knows. These are questions I am sick of asking myself and the answers are impossible to know and pointless to fathom. Romania and peace corps still see a need for us to be here, so I'm here to help and that's all there is to it, babies saved and libraries built or not.

Well, mini rant over. I just wanted to post a link to this story cause I thought it was interesting: http://www.thirdgoal.com/ottojones/2005/12/12/posh-corps/

Been a year since I saw Reno. I was in a plane preparing to land in Philadelphia at this exact moment. One year ago.

Word of the day

If I could select a word to describe my emotions lately, it would be volatile. Easily changed. Unsteady and unpredictable. One moment I feel just fine with what I am doing here, what I have done, and what I hope to do, and five minutes later, I want to smack myself for thinking I've actually done anything of use or have any good ideas. My balance between alone time and time with my Romanian friends felt perfect yesterday, while today it's clear that I'm nothing but an anti-social non-integrator. I feel satisfied with my decision to focus on Romanian instead of Hungarian, then I feel like a stubborn dimwit for not trying to learn both. This morning I woke up thinking about how quickly the past year has gone and now as I get ready for bed I question whether this month will ever end. A story I told yesterday sounded witty while today it sounds along the lines of spoken cow manure. I was looking at some pictures of me sledding with friends recently and started to laugh, but my eyes filled up with tears and suddenly I wasn't sure if I was laughing or crying. I couldn't tell and went through a strange, confused moment where I felt both very happy and very sad, which has never happened before over such a simple thing like a picture. I could not decide which of two fairly opposite and strong emotions I was feeling. Why would a picture of me sledding make me cry? Maybe because I look so happy in those pictures and wish I could hold onto that happiness for more than just a few minutes before I'm yet again mentally socking myself in the eye.

LOD

Today I learned that the kids in school think that everyone goes on vacation when they do. This became apparent after every kid in the drama club individually asked me how my vacation went. It was nice that they inquired, but it also made me realize how little they know about what I'm doing here. When I told them it wasn't much of a vacation for me because I had to work all week, they said "Really?" and gave me a bit of a blank stare. As much as I love the drama club, it has unfortunately become a small part of my life and I get the feeling that they think I spend all of my time preparing for the once a week, 1.5 hour session. So when they had their end-of-semester vacation last week, I had my 1.5 hour vacation (plus, it was nice to not have to prepare). I spent my vacation at a former EPA employee's house in a nearby village playing with year old twins.

Twin 1 (Zsofi or Janka):


Twin 2 (Janka or Zsofi):


So I did have a nice vacation pushing tots in swings and watching them eat apple sauce at the same time. It was interesting. The mother had a very good system down for feeding them and keeping one entertained while the other one took a messy bite. Gemeni means twins in Romanian, like the zodiac sign. I can't believe all these twins that are popping up. My good friend back home had twins, I'm playing with twins here, and a lady at the agency is going to the US in May to visit her daughter who is pregnant with, yep, twins. What's going on? Is it the weather? Does climate change also mean fertility change?

Anyways, lessons of the day: when you're a kid in school, it's hard to imagine life as anything else. Twins are a zodiac sign, cute and caused by climate change.

Good night.

Another Language

I recently discovered that not only the people in Romania speak a different language, but the animals do, too. My tutor gave me a lesson last week on the language of the animals here and I found out that the dog does not go "woof, woof", he goes "ham, ham". Birds do not tweet, they "cipcirip" (cheepchereep). When a pig wants to say something, he does not go oink! He goes guitz! Instead of quacking, ducks go macmac-ing and a horse never says "neigh", she says "nihaha". There's this CD that my tutor has been playing over the past 6 months in the background for her son while she's tutoring me and after this lesson, I realized that the CD is loaded with people making animal sounds, which kinda made my day. I think each animal has its own song. I'm going to ask her if I can have a copy of the CD so I can work on my animal communication skills. We shall see.

Here's my list thus far:
dog (câine) = ham ham
cat (pisică) = meow
bird (pasăre) = cipcirip
horse (cal) = nihaha
cow (vacă) = muu
pig (porc) = guitz
sheep (oaie) = meeehehe (mayheyhey)
goose (gâscă) = gagaga
duck (raţă) = macmac
frog (broasca) = oac oac
bear (urs) = mormor
mouse (şoarece) = chitz chitz
snake (şarpe) = ssssss
goat (capră) = beeehehe (bayheyhey)
chicken (pui) = piu piu piu
rooster (cocoş) = cucurigu
hen (găină) = cotcodac
donkey (măgar) = iah iah iah
owl (bufnita) = buhuhu (boohoohoo)

Got any to add?

I have this new loose goal of posting something I learn each day here (loose, loose goal...maybe every other day...to once a week).

Drama!

Ok, I've created a blog for the drama club. I have no idea how it will go, but I'm hoping it will prove useful. Find it here: http://sgtheaterclub.blogspot.com/.

Tomorrow and Friday I'll be at a waste management conference in Covasna city, which I'm looking forward to, but also wish I could use that time to write lesson plans for the environmental education committee and research ways to establish animal shelters and write the spa grant for Reci and prepare lesson plans for english class and put together a presentation for the American corners and visit my older lady friend at the craft shop and test out the pond-route for our moor frog study and give that new cookie recipe a whirl and plan for the next drama club. And update this a bit more intelligently and give my flickr some love and clean the apartment for my wonderful friends who will be staying here this weekend. But I can't! Gotta go sleep so I can get up at 6 tomorrow! The month of February is officially the month of panicky stress accompanied by frequent headaches and tired eyes.



Aaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

Almost a year. Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I am having a good time, though, just in case you were wondering.

Twenty eight

I was born twenty eight years ago, on the day that both Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th president of the United States and the American diplomats being held hostage in Iran were released to US custody. It's something I know simply because I was born on that day. My mom has told me the story a few times, of how she spent the day watching Reagan's inauguration and the developing story of the hostage situation in Iran, until a certain someone decided it was time and demanded some attention. After my delivery, she passed out and woke up thinking she was a hostage in Iran, luckily not for long. It's an interesting way to start life. I've never really thought about me being born, but I feel this year that things have somehow come full circle. I like that every four or eight years, my birthday coincides with the optimism of a new president's official swear-in ceremony and the inevitably uplifting words. A fresh start and the hope that accompanies the unknown. I listened to Reagan's address yesterday, just out of curiosity, and I know he wasn't always the most awesome president, depending on which camp you fall in, but listening to that speech, or any president's inaugural speech, brings a little swell of proud hope into your heart. I felt it yesterday as I listened to his words and I felt it even more so today as I listened to Obama's. Both then and now, the US was faced with a dark recession and no matter how deep the hole, an eloquently delivered speech temporarily soothes the starkest of fears, especially for those of us who are just trying to live our lives. Perhaps it's silly to think that I was born into a day of hope as Reagan spoke of prosperity and, a short while later, the fifty two hostages who had been held for over a year stepped out into the sun as free people. Maybe they squinted at the brightness of the sun as they emerged for the first time, just as I squinted at the glare of the hospital lamps in my first blinking moments of life. Maybe they struggled to breath in deeply because the air felt so clean and new after months of staleness, just as I stretched out my lungs to deliver my first wail of surprise. Maybe they felt a renewed interest in and love for life, just as I was becoming aware of it. With the hopeful words of a new president playing quietly in the background, we both gained life that day, they having it handed back to them and I having it start anew. I'd like to think that twenty eight years from right now, somewhere out there a birthday girl or boy will take an interest in the day of their birth and discover that there is quite a bit to reflect on and that the world really is a hopeful place.

Call for plays

I must say, I'm a little disappointed. I've been searching for about three hours now for something to do with the drama club in honor of Women's Day (March 8th), but whenever I type into the search engine any combination of the following words: one-act play women history promote strong, the only plays that come up are about eating disorders or abusive relationships. Yes, eating disorders and bad relationships are troubling topics worthy of discussion and dramatic performance, but I think the history and pride of women is a bit richer and hopefully brighter than anorexia or abusive men. I don't want to sound insensitive, but I'm hoping to put on something uplifting about the changes women can make in the world instead of focusing on how the world can beat us down. And I'm having a very difficult time finding a (royalty free) one-act play to do that with. So...I guess I'm asking for your advice, if you know of any plays out there that would fit the ticket. I know it's a long shot, but leave me a comment with your suggestion and if it works out, I'll dedicate the play to you. Thanks.

Look alike

For the first six or so months here, I would occasionally see a person who I would have to look at twice, do a double-take, because they looked like someone back home. It happened alot at first; those moments of "she looks just like...could it be?" followed by "no, no...they're thousands of miles away. Stop being so silly." It's strange how the mind does that. How when you're overwhelmed with newness, your mind searches so desperately for something known that it will take a person you undoubtedly have never seen before in your life and transform them into your mother or your best friend, your old college professor or even the barista from your favorite coffee shop, and for a fleeting second your heart leaps into your throat and you want to run to them and fling yourself into a big hug and jump up and down with them in excitement. But the fleeting second passes and logic takes over and you realize how silly your mind's form of wishful thinking is. These moments almost never happen anymore. I kind of miss them and the little dose of mystery, excitement, and heartache that they would bring. Of course I'm not going to randomly bump into my sister over here, but there's something a little bit mystical in your mind's temporarily successful search for familiar faces in a world that's knowingly unfamiliar. It makes me wonder, too, just how different from eachother are the grubby man who resembles my dad and my dad. Are their personalities at all similar? I saw him three days ago and his face looked so uncannily like my dad's that I'm pretty sure had my dad grown up here, with less nutrients, more air pollution, and the hardship that went with living under communism, he would have been identical twins with the man. Slightly hunched back, five foot six bony frame, gently bowed legs, a cane in hand, missing and badly stained teeth. It's a little scary to think about how much of our appearance and health depends on when and where we grew up. Had my dad's look alike been born in the US, maybe he'd be standing on solid legs, baking bread on Sundays and making guitars in his free time, too, instead of leaning on a cane, sweeping the streets and emptying the trash cans to earn a living. Who knows.

2008 (from my good friend ace)

1. Where did you begin 2008?
On the road between Miami Beach and Reno with my mom and Ozzie. I believe we were staying the night at a hotel in Mobile, Alabama on New Year's eve.

2. What was your status by Valentine's Day?
Invited.

3. Were you in school (anytime this year)?
Informally, you bet.

4. Did you have to go to the hospital?
Yes, I accompanied a friend with diabetes to a Romanian hospital. It's a night I will never forget.

5. Did you have any encounters with the police?
About four months ago, I was putting posters up around town to get the word out about an electronic recycling campaign a friend was organizing. All the posters I had were in Hungarian, but all the police here are Romanian, so when a police man saw me putting up a Hungarian sign, he asked me why I didn't have any posters in Romanian, that way everyone could understand. I tried to explain to him that I was just helping and didn't know why and he immediately recognized me as the foreigner I am and gruffly shook my hand and told me good job, but next time to request Romanian posters, too. I said ok.

6. Where did you go on vacation?
Sighisoara, the Apuseni Mnts, Campalung Moldovanesc, Targu Mures, Okland, Turda, Onesti, Miercurea Ciuc, Brasov.

7. What did you purchase that was over $500?
I sold my car.

8. Did you know anybody who got married?
Uh...not that I know of.

9. Did you know anybody who passed away?
Yes.

10. Did you move anywhere?
Yeah. Romania.

11. What sporting events did you attend?
A soccer game in Ploiesti and a hockey game in Miercurea Ciuc. The first had free obnoxiously yellow hats and the second had awesome tasty hot tea.

12. What concerts/shows did you go to?
A few just before I left. My favorite was probably a Holland Project show featuring the Juvinals and Panic Opera. There was also an orchestra concert in Ploiesti during training with a fantastic rendition of the 1812 overture. A couple other little classical concerts here and there. I miss shows alot.

13. Where do you live now?
Sfantu Gheorghe

14. What's the one thing you thought you would never do but did in 2008?
Organize a drama club

15. What has/have been your favorite moment(s)?
Please refer to the past 10 months of entries.

16. What's something you learned about yourself?
I have an embarrassingly horrible memory, but people still seem to like me.

17. Any new additions to your family?
No, but a close friend back home just had twins and I can't wait to meet them!

18. What was your best month?
I guess December. The drama club put on its first production and that felt pretty awesome.

19. What music will you remember 2008 by?
Antelope and Tom Waits.

20. Made new friends?
More than ever before.

21. Favorite Night[s] out?
Each night at In Service Training was pretty fun.

22. Any regrets?
I regret not being naturally talented at learning languages.

23. What do you want to change in 2009?
Enjoy more, stress less

24. Overall, how would you rate this year on a scale of 1-10?
6.5

25. What would you change about 2008?
Losing touch with lots of people back home...but I guess that's inevitable.

26. Other than home, where did you spend most of your time?
On a train, bus, or maxi taxi.

27. Have any life changes in 2008?
Whatever changes happen when you move to a foreign country.

28. Change your hairstyle?
Actually, it's back to where it was last year at this time, though it went fairly long and very short in between.

29. Get a new job?
PCV!

30. Do you have a New Year's resolution?
Usually I don't do resolutions, but this year I'm going with reading more, eating healthier, exercising more, traveling more, and stressing less.

31. Did anything embarrassing?
Yes. Lots.

32. Buy anything new from eBay?
I helped a colleague decipher his purchase of golf balls. That was my first and last interaction with the site.

33. What was/were your favorite purchase[s]?
My felt bags, woven scarf, and honey pot from my favorite craft shop. And all the little trinkets I got to send back home.

34. Get married or divorced?
Or neither.

35. Get arrested?
No. But, I did go through the security at Frankfurt airport twice in one day, which felt pretty much the same.

36. Be honest - did you watch American Idol?
No. I did watch one episode of Romanian Idol, though.

37. Did you get sick this year?
More than ever before, except the time that I had the chicken pox. I didn't barf this year though, which is nice. I've just had lots of little tummy troubles. Nothing too severe.

38. Start a new hobby?
Romanian and maybe cooking. Still obsessed with easy crossword puzzles. Please send me some.

39. Been snowboarding?
No.

40. Are you happy to see 2008 go?
Happy and surprised it's already over. How quick a year can go.

41. Drank Starbucks in 2008?
I had one Starbucks in Philadelphia. It was the first day of staging and we had some time before the session started, so we all thought we'd go to the Liberty Bell and along the way, we stopped by Starbucks. I really needed coffee and just let go of my pride and convictions for five seconds in order to wake up and not make everyone wait while I hunted down a local place. So shoot me.

What are you wishing for in 2009?
Peace. In Reno. In Romania. On Earth.