Where did she go?

I have written about people who have touched my life in significant ways here on old Chez What, and today I am gonna tell about Jill.

Jill and I were in Peace Corps together, in Western Russia. Well, aside from my parents getting a divorce when I was 13, Russia had to rank right up there with one of the most strange and stressful things I ever did. I think the same could be said for just about every person in my group, but of every person in that group, I had the most respect for Jill.

Aside from obvious assets that Jill had, like being fluent in Russian, having already lived in Ukraine, having an eternally cool head and having a great sense of humor, Jill seemed to manage 99% of the time to float above all the crummy things that were happening in this time in Russia. Example?

Jill's first placement was with a woman who took her basically as her own little personal American slave. She loaded Jill up with classes to teach, and while the rest of our group had apartments, Jill was living in this freezing cold dorm sleeping in the same room with 2 other girls (students) and sharing a kitchen that was nothing more than a hotplate on top of a fridge and a seat next to a window.

Almost miraculously, she got PC to change her assignment (for some reason this was utterly unheard of) and she went to a different school in Moscow.

This new job was less problematic, except that the living situation wasn't much improved and where she was living was so dangerous she told me of being held at knifepoint outside of her dorm at night.

Now Jill was savvy and able to make connections with the teachers she was working with. She arranged for herself through her own connections to do a teacher training way out in Izhevsk (VERY far from Moscow). She charmed and wooed them (an easy task for her she was capable in Russian and had a charming personality) and they invited her to teach there with them. She had essentially done for herself the job that PC does for volunteers.

When she asked PC if she could go and her reasons why (safety, better circumstances) they said that she was not allowed to change sites again. And with the most amazing testicular fortitude, she ditched PC and crossed Russia on her own to teach in Izhevsk (a small remote burg), trusting them to pay her, help her out and give her a place to live. They did all that and she stayed there for the remainder of the time she was scheduled to be in Russia, after which, I believe PC flew her home.

Now it might not sound like a biggie, but to be in a foreign country without a sort of organization behind you to back you up or pull you out of a jam, well, that to me sealed the deal as Jill having real courage, and confidence. I don't think she ever though twice.

Jill and I kept in touch after PC. This was during my salsa dancing phase. I went to Monterrey to visit her as she got her Masters in teaching Russian at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies. She came up to Portland and I took her around and to my family. She made fun of where my parents lived, in Gig Harbor, called it Geek Harbor and then laughed really hard and slapped her knee, she only ever referred to it as Geek Harbor. I thought it was funny too.

I admired Jill because she was so determined, so focused on what she wanted. She was all about Russia. And while my language abilities in Russian faded (I learn fast and forget equally as quickly) she had started publishing and got a job in Washington D.C. with ACTR (American Council of Teachers of Russian). With them she would bring Russian teachers of English to the U.S. to train and she would go to Russia to stay for trips.

She did things professionally that I thought were beyond cool, she presented at TESOL. She interpreted in important meetings. She was travelling, publishing. During this time of my life, I was basically trying to figure out what to do with myself after PC, hoping to avoid the Masters Programs so I didn't accumulate any more student debt).

Jill now is an occasional intermediary between my host family in Russia and myself. I have sent her several letters, and not heard a word from her. She sent me a gift when my daughter was born, but the last letter I received had the wrong phone number for her in it. I think I called it about 5 times, leaving messages. The email too, dead. How wierd!

Jill told me once about how she had a friend in Russia who she had basically ditched. She told me how awful she felt about never writing her back, never calling her after having been as thick as thieves for years. If memory serves, she said she loved her dearly, but that the friend had become very reliant on Jill.

It is true, Jill and I were very different people, especially at that time after Peace Corps when I was trying to figure out which direction to take. She would tell me her professional travails, and all I could think was how lucky she was. I encouraged her, told her that I admired her, especially as this 2 year period saw my life sullied with ridiculous jobs, choices made out of boredom and a lack of real focus.

Jill and I were really different, she never seemed to be the remotest bit interested in marraige or family. I hadn't been until I hit about 29, then it dawned on me: I wasn't sure if being single was what I really wanted. She seemed to float above that. Marraige wasn't at all interesting to her, her work completed her it seemed like.

Well so I have no issue if Jill dropped me off along the way, I am glad to have known her. She still kind of inspires me with her focus. I am not her, I do wish I could speak with her, if only to hear tales of her meteoric rise. I don't doubt for a second that she would achieve among the highest goals. I hope she is well, and perhaps we will cross paths again.

Things that change people forever

I had a friend when I was younger.

G and I would talktalktalktalktalktalk talk about everything, but mostly about religion. I never was one of those "The bible said it, I believe it and that is the end of it" sorts. I had to think about it, turn it over and look at it. Scratch my beard. Wonder why. Eventually I figured it out, but sometimes people got uncomfortable about me talking about things, asking why. G never did.

There was an "elephant in the room" with G and I. I was unsure how much of an elephant there was, whether it was there or not. He never said. So I ignored it. I just liked having him as my friend, my only one with whom I could talk about religion. We were tight. We could be apart for a very long time and pick right back up. Though in some of those spaces he developed habits that changed him. Drinking and smoking pot became his friends too, such that he kinda changed a bit. Hunter S. Thompson was his hero.

G and I the last time we spoke was a terrible terrible conversation. One wherein he professed his undying love for me and I bawled. He told me I inspired him, that I was the only girl he had ever loved (or something like that). When we first met, I was a little attracted to him, but as he got older he grew in strange ways. Ones that I grew away from. We stayed friends, but it was different, and only maybe when we first met did I like him so much.

G and I don't speak anymore. He is married, I am married. I lurk at his blog. I remember the past we shared. But his present has surely defined him more than anything he and I went through together. In this last year he lost twin daughters an uncle and a grandfather.

As I was driving around I thought of G. I wonder if he would ever, ever recover from 2006. Whenever I think about him now, I cry. He wasn't supposed to become a tragic figure. I wonder how a person recovers from losing twin daughters, babies they were, days old. Beautiful they were. Intensely beautiful babies.

How does life become happy again after that?

Our neighbors lost one twin daughter in a horse riding accident. They seem to rarely leave the house. J says that when something like that happens, it changes a person so that they always carry sadness and you have cut them alot of slack. I am sure he is right.

Good night G, I still pray for you. It is all I can do.

May Fray, part deux

Props to Mrs. T for encouraging me to finish this. I also loved that movie Lost in Translation. Bill Murray, never has any actor made being an old fuddy duddy look so stylish, cool and well, hot.

So last we left off I dragged MF and Olga out in the middle of downtown Vladimir, Russia in a snow storm in order to pick up a package sent from my parents. Olga was in the midst of mourning her lost dad and I in my single-minded focus on the package was oblivious. By the time we got home, MF and I had both spend the better part of 3 hours trying to retrieve the package in -35 celcius weather. Our noses were full of ice, our round MF had ice stuck to her face, my lips and nose were freezing to the point of numbness. Tears on our faces froze. We weren't sad, but very cold weather makes strange things happen.

This time in Vladimir, these three months of October, November and December of 1996 were miserable for everyone in our group.

People were going home like crazy. We easily lost 1/3 of the group in training. One girl looked up her site in her Lonely Planet and it said to not go there because it still had alot of contamination from Chernobylsome ten years earlier. That was it for her.

Another girl had a boyfriend back home who had bought a house for her and was waiting for her to come back to get married. Why she was in Russia in the first place was a mystery.

It became easy for volunteers to predict failure at their assigned sites after starting our time there with 3 months of icy winter. And so they did. And then they left. It didn't do morale for the rest of us much good. We started to ponder our navels and wonder why we weren't going home.

Props to K who proclaimed that he wasn't going home because he had to do a "Project" (PC encourages this) of starting a modeling agency with his students. But that was the alternate project to creating navel lint sculpture, which was his first choice. Did you know that you get more navel lint when it is cold? Who'd a thunk. K was insanely immature, but he was also so irreverently funny that it was nice to laugh at his stupid quips at times.

Russia isn't a "love at first site" type of place, like say, Italy. There are ugly cars, mean people, crowded buses, no flowers, ugly apartments, nuclear reactors that caused fear--and couple that with 3 months of freezing temps and suddenly whatever anyone was trying to escape stateside didn't look so bad. Russia, truthfully, looks best in the spring, fall, or winter on the outside. Winter is a time for cozy conversation, good meals, tea, reading and playing in the snow.

Not to diss Russia, because after you stay there for awhile, you grow to like it alot. But it doesn't make a great first impression in the dead of winter.

MF and I also made pizza at my home stay apartment because the only pizza there typically had mayonnaise and pickles. And there was just so much wrong with that. Sausage was pieces of either hot dog or bologna. Tomatoes did not exist. Sauce was mayo. It was all just so surprising, we were SO EXCITED to get pizza, and we ended up with this "version" of pizza that was...only edible if one was really, really hungry. Which we usually were. We would eat this "pizza-food" creation, grimacing for another disappointment, but brightened because it was nice to eat. MF and I invited all the non-clique folks and we made some really good pizza.

MF distinguished herself by being so easy to work with. Beyond that, her laughing at strange things or odd commentary, I didn't care. She was nice. Period.

MF was shipped off to her site. Penza. We emailed. Her guilelessness always struck me. My friend K made fun of her.

"So how's MF? Still got her beard?"

MF laughed at things that weren't really funny. I started to do this too though, because I so desperately needed to find humor, and it was always happy when a person laughed. Except for when we started to sound crazy.

"Peace Corps forgot to send me my money this month! HAHAHAHAHAHA! I have no money for food or bus fare! HAHAHAHAHAHA! I have gone to the bank every day for 2 weeks and now the tellers know me by name! HAHAHAHAH! I have to hope the ticket collectors on the bus don't kick me off, I don't have 15 cents for bus fare! HAHAHAHAHA! What are you eating for dinner? Can I have some too?? HAHAHAHAHA!"

To be fair, this was not a common occurrence. It only happened once. But my excessive positiveness is something that I took home with me. Now I don't have to laugh at crazy things and I can identify non-problems more so than before I did PC.

After we went to our sites, MF and I only saw each other at trainings. Since all the other volunteers had grown to hate each other after the training debauchery, the atmosphere of our group was of very tight knit pair cliques and some fairly caustic attitude problems. I had problems of my own at my site and was personally on "survival mode" so MF was a good person to sit next at every training because if and when I got morose, she listened and then changed the subject.

Me: "So now since I have had to change sites, people are wondering why I left the first place and some people don't trust me (BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH)...."
MF: "Hm. You know, it is good to see you again, I am glad you got to change sites. I hear they are having a banya tonight, wanna go?

She also helped out when I was volunteered to be the stuffing captain at the PC thanksgiving in Zelenograd one year. I had to make 3 different kinds of stuff and stuff something like 13 turkeys. MF got a bunch of people who had nothing better to do to help out with this. In the end, all I did was collect the ingredients together, and they did the rest. I didn't want to be a stuffing captain!

She was stoic in the face of my perpetual internal desperation and gloom. About a year into my time there I was struggling--facing winter, too much time, and again some hard core coping skills had to kick in. MF just hung around. She all but ignored my poor attitude, answering each time with something less miserable, less inward looking and improved my ability to see the world, the snow, the market, the ice cream joint and to forget forget forget about stupid things that were making me unhappy. I don't know why she stuck with me. But she did, and I was okay with that.

That night after the turkey stuffing we went to the banya, a coed one (eeek!) wrapped in tableclothes. Strange times. For the unintiated, banya was naked sauna followed by a cold pool, snow or cold shower. It got the blood flowing in the cold weather and was respite from the chill. Banya is highly addictive in Russia!

I left Russia, and though I told my counterpart I would cry, I never did. In fact, to dissociate from that "chapter", put it to a close, end it was okay by me.

After I left, MF stayed another TWO YEARS for a total of nearly four years in Russia. She also got a Masters in some Russian type of subject area. Her Russian vocabulary improved far beyond mine but she did endure some difficulties because of her Russian. Her colleague rejected her so her work there was without a Russian connection. Talk about difficult. MF had plenty of her own crap to deal with. She was such a realist though.

MF came to visit me here. Here in Portland. Here with my daughter, my husband. We went out to sushi and I went to visit her at the training she was attending in Forest Grove. it was some sort of hippy training. She had some oozy poison oak on her knee. But she was involved with such cool things.

I am in awe sort of, of females that can just be okay with perpetual singleness (she is nearly 40 now). In my younger years I was more than ok with singleness, but after 30, it became less ok. I didn't want to just do whatever I wanted anymore, I wanted to share the decisions and the experiences. MF seemed happy.

May Fray

I would blog alot more if my memory didn't temporary erase itself. I started taking a sleeping aid and I think they are akin to stupid pills. Sometimes that isn't so bad because I stop thinking so much and I go around smiling all the next day, plus I got regular sleep. Did I mention they make me stoopid though? I forget everything. Wait I already said that.

Well before I forget about her, I am going to write about MF.

MF served with me in Peace Corps, and even though she might think I am kinda odd, I think she is cool. MF is a total no BS kind of person. But rather than talk about her, I am gonna tell about meeting her and coming to know her, in a series of MF vignettes. Let's see if I can do this.

It was a strange October in DC when we all first met. It was around the 27th, and the weather was unseasonably warm. So much so, we were all dressed entirely too warm and subsequently in this tense first meeting of our group of 30 some odd, we were mostly kinda sweaty.

After enduring the ill-advised Cosby sweaters for our first meeting under the buzzing fluorescents of a Grand Plaza suites, one of many anonymous but suitably well equipped hotel rooms, we dispersed to our rooms. Some repacked, some slept, some went out carousing, some did a little of all these things.

I don't remember MF in the fray of these awkward first meetings. I thought I was the 10 percent, making comments that made people look at me funny. But I hadn't met Chris, the guy with permanent bedhead, huge muscles, no self editing skills and no problems finding girls with whom to be carnal and clean his apartment. He was removed from Ufa in the middle of teaching a class. His "separation" was shrouded in mystery, and he was strange enough that our imaginations clicked in time while hearing the limited details of his demise at trainings.

One volunteer speculated that they couldn't imagine ever having been worried that they would not be accepted into Peace Corps when they got to know Chris, who would randomly allude to how he would murder particular people who didn't do as he willed.

MF was there though, in that hot room with fluorescent lights. Wearing a sweater like all of us, regretting it. Shaking hands. Smiling nervously. Hoping to remember these peoples names, not knowing what to expect from their smiles, their hairdos, their pants.

I was with M though. M was next to me because our lasts names were alphabetically aligned. We were fated to spend time together on this account, on account of the alphabet. What is amazing to me is that as I write this she is consulate in a town I visited in China. She who packed and repacked more times than I can remember. She who obsessively apologized for smelling bad, and she who listened to me go on and on and on as I tried to work out a sexual harassment situation. Honestly, she gets awards for listening.

Sometimes I think those who get the best are just those who didn't give up. Ever.

MF and I got a little closer because we were assigned to the same Russian language group. Her distinguishing characteristics were her black curly short hair, her shortness and her perpetual roundness which was, like all of us, enhanced by the layers of clothes that we were required to wear in negative 20 degree weather. She was perpetually amiable, but not overly so. She dissociated herself from the vodka drinking and promiscuous clique that formed in our cultural adjustment phase which made me like her. However, her Russian in class and on the street was completely unintelligible to Russian speakers and English speakers alike. It was painful to listen to her destroy simple words that seemed to confuse her mouth so badly that I began to dread her interpretation of Russian. My only strong suit in Russian was an accurate accent, though it was coupled with grammar guesswork. I dreaded listening to her struggle through the new sounds that Russian made her formulate. She turned a perfectly difficult language into her own language that no one understood and was a discomfort to listen to.

MF decided to hang out with me on Christmas day. The 25th of December is no big deal in Russia, and I had received a note that said that I had a package from home waiting for me at some post office in the town of Vladimir. So we, MF and I, set off to find the post office that might have my much desired package, the first one from home. It was also the coldest day I had ever experienced in Russia, at negative 35 degrees Celsius.

All we had was a small low quality piece of paper that was printed with Russian words that we only vaguely understood. We embarked in a search for the package on this less than balmy day.

Neither of us knew downtown very well. Ice collected in our noses. MF's generous facial hair gathered ice. We trod up streets searching for the pochta, asking for help and trying to understand what we were told. Ducking into producti magazin's when we got too cold.

Her willingness to do this was deeply appreciated by me. She had less idea than I did of what we were doing, where we were going, but was an amazing sport to go with me in search of the package. Finally we went home to where my host mom was grieving the loss of her father which recently occurred, but I had barely realized this. Olga, my host mom, helped me find the pochta with MF that day.

The package was huge, and had cost 125 dollars to send. It was large, heavy and bulky. It took all 3 of us to get it back to the kvartira (apartment) on the trolleybus where grandmothers dealt us swift blows to the kidneys to jostle for a seat or place to stand. I cried over the pictures they sent as I wondered why in the world I had ever come to this god forsaken frozen place for 2 years. I pondered the shoes they mailed, remembering at one point I thought they were important. How deceived I was. At this point my only valuable shoes were a pair of boots that could accomodate 3 pairs of socks and had sufficient tread to assist walking over ice.

to be continued.