Dates Re-visited or Peace Corps as a Jar of Pickles

I bought a jar of mini-pickles today and the expiration date is May 17th, 2010. If all goes according to plan, I'll be finished with my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer when those pickles are officially deemed inedible. Oddly enough, there are 23 pickles (yes, I counted them because I could...I also ate two to make it exactly 23) in the jar. One for each month of remaining service. It seemed so small sitting on the shelf, 25 little pickles packed into my one jar amongst rows and rows of other jars, some with more pickles, some with peppers, some with beans, a few peas. Some will be purchased this week, some next week, some next year, but all of them will go to a person who will do with them what they can, whether they go towards a spaghetti sauce, a minestrone soup, or a chicken enchilada. I'm not sure what I can make with a jar of pickles, but I'll do my best. I've got two years to figure it out.

Maybe you're curious about how the camp with the kiddos went. It went well. I did the Time Warp for the first time in about 7 years, didn't catch the ball once during a vicious game of kickball, nervously narrated a native American legend, convinced some kids that I can understand EVERY language, even Martian, and ate the best food I've had since swear-in. Also, I saw an awful lot of staggering beauty, played cards with a Birds of Pray deck in a room that felt like Dracula's personal bar, said Jo Reggelt/Napot/Estet (good morning/day/evening) to every unexpecting soul who passed me and my group of lovely friends. I'm pretty sure I learned more than the kids did, but that's how things work in this pickle jar.

There's another package at the post office awaiting my open arms! I'll be able to pick it up on Tuesday, from 10 to 12. It's all about waiting here.

being american

Tomorrow through Wednesday I'll be helping out with a youth camp and will probably have very limited access to the internet and email. Not that anyone will notice. I'm a little nervous about working with kids again. Haven't really spent much time around them since I was a Latch Key day care leader, and my memories from that involve alot of boogers, mopping up some barf, and being asked whether I was a boy or a girl. But that was ten years ago and I can hopefully handle all situations with a bit more grace and dignity. At least this time around, I won't really be able to understand what the kids are saying because they're Hungarian, so if they're questioning my gender, I'll just smile and nod and give them a pat on the shoulder. No hard feelings whatsoever.

When I was little, I remember walking around and saying random, nonsensical things to myself and wondering "wow! I wonder what language I'm speaking!" and being fascinated by the thought that somewhere out there was a country, maybe a planet, full of people who would understand my "bing boop sluie bop" to mean "this cookie is delicious". Only when you actually try to learn a new language do you realize how silly you were as a little kid. Seriously, I want to learn Romanian so badly, but the more I learn, the harder and more convoluted it seems. During PST, we didn't get into the confusing grammar too much, just brushed the surface, but now...nothing makes sense. There are about ten different ways to say "this", depending on the gender and the number and the location of what you are referring to. No bing. No boop. And there isn't an exact translation for cookie, which makes me sad. Add on top of that very little time to actually study and co-workers who speak English very fluently and nearly refuse to speak Romanian with you (because they're Hungarian) and gladly translate every little thing for you and you simply don't progress. If anything you regress. And the two different languages thing is getting annoying. I don't know how to greet anyone and I feel bad if I talk to someone in the wrong language and I feel guilty that I'm not learning Hungarian. Bah.

Yesterday, towards the end of my Romanian tutoring session, we some how got onto the subject of ethnic background (in English, of course...cause half the tutoring session is in English) and I mentioned that I'm about 3/4 German. "Really?" my tutor asked, "Do you speak German?" This took me by surprise, nobody has ever asked me about the language when I proudly state that I'm part German. "Uh...no. Nein." I said, feeling clever. "Why not?" She asked and put me on the spot...I suddenly felt that I needed to justify my German-ness. "I've never studied it," I said, honestly. "Didn't your parents speak it at home?" I almost laughed at that question because the idea seemed so strange. "No...not at all. My dad studied it in college, I think." "And you? They didn't offer it at your school?" "Well...they did, actually, but I took French instead..." "What about your grandparents, didn't they speak it?" And this is where it hit me as to why I had no clue about the German language. "I don't think they were allowed to." My response stopped her flow of questions, to my uncomfortable relief, but has been bothering me ever since. Either my grand parents or my great grandparents immigrated here from Germany long ago and I'm sure they maintained their heritage in their cozy German house and kept up their daily German routines and spoke in their native tongue, until a war came along and made them unpopular. They no longer wanted to appear German so they ceased all German activity in public and became so ashamed of their heritage and the horrible things their people were doing that they stopped being German, even at home, refusing to respond to the children when they said "guten morgnen". Now, generations later, I proudly state that I'm 3/4 German and yet I have NO clue what that means. I've had so many ethnicity conversations with friends in the past, where we all sit around and one by one go around the circle and share our heritage and I would say my usual, "I'm 3/4 German, nearly 1/4 Irish, and a tiny bit of Cherokee", and I was so proud of this, my background, my roots, it was something that invoked images of a different time and life, milking cows in the German mountains, watching the waves crash on an Irish shore, listening to the wind sweep across the open plains. All of which I now realize has nothing to do with me. All of which has been lost over the past generations and the never ending, dehumanizing wars and the ongoing loss of heritage. War both creates and destroys history and thanks to it, I'm now simply American and clueless.

Small Dent

I just posted 21 photos for your viewing pleasure on my flickr site (link on the right). Still have about 500 more photos to go through. Squee.

Today was awesome and perhaps I will write something more about it when I'm not so tired, but I will say that it involved jogging, hundreds of frogs, charging wild boars, fleeing deer, intimidating men with chains and chainsaws, a rousing game of "how many pinecones can you get in the boot?", an amazing swamp-bog-woodland-lake-type place, and cheese puffs.

Routine

I can sleep in tomorrow morning so I'm going to splurge and stay up till at least midnight! Bwahahaha. Just for fun, here's a break down of what I did today:

6:15 alarm goes off, I hit snooze repeatedly
6:30 get out of bed, stumble around for a bit, brush teeth, wash face, hair and the necessities, dress
7:15 eat breakfast, which consists of yogurt and granola
7:30 pack myself a lunch and wash dishes
7:45 leave for work
8:00 arrive at work and say "buna dimineata" or "servus" or "jo reggelt" to any staff that I run into
8:30 drink coffee and check the 15 emails that somehow accumulated overnight, take care of any internet or peace corps-related things that need to be done
10:00 the main guy in the biodiversity department asks me to show him how to do a few things in ArcMap; I agree, happy to fulfill one of the peace corps goals: transfer of skills
10:30 realize he doesn't really want me to show him how to do stuff, just wants me to do it. So much for that "transfer of skills" goal
12:30 create 931 randomly generated points that represent possible locations of Carpathian Brown Bears, buffer the points by 1km and 5km, intersect the buffers, dissolve the intersection, calculate the area of the dissolved intersection, dissolve the 1km buffer and calculate the area of the dissolve, add fields to the attribute table, digitize a few roads, and make a map of everything done for the day
3:15 leave work, drop computer off at home, head towards tutoring
4:15 arrive late for tutoring because my knee hurt from running the day before, tutor doesn't seem to mind
6:00 finish tutoring, stop and get an ice cream cone on my way home from the only place in town that makes the ice cream in the store
7:00 arrive home, make dinner
8:00 start mixing 2 batches of cookies to take to a party this weekend
9:30 finish mixing, start baking
10:00 decide to fiddle on my own internet while cookies bake
11:00 cookies finish baking, internet still fiddling

Same life, different country. Why am I here? To bake cookies and make maps? Just like I did in Reno? I have a washer, a water heater, internet in my apartment, a cell phone, ArcGIS at work, I ride in a car every other day to the nature reserve, where I strap on my water boots and have a good time looking for frogs and taking GPS points. I buy big jugs of Danon yogurt and packets of Nestle's hot chocolate from the supermarkets. I take colorful pictures of interesting buildings with my shiny Digital Elf and I listen to the music I find enjoyable on my iPod while I sweep my laminate flooring and scrub my porcelain sinks. Isn't there something else I should be doing? Aren't there stories waiting to be written, kids waiting to be taught, trees waiting to be saved? I know there are, but I haven't had time to find them and I'm scared I won't have the perseverance or ability not only to find them, but to help them. If all that Romania wants from me are some cookies and maps, maybe I could just ship them over from home.

No, I'm not thinking about coming home, I'm just questioning my role here. I thought this was going to be different and as broad as I try to keep my expectations, sitting in an office all day working on maps has never been high on my list of volunteerism goals. How do you tell someone who asked for your help that you don't think they're asking for the right kind of help? Is there a right kind of help? Would my time really be better spent presenting information on how to save the forests to classes of highschoolers instead of making hypothetical Brown Bear territory maps?

Despite all these rhetorical questions, I am quite happy here. I can't describe the feeling of community I get when I walk around downtown in the evenings. People are everywhere, children running around giggling without a care in the world, parents watching with careful eyes and high hopes of a childhood brighter than their own, teenagers trying to find their name in brand clothes and interesting hairdos and indulging in their freedom, bunicas resting on the benches and watching a world that must look indescribably different than the world they knew only 20 years ago. The memories they must have. I watched out the window today as it poured harder than I think I've ever seen it pour, settling the dust from the never ending road construction, washing the dirt from the sidewalks, and fueling the green sprouting through the cracks in the pavement. A world in transition in every way and all I can do is watch.

There's been some commotion about volunteer blogs being insensitive or offensive to host country nationals (i.e. Romanians) and, although I truly hope mine is not one of them, I'm going to password protect it on July 1st. The password will be Sfantu24. Once service is over, I'll open it back up to the public.

Internetul

I am proud to announce that finally, after two and a half weeks of impatience, I have internet in my apartment. But I'm not sure why exactly I was so impatient...what did I do on the internet before? What should I do now? Hmmm...what. to. do. I'll figure it out tomorrow, noapte buna!

Antici...........pation!

Ooooohh! I got a slip on my desk today that says there's a package at the post office waiting for me to come and pick it up!! I can only pick it up on Thursday between 10 and 12, though. Why? I don't know...but there's a package there and I have no clue who it's from because my mom hasn't sent hers yet and I'm not sure who else would have sent me one in such a short amount of time and I wanna know what it is and who it is from! SQUEE!

My colleague caught a really stinky snake at the reserve today. I think his hands have been permanently tainted because I can smell the nastiness from here and he's washed his hands about ten times and is sitting 10 meters away from me. Bleh. Who knew that snakes stink? In other news, I'm getting better at catching frogs. I've only caught three, but it's getting easier each time. It's all about the sneak and surprise method. Sneak up and hunch quietly and still over the frog for about 15 seconds, then SURPRISE! smack you hand (cupped, of course, as to avoid hurting the poor thing) over the frog and carefully scoop it up and play with it (nicely, and only for very short amounts of time). Then release back into the wild and watch it leap, terrified, away.

I've got Hungarian tutoring in about 5 minutes, so I better go...just passing a few minutes in the office. I've decided that today's going to be my last Hungarian lesson for a while and I'm going to focus on Romanian for the next 6 months. Two languages at once? That's just nuts and counter-productive. Besides, I'm picking up random Hungarian words with my work and everybody's very supportive of me switching to only Romanian.

Adjusting

Here's some stuff from the past couple'o days.

27 May 2008

Man, I can’t stop judging myself. Every little thing I do, from baking up some chocolate chip cookies to hiking with a colleague through one of the nature reserves to drinking tea with some new friends to getting out of town for the weekend, I keep the question “is this what it’s supposed to be?” in the back of my mind. One of the main goals of every peace corps volunteer is to integrate into their community, but just what does integration mean? I feel like I can survive here for two years, but does survival have anything to do with integration? And now that I think about it, just how integrated into Reno’s community was I? After living there for nearly 18 years, was I anything to Reno? It didn’t depend on me nearly as much as I depended on it and I doubt it’s taken any notice to the fact that I’ve left. Just one less car plugging up the interstate bowels.
Is community integration less likely to occur for somebody who relishes baking cookies “singura” (alone) and curling up with a good book in the evenings over someone who is happier hanging out in smoky bars with friends and snapping up new “contacts” every few minutes like they were gummy drops. Who’s more likely to fulfill the goals of peace corps? Me or Mr. Gummy Drop? Should I really worry about this or can I get the go ahead to live my life how I’m used to? I’m not saying I don’t like social contact, I thoroughly enjoy it, but I know if I get too much of it, I shut down. The occasional evening “singura” is necessary and if it doesn’t happen, I turn all icky and no-fun.

29 May 2008

I don't think I was in a very good mood on May 27^th, but it’s something I felt at the time (and, honestly, am still thinking about), so I’ll keep it as is and put it out there for the world to enjoy. Actually, this past week has been a bit rough mainly because I have not been feeling well. Ever since I got back from Onesti, my tummy has felt the need to cramp up every 20 or so minutes in a really weird, quite painful way, luckily without emitting any solid (or liquid) results, but still making me not want to smile at the clerks or even think about how to ask for a bottle of coke in Hungarian. Feeling just a little bit ill in an unfamiliar place is like being a kid who’s lost his binkie - a very minimal, no-panic-necessary problem that evokes nail-biting fear, a sense of helplessness, and a pinch of woe-is-me. Today, finally, I am feeling a bit more in line with my properly operating stomach and can once again smile at the lady I buy a coke from nearly every day.
Part of my heightened spirits may also be due to the fact that I just bought a kilo of strawberries that were grown in this region for 4 lei (somewhere around $2 – a kilo! That’s like 50 strawberries!). I also spent the day wading through water at the nature reserve (which I found out is where parts of Cold Mountain were filmed) looking for frogs (my sister should be here) and taking GPS points that actually, after hours of frustration and adjustments, lined up correctly on the map (nothing in this world will ever make me understand or enjoy working with projections. Nothing.), ate ice cream and drank tea with “the girls” from the office, had someone ask me if I’d like to go to a couple of plays with them, came home to a drying rack full of finally dry clothes and a bag full of sugar cookies that I forgot I had baked, and, last but not least, realized that the word “elephant” is phonetically the same in English, Romanian, AND Hungarian. It’s my new favorite word. This was a good day. I like these good days. And no matter how difficult it is for me to do, the busier the day, the better it seems to be and the less I feel like judging me and my volunteer abilities.
Something really cool happened last week. I was finishing up a tutoring session when one of the girls who occasionally helps out asked me where I was from. I responded with the usual: “Nevada, it’s on the west coast next to California. About a seven hour drive north of Las Vegas” (EVERYBODY knows Las Vegas…grumble grumble). She responded with “Really? Which city?” I said Reno and her eyes immediately lit up with a big smile across her face and another girl in the room looked astonished and said something high-pitched in Hungarian that I couldn’t understand and I suddenly felt my eyes water up a bit because obviously Reno meant something to them and usually people just vaguely smile at me when I tell them which city. Turns out she lived there for two years, all of 2003 and 2004, with some friends and worked at various places around the city and I probably crossed paths with her at some point. Funny thing, too, because she looked familiar the moment I met her, but I never even thought to say anything because it’d sound silly. We then proceeded to chat about different places around Reno and what we enjoyed doing there and how curious it is that our roles are now reversed and even though it was pouring rain outside, everything felt right with the world.

I think I’ll go for a walk. Pa for now.