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.

My Peace Corps experience, part one

Before I go on, let me say first off that Peace Corps is an amazing opportunity for Americans who have graduated college. I say that because those are the two most basic requirements, you must have graduated college and you must be an American citizen. I have heard people say they wanted to do it after high school and other people who didn't know a Bachelors degree was a requirement. There is no experience that can compare with being able to go abroad for 2 years without paying all the costs involved, be guaranteed a job and health care. That kind of opportunity is just rare.

Let me also clarify that Peace Corps isn't a way to pay off student loans. When I was in school, my Perkins loans, were less than 1 percent of my total loans and my Peace Corps service paid off I believe only 30 percent of that. While I was serving my loans were deferred, but my unsubsidized loans accrued interest. Thus, I had to pay to volunteer. For that reason, I ended my service days before I could have had a proper Close of Service (COS). I was not told that until I was paying my last visit to the Peace Corps office in Moscow.

Still, with all this, I still think Peace Corps is true to its' motto of "The toughest job you will ever love". You might hate it at the time, but it will always be an experience to look back on that was pretty amazing.

I graduated with a degree in Spanish and Linguistics and some certification to teach English as a Second Language. The certification was mostly a collection of linguistics classes, I had to arrange my own practicum which was useful but was a far cry from what a person needed to go teach overseas. Still, most volunteers are hardly qualified for the jobs they undertake so this is all normal.

I came very close to going to Colombia, to Villavicencio with EF education. I went so far as to attain a visa. But because there were so many travel warnings to Colombia, and because I was mostly afraid I would have no real "backup" should something go bad, I opted for PC. Alot of it had to do with not wanting to break my parents hearts should I come back in a body bag. Because it was only my second time overseas, and because it was for an extended period, and because I was a little nervous, I opted for PC who then promptly sent me to Russia. I left in October of 1996.

My family made fun of me that with a Spanish degree, I went to Russia. I 'd had a study abroad in Ecuador and from that experience I had a fire burning in my belly to experience more travel. Maybe it was because I grew up in sheltered suburbia, but I felt I knew the real education was going to take place outside the classroom doors. I wasn't disappointed, and what a long, crazy trip it was. When all was said and done, I came back with another language in my bag, but the Spanish I labored in college to learn had gone AWOL.

Our group, Western Russia 5, the 5th group to go to Russia. We were trained in Vladimir for three months in Russian language and culture. The culture training was kind of ridiculous, but the language training was good because our teacher was very good. My group was considered advanced because we had learned the Cyrillic alphabet. Only about 4 of the 30 some of us knew any real amount of Russian. Our groups oldest member was 30. We were a young bunch. We would have benefitted from some balance in that area. Our group quickly cliquified, many of us who were out of the clique going our own ways. From within the clique escaped stories of debauchery.

In Vladimir we lived with families. My family was most excellent. The woman of the house treated me so amazingly well. Those days with the family were at once great but also exhausting because the perpetual language barrier. They kept me well for 3 months. They had 2 daughters, both brilliant and attended Moscow State University.

I hoofed it to the school where we were trained every day and learned the lay of the weather and the land. There were milk tankers, where people would bring their pails to get milk and impromptu markets selling garlic and other food items. We arrived to negative 20 degree celcius weather and it only got colder. I saw hoarfrost for the first time. I learned the difference between 2 layers and 4 layers of clothes. I sat and drank tea endlessly with the family, listening to a language I didn't know. Olga, the mom prepared me a very special meal for Christmas as she could tell I was having a hard time dealing with the weather, the social climate and wondering if I had made a big mistake.

After training, my job was in a small little town called Cheboksary. Cheboksary is the largest town in one of about 20 independent republics with in the 11 time zones of Russia. They have their own language and their own culture and their own government. The best word to describe them is rural. My counterpart, the woman who would guide my work there and was my only contact there, was Lyudmila Vasilievna. She was an older woman. She was a force of her own, like the weather.

My job was at the Institute of Education. Upon getting off the train, after sleeping on the train all night (yeah right, like I slept) I was supposed to give a lecture on methods of education. While I had been warned that I was supposed to prepare this to give these lectures to about 100 teachers upon arriving, I had some scant notes that were more like a reiteration of what I knew than having any real value, as near as I could tell. I had no idea what would be truly appropriate, I had no idea of what to expect, what the venue would look like, how much if any English they would speak, where I was even going to sleep that night. So as I ached for nothing more to go sleep when I got there, instead I was ushered up to a stage to give a lecture that was to last for 45 minutes. About methodology of teaching English. Good heavens. What a joke.

A sea of peasant faces from the Chuvash country side looked up at me. I didn't know it at the time, but they had all traveled hours to be there that day, and most of their English was memorized phrases. Things like "It's a beautiful day!!!" "Take out your notebooks, children!!" and "Reapeat after me!" All with a heavy emulated British/Russian accent.

I started out at Suggestopedia and ended up at the Natural Approach. The whole 45 minutes in front of this sea of faces what everything from bewildering to frightening. I was 26, had never taught before and was "lecturing" these experienced teachers on how to teach. It was hard to ignore how wrong it all was, but I couldn't really say much about this either. I bootstrapped, improvised and started to ignore the first of many incongruities that filled my service in Cheboksary.

It gets more strange.

By counterpart was a woman by the name of Lyudmila Vasilievna. She was old, should have retired, but had an iron will and a history of Soviet Russia. She fed me a can of fish in oil for lunch and I was told this was a great delicacy. The smile strained across my face as I tried to not show my fatigue, my bewilderment, my lamenting the earlier speaking engagement.

For the rest of the day she trotted me to different small classrooms where Chuvash teachers basically listened to me speak. They did not give me any topics that I should speak about, I was just to speak. Apparently they were to just bask in my English.

Before every speaking time began, Lyudmila would proudly announce all of the great and wonderful things she had done for the teachers there, should they have forgotten, and then the coup de grace was "I have now brought you an AMERICAN!" I was trotted out like a prize poodle and was to speak.

I knew nothing about my audience and was told that their English was not so good. Not surprising since it was in fact their third language after Chuvash, and most of them had never heard spoken English from a living person. They were however, dear, kind gentle people who I sat in stark contrast with my iron-willed colleague. Their genuine motivation and excitement to learn English and how excited they were to meet me was baffling and sweet all at once.

That day, my first day was long, long, long. I was taken to my apartment after my 7:30 AM arrival at 8 PM. During the course of the day I had met the Minister of Education for the Chuvash Republic who was apparently responsible for my being there, so I showed appreciation. I smiled.

This was a fateful smile.

During the speaking engagements, my audience was kind, and I learned some tricks. I knew if I showed where I was from by drawing the outline of the US and showing Portland in relation to other major US cities, I would draw ooh's and ahh's from my listeners. I found this to be positive. Over time, I learned that they all knew a few people I knew, like Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller. In fact, they were experts on them. I knew if I stuck to these subjects, I would have a better chance of being understood, my English, that is. If I basically took what I said out of English textbooks that I knew they used, that would be best for my low level teachers. That worked very well for me. I mixed that with some diplomacy, smiles and nods and the myriad speaking engagements I had all over Chuvashia that 6 months went well.

Seldom was I able to teach. When I did teach, I was given some handpicked excellent students. It was awful because with zero familiarity of what they knew, what they needed to know, what would be interesting to them, what they studied, my teaching was constant trial and error. Usually error. Expecting to them to speak was like asking them to make fools of themselves. But I couldn't just give them the grammar translation stuff they had from their current teachers, primarily because even their current teachers could do a superior job at that than I could. I worked very hard in these days and was mostly grappling. I thought it would be nice to do fun things, but the students only wanted serious work. If only I knew then what I know now.

Several times I was placed in say a library or a large classroom and the room would be filled up with students. The students were to then ask me the questions they had formulated for me. The questions were wonderful. They would ask me if I like to go to the circus with my brothers. Naturally the answer was YES! They would ask me my favorite food, color, author, if I had read Pushkin (I hadn't yet). There was a beauty in these young people, they were so unjaded. So uncynical and sarcastic. They had no pretenses whatsoever. In Russia, intellectualism is revered as a really very desireable quality. Young people got to be cool by being intellectual, well read. I wish we could start a movement like that here. They were serious at school. School was serious, important and a privilege. When my little Q and A session was over, I was often asked to sign their little notebooks. They would stare at my signature, it was so different from the Russian.

In other places in my life, I was discovering banya, the market, downtown, finding a tutor, and suffering from some of the most major depression I have ever experienced. This was largely due to that fateful smile I gave the Minister of Education.

On my first night there, he invited my fellow Peace Corps person and I to his apartment for tea. I said "No way, I am beyond tired." after my 12 hour day with no sleep in a strange, cold place. She reminded me that in cultural training, we were told repeatedly that the way to make connections was to accept these invitations, and he was after all responsible for us being placed there. She made a very good point. We walked down two stories in the dormitory where we all were staying, roaches scuffling in the corners, to his apartment where he promptly poured us shots of vodka.

This was before I had learned how imperative it is to tell people that offered vodka a polite excuse and expect their understanding. Russian hospitality is such that if you say no to anything, it is like an affront: you are not accepting their kindness, you are rebuffing their offers of goodwill. I hadn't learned how to manipulate these situations on my first night. Within a half an hour, he was the Minister of Hands and I couldn't get him off me. My Peace Corps friend intervened and got him away from me and got us back up to our apartments.

From that point on, it seemed that his understanding was that I wanted him, and he in return and she had merely gotten in the way. I spent the next six months dodging him, avoiding him, but still needing him to make my work possible.

My work was also sort of a joke, as the Institute had no money to do teacher trainings, I spent the better part of the day on busses going to schools. It was in this time I grew increasingly distressed about this circumstance. My colleague wanted me to get money. I wanted to get money but I knew precisely nothing about writing grants, foundations, projects or anything of this sort.

This was a hard time, I was disillusioned. I had this minister chasing after me, holding my hand, gazing lovingly into my eyes, clearing rooms of workers so he could have private chats with me, and I was mortified. He had to be at least 50, and I was 25, knew next to no Russian, and had not at all felt prepared for this. When I appealed to Peace Corps, the woman in the office who could have changed my job told me this was all my fault because I had smiled at him. Naturally I was incredulous.

Another volunteer fielded a strong phone call from me. I either needed to change sites, or I needed to go home. The minister had gotten the message that I was not in the least interested in him and my opportunity doors were mysteriously closing.

At that point, the difficulty ended, thanks to this particular volunteer, my site was moved to Saratov.

In Saratov everything was really, really good. However, I felt like damaged goods. I had trouble after that really bad start, with 6 months of winter, a bizarre harrassment situation, and a strong bout of misery, getting back on my feet and having any real sense of how I might really benefit my new site.

In a new found social life, I made friends with a young man who was getting his doctorate named Kostya. Kostya was beyond good to me. He was perhaps one of the best conversationalists I have ever met, taking me at a time of real difficulty and always being nothing short of a really good friend. I began spending most weekends in Moscow at his grandparents house with him.

Shortly after arriving to Saratov, in an attempt to clear the slate, I took a short trip to Ireland via London. I was travelling alone from my home in Saratov. It was really a fascinating trip in many ways, though very solitary and on such a scant budget that by the end I mostly just felt like a penniless traveller. I spent much time reading in my new surroundings, absorbing sunshine and Saul Bellow. I went up to Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival. It was a wonderful, much needed break after a long hard winter. But travelling alone is in itself a small challenge. There were friends to be made, and usually they were Dutch. The Dutch always seemed to be the friendliest and without any pretense. The Irish also were wonderful. I went to Wicklow County, Dublin, Edinburgh and passed through London on my way in and out. The last stop overnight was in Belgium. There I inadvertently left all my underpants.

When I arrived back to Saratov, I was ready to start again.