To Infinity

The Drama Club put on its last play of the year tonight. It was a spin on fairy tales and involved Prince Charming and Snow White a year after their wedding. Special appearances were made by Chuck Norris, Bob Marley, the Wicked Witch of the West, Hansel (of Hansel and Gretel), Little Red Riding Hood, and even Death himself showed up. The students wrote the entire script and designed the set (we actually had a set this time) and came up with their costumes and did everything on their own. Yet, for some reason, they don't think they can continue on next year without me. Although I'm touched, it's nonsense. I wish they could see how talented they are. We'll meet up one more time next week for a little goodbye party, then my time with the Saint George Drama Club will come to a close, most likely tearfully. All I can do is hope that the club will still be running when I come back for a visit, 5 years down the line. That would be so cool.

Today also marked my goodbye party at the EPA. Despite not going in much at all over the past few months, nearly the entire agency stopped by to bid me farewell and munch on a cookie or two. It made me realize how much I did, at certain times, enjoy working there and how nice some of the people are. For a while, I had it in mind to leave without really saying goodbye, but I'm so glad I didn't do that. Several of them have been a part of my life for the past two years.

I feel surprisingly numb. I had my first going away party on Monday with the 5 people I've worked the most with at the EPA. When they brought out the surprise cake and gifts, I started to cry. It didn't last long and wasn't too over-dramatic, but the cake and gifts and kindness were unexpected and really hit home. I'm leaving. I'm going to miss these people and it seems that they're going to miss me, too. Since then, I think something inside has shut down a little bit and isn't registering all of these goodbyes and isn't letting me cry. It'll wake up at some point. Maybe in Bucharest. Maybe on the plane. Maybe at home. It'll wake up and want to speak in Romanian and wonder why I've left and crave the comforting te pups, but none will be found. Hopefully I'll be around my family and friends by then and their presence will undoubtedly lessen the shock.

If Iceland's volcano or any other sort of natural disaster doesn't get in the way, I have one week left in Sfantu Gheorghe and 9 days left in Romania. I'm so sad to leave, I can't wait to get home, I'm so sad to leave, I can't wait to get home, repeat to infinity.

Little Lambs Eat Ivy

A little warning: this entry might be a bit much for animal lovers...

Last Friday, Mihaela, Hana, Auntie, little Luca and I drove to a nearby village to pick up the most important part of our Easter feast. By the time we arrived, the lamb had already been killed and hung eerily from a rafter in the barn. It hung upside down with a red streak across its woolly neck and a bucket on the floor underneath, catching all the drippings. The lower half of the legs had been removed.

As I squinted from a safe distance, I caught sight of three little lamb bodies already skinned and cleaned hanging in the back. Our small friend had a ways to go before it was ready to be packaged up in the trunk of Mihaela's Dacia. I watched as a lone lamb emerged from a separate barn, took in the four bundles - one fluffy and creme colored and much too similar to itself, the others smooth and sinewy white and somewhat sinister - and, with two sad bleats, retreated back inside the barn.

Before my stomach could turn too much, we were ushered into a small kitchen and served coffee and fried patties of some sort by Mihaela's aunt, who took great strides in ensuring that I and the rest of the guests had plenty to eat and drink. Small talk and banter ensued and my mind quickly stopped following the conversation and wandered out to the barn and its four little tenants. I followed Luca's initiative and darted outside at the first opportunity. He, being almost two years old, was more curious about the outdoors world than the indoors one.

We wandered over to our prized lamb, who was now being attended to by an overall-ed man with a sharp knife and a surprisingly kind smile. The progress that had occurred in the past 10 minutes was significant. It now looked as though the lamb was wearing a wool skirt that, flipped upside down as it was, dangled at its chest. The white stockinged legs and lower body lay exposed. The man obviously knew what he was doing. With gentle punches and flicks of the knife between the skin and the muscle, he separated the two and progressed in quick circles, around and around the lamb's body, until the skirt became a cape that hung from the lamb's shoulders and nearly touched the floor.

Luca was just as transfixed by this process as me. We stood there, side by side, watching a dead animal lose its fur and become meat. Right before our eyes. I wondered how I would be different if I had witnessed such a thing for the first time when I was two instead of twenty nine, and continued witnessing such things throughout my life. Would I still feel a weakness towards every baby animal on the planet? Would I still shudder every time I saw a badly limping stray dog wander into the street? Would I still feel a distinct difference between the lamb meat on my plate and the lamb bleating in the barn? As the man prepared to remove the skin from the lamb's face, I turned to leave, knowing my limit for the day had been reached. Luca, however, did not follow me.

The next day, I helped Mihaela prepare some traditional lamb recipes. Luckily, the lamb had been chopped up into manageable pieces by the time I arrived and I spent the day dicing the lamb's heart, liver, kidneys and lungs, all while its tongue poked out at me from a bowl on the other side of the table. We also prepped some of the meat to go into a ciorba (traditional soup) and to be roasted with potatoes. The following day, Easter Sunday, my friend and I arrived and we all sat down to a table of lamb dishes and ate to our heart's content. This proved to be the closest I have come to seeing a meal through from start to end.

Last Easter, the piatza sold lambs by the half. I had always assumed that I would pass out at the sight of the innards of any once living being, but as I strolled through the market that day, perusing the aisles of half-bodied lambs, I found myself more fascinated than grossed out, like I was revisiting the interesting and unseen side of Biology 101. The piatza buzzed with shoppers probing and prodding different parts of the lambs' entrails, discussing signs of health and quality.

Where in the US could you go to buy a lamb by the half or see one being skinned and prepped for cooking? Not that it's something I want to witness regularly, but it's a part of the food process that seems to be locked away and inaccessible where I grew up, which leads to a person believing they will pass out at the sight of animal intestines. Or leads to a person not understanding the connection between the piece of meat on their fork and the lamb frolicking in the field.

I'm sure there is a sizable population in America of people who witness these things daily, on farms, in butcheries, etc., but I have the feeling the average American is much like myself and has a huge gap of vast nothingness between the image of an animal and the image of its meat, where here, people start understanding the process when they're two and probably have a more accurate idea of what it means to be a carnivore.

Since being here, I've become vegetarian when I cook at home, but almost never refuse meat when it's offered to me at someone's home, especially around the holidays. I feel better about eating that meat, knowing that it most likely came from a nearby village and was carefully tended to by a person with a kind smile and a few healthy and happy (for the time being) animals in the barn out back.

April's Fool

No, I do not know the child in the picture above, but he would squat down and make that face every time I pointed the camera at him. I bet he never knew it would get him featured on my blog. Heh.

Anisoara

Today I said what I think may have been my first goodbye to a local friend. Anisoara is leaving on Saturday to visit her daughter in Virginia and won't be back until mid May, a couple of weeks after I'll have left. Her daughter moved to the states a few years ago to be with her American husband and last year at about this time, their twins were born. A little boy and a little girl, the boy with dark green eyes and the girl with bright blue. I know because Anisoara has shown me countless pictures of them. She has also shown me countless pictures of her daughter, her husband, her house in the countryside, her dog, her life.

The first time I got a peek into this quirky lady's life was two years ago, when I stayed at her apartment during my site visit. When I think back to that weekend, which was my first introduction to the city of Sfantu Gheorghe, to my assigned agency (the EPA) and to the people I'd be working with for the next two years, one word comes to mind: awkward. The whole weekend was full of awkward, especially with Anisoara. But not a bad awkward, a very comical and enjoyable awkward.

In the mornings, she'd poke her head into my room and say "Ereen, please come to chicken." I'd get up and go into the kitchen (aka chicken), where she had already set out a typical Romanian light breakfast of cucumbers, tomatoes, eggs and bread. As we munched and tried to think of things to say (my Romanian and her English were at about the same level: beginner), she would start dancing to the music playing in the background as she ate. Just a little bit, a little sway and dip of the shoulders, a little bob of the head and a little wobble on the stool. Then she'd start to hum along with the tune and clearly there was no other option than to join in. So there we'd sit, eating the breakfast she'd prepared, awkwardly dancing and humming in our seats. And smiling.

On the last night of my site visit, I was in my room pretending to study when she knocked on the door, walked in, sat down next to me and opened up a photo album on her lap. During that entire weekend, I had hardly learned anything about her, but through those pictures I learned volumes. It was easy. She'd point to a picture of a young, beautiful smiling lady in a park and say "my daughter, Virginia" and I'd nod. Then a picture of a handsome man "daughter husband" and I'd nod. Next came an old picture of a man in the snow "My husband, dead" and I frowned. She never explained how he died. The next picture was newer and showed a man working on a ship. She said "new husband" and I nodded. It went on like this for over an hour and I learned the basic story of my new friend's life.

There is total truth in the phrase "a picture's worth a thousand words", especially when those thousand words are in a foreign language. Just this week, Anisoara showed up at work with a new stack of photos to show her friends and I looked over every single one of them. She brings in new photos every month or so and I never tire of looking at them, for some reason. Especially the ones of her daughter. I think it's because we're leading opposite lives, in a way. She being the Romanian in America and me being the American in Romania.

Anisoara has always been the top attendee at my English hour, almost never missing a class, and I hope those lessons help her out over the next two months as she gets a sample of what I consider home. Today we kissed eachother's cheeks and hugged and I tried not to think too deeply as I said "mai vorbim, mai vorbim" (we'll talk more, we'll talk more) as we parted. Anisoara's one of the few people I've met here who almost always has a smile on her face and a hearty laugh ready to go. I'll miss her.

Make Something Good

You know how sometimes you discover certain songs at the exact right moment? The moment when that song rings its truest for you, and if you had discovered it 6 months ago, you might not have even noticed it (which would have been impossible in this case because the album was released a month or two ago, but still...). Last night I found Laura Veirs' album July Flame and listened to the last track - Make Something Good - maybe twenty times. If you're a PCV at the end of your service, maybe it'll ring true to you, too. Or anyone who has had the best of intentions for something. Here are the lyrics, but even better -
here's the song.

(I hope this isn't some how illegal...)

I wanted to make something sweet
The blood inside the maple tree
The sunlight trapped inside the wood
Make something good

I wanted to make something strong
An organ pipe in a cathedral
That stays in tune through a thousand blooms
Make something good

It's gonna take a long, long time
But we're gonna make something so fine

I wanted to make something pure
Emerald field from steer manure
A wild-eyed child in a moonlit room
Make something good

I wanted to make something built to last
A bottled ship with a golden mast
And through the squall the course stays true
Make something good
Make something good

It's gonna take a long, long time
But we're gonna make something so fine
It's gonna take a long, long time,
But we're gonna make something so fine

- Laura Veirs, July Flame, Make Something Good

About Right

My apologies for talking so much about the looming end of my service on here, but I find it difficult to think of anything else right now. It's weird. The little knotted ball of anxiety that formed in my stomach just before I left home two years ago has returned. It's not like any other ball of anxiety. It's the lots-of-stress-and-tearful-farewells-on-the-horizon ball. The one that shakes you awake at 3am to ask where your original passport is and isn't calmed until you go and find it, just where you left it two years ago. The one that can't stop pondering the amount of material a person can accumulate in 24 months. The one that pitches the hardest each time you say goodbye to someone and wonder how many more times you'll get to say goodbye. Just when you seem to strike a balance in your life, a balance that gives you enough work to keep you involved and busy, enough free time to take long walks and learn to cook, enough friends to have weekend plans and tea times, and enough confidence to feel good about where you're at and what you're doing, it's time to wrap things up in a tidy package and say goodbye. When I signed up for the peace corps, one of the main things I was hesitant about was the two year commitment. Two years? Might as well sign my life away. Why isn't there a one year peace corps program? Well, once I reached my one year mark, the answer was obvious. After a year, I was truly still at the beginning. And if I word it in my head a certain way, I will always be at the beginning. So many unanswered questions and unrealized projects remain that it's difficult to feel like I've accomplished anything. BUT when I think about how hard I've tried and about the things I've been a part of and have witnessed, it all makes sense. It all seems about right. The past two years will never fit into a tidy, easy to handle package. They will remain in a massive heap on the attic floor. A heap that can be carefully and lovingly picked over, with forgotten shining treasures showing up in odd locations.

Unconditional

Now that my tutor's two year long maternity leave has ended, she's been back at the high school teaching English. So instead of tutoring lately, I've been going and observing her classes just to get a feel for what a more realistic, every day classroom is like instead of the "special-occasion" classes I've been teaching. The first class I observed was all tenth grade girls preparing for some sort of essay competition. I chose to sit quietly and unobtrusively in the back, hoping to blend into the wallpaper (as tends to be my norm) and disturb the class as little as possible. As a native English speaker, I figured the class would be a piece of cake and I'd know everything that was going on the whole time. Ha. After the students read the ideas they had written down for their essays, Miha went over conditionals. Conditionals are typically "if" statements, like "If you bake cookies, I will eat them". Simple, right? Well, there are a few different types of conditionals. Four, to be exact. There is the type 0 conditional, which contains present simple verbs in both the if clause and the main clause. For example, the sentence "If you heat cookie dough, it bakes" is a type 0 conditional. As Miha explained this and wrote on the chalk board, the students busily copied in their notebooks. Type 1 conditionals consist of an if clause with a present simple verb and a main clause with a future simple verb, such as "If you bake cookies too long, they will burn." Type 2 conditionals are used to express unreal situations in the present or future. At this point in the lecture, Miha caught my eye. "What's wrong?" she asked. "Am I incorrect?" It was at that moment, as all of the students turned to look at me, that I became aware of the expression on my face and immediately took action to correct it. I tried to untwist the look of utter confusion and fear into a smile and said "Oh, no. Looks good to me!" The students smiled and turned back towards the board just as the bell rang and Miha assigned the night's homework. Conditionals.
Thank you, stars, for the fact that high school was ten years ago.