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.