Peace Corps Service is a 24/7 commitment, and it’s not all that bad.

The Peace Corps told us on the day we assembled in Philadelphia to depart from the States to begin our service and repeatedly on many occasions since then, that we are expected to work 24/7. This means that when not doing the actual physical/mental work assignments we are given (Peace Corps’ 1^st Goal), which here in Macedonia is either Teaching English as a foreign language, or Organizational / Community Development, we are expected to be an active member of our assigned living site. As such, we are expected to be actively involved with the people in our assigned community at all times for cultural exchange activities (Peace Corps’ 2^nd Goal). We are allowed some planned vacation time as well as occasional personal days to get away from out assigned site and enjoy a little R & R.

With the current holiday break from my assigned work site, I took two personal days to do some tourist type sight seeing in and around Skopje. I came home to Negotino last evening with nothing planned for today, (Orthodox) Easter Sunday. I decided to create an Easter activity; a visit to Renatta in the Дом Жана retirement home, the only one in this region of Macedonia.

Дом Жана, a retirement home in this region of Macedonia.

Renatta is the woman I met when our NGO put on a Christmas play and sang songs with the pensioner residents in the retirement home a few months ago during the Christmas holidays. She and I had fun at that time speaking German, English and Macedonian. I remembered her and decided to visit her because she has no family visiting her. It took all of my limited Macedonian to explain to the retirement home staff that I wanted to visit with a woman I had met at Christmas, but could not remember her name. I guess I described her well enough, because one of the staff led me to the third floor and into a room, where we interrupted her nap. I was relieved that is was the woman I hoped to visit.  “Everyone is dead,” she told me, except for her invalid sister who cannot travel to visit and her son who lives in Austria. Coincidentally, I learned that his name is Lewis, also, but I believe it is spelled differently. Despite sharing abilities in 3 languages, we hit occasionally snags in our conversations, whereupon we begin to giggle and laugh and forget to finish that part of our conversation. When we were chatting about the years she was lived and worked in Germany, the subject of the Rhine River crises came up. She said she remembered the famous song about a very popular German folk tale, “die Lorelei,” and she began to sing it. I joined her and after the second verse, she began to appear to forget some of the lyrics, but not the music, which she hummed. However, I knew the words and continued singing, whereupon she would pick up at places she remembered. After the fourth and final verse, she laughed and exclaimed how much she enjoyed that, especially when I was able to help he recall all of the lyrics. She then became even more conversant about her background and family and asked me more questions about myself and my life in America. I gave her a box of chocolates I had brought as an Easter present. She exclaimed that they were her “favorite.” I saw through this and realized that she still had considerable social awareness and was simply be gracious. We chatted some more and I took a picture for both of us.

We had a fun visit this sunny and hot Easter afternoon.

We ended our visit talking about perhaps having more visits. I will have to visit her there, because she does not go out anymore, not even to stroll in the town.

She thanked me profusely for visiting. On my way out of the home, the staff also thanked me for visiting.  I did not notice any other visitors with any other resident during my time there.

All in all, a wonderful Easter afternoon, expanding a new friendship and nailing Goal #2.

Should you volunteer overseas?

Three years ago I was searching the Internet looking for information related to my lifelong desire to join the Peace Corps. I was also reading anything I could find regarding life as an ex-patriot volunteering overseas. Perhaps you have been going through a similar process when you came upon this blog. If so, you might find the following helpful. If not, you still might find this interesting, if only to confirm your own feelings about living and working overseas.

This is a deceptively easy infographic to use. It can help you decide if volunteering overseas is for you and, if so, in what manner should you be considering doing so.

This is from - – - http://www.globalcitizen.org 

Volunteering overseas to support development projects can be a life-changing experience, and can add value in supporting local communities to build capacity and overcome poverty. It’s a great way of contributing your skills and passion to helping, but in considering how to do it, there are several questions that you should consider.

 

The infographic above outlines key questions, and gives you a starting point to consider what sort of volunteering is best for you. We’ve provided a brief summary of each option, and next steps for you below.

Long placement. Peace Corps and VSO are the world leaders in long-placements, where you will spend at least year, and often two years, working inside a community, usually partnering closely with locals, and supporting them to build capacity. It’s a big ask of you – to uproot yourself for this long, but if you’re really going to apply your skills to a community, you need to take the time to understand it, make a contribution, and transfer your skills.

Short placement. For a first time visit, this is usually the best option to take – where you’ll stay around long enough to understand and adapt to the complexities of the local community, whilst also being able to contribute within a window of a couple of months that you might have over summer, after graduation, or between jobs. Approach your favourite charities to talk about options for short placements, or reach out to friends and family with existing strong connections to communities to understand whether and how you might be useful.

In & Out Trip. Use your skills and local knowledge to train locals, enable them to do things they otherwise couldn’t themselves, and build some great ongoing relationships. These trips tend to be anywhere from 1 to 6 weeks, and the longer you can spend there, usually, the more useful your contribution.

Immersion / Study Trip. If you’re short on time, an amazing way of understanding more about the progress and challenges of fightlng poverty is to go on a trip with a charity or community group (like your school or church) for 1-2 weeks. You’ll learn a huge amount, and the trip may well challenge your ideas of how you can help in the future, but you won’t help fight poverty directly, except by spending money in communities.

Don’t Volunteer. It might sound harsh, but if you’ve answered to all the questions, and arrived at this outcome, we seriously recommend that you don’t volunteer overseas. Instead, why not consider learning a language, volunteering locally with charity that works in development, or starting to build a relationship with a community by going on holiday to a developing country, and spending time learning.

 

Musings at Mid Service

This is the last week of March, 2013. During the first week of this month my cohort and I participated in MST (Mid Service Training). Officially marking the midpoint of our service has caused me to have many reflections during the past few weeks about how long I have been here and what I have experienced, learned and accomplished.

A common thought I have had is how much I have adapted to and how my initial enthusiasm has waned, leaving me feeling so tired most of the time. There are many aspects of living here which cause me to realize how much I took for granted back in the States. One thing we PCVs do not have to worry about is the cost of gas for cars, because we are not allowed to drive during our service. The cost of gasoline here is more than twice the cost in the States. That, in perspective of the much overall lower cost of living here, makes the cost of gasoline here almost prohibitively high in comparison with the cost in the States. I do not usually miss driving and all of the walking is actually healthful. However there are all of the other aspects of daily living which do affect my daily activities in ways I rarely ever had to contend with in the States.

One of those daily challenges is the water situation here in my town, which is due to two significant factors. One is the fact that the main source of water is a stream that flows from the surrounding mountains to and through the town. The other factor is the antiquated infrastructure; the water purification system simply cannot meet the demand and has to stop pumping for this time periods in order to ‘catch up’ each day. By the way, that is not true in other areas of this country. I have been working with the American Embassy and the US Army Corps of Engineers to see if something such as more efficient, pumps will alleviate this. Unfortunately, the supply is limited because of consumption of the water by the villages and towns upstream of this town. Larger pumps here will not totally resolve the problem.

While on the topic of public utilities, I can also tell you that the waste water (sewage treatment) in all areas of this country is also antiquated and cannot handle much without backing up, or breaking down. The biggest problem presented by this is that NOTHING except “whatever has gone through your body” can be flushed in a toilet. This holds true for flush toilets as well as for squat toilets (a hole in the floor).  So, what does that mean? Well, it means that just like anywhere else, we cannot flush paper towels, or feminine sanitary products. However,  it also means that here we cannot flush ANYTHING ELSE. Yes, this means that not even toilet paper can be flushed and ALL toilet paper must be put in a trash can that we find beside every toilet everywhere, even in our own home/apartment bathrooms. Taking out the trash has become a more frequent event for me. Oh, another frightening thing is that if you do not carry your own toilet paper with you at all times, you will be in a real predicament when using a public toilet, even in such places as the опстина (opstina = city hall); There is usually no toilet paper in public toilets, which are also frequently likely to be squat toilets.

Then, there is the matter of the electricity rates . . . they are very high. As I mentioned, there are off-peak periods, such as between 11pm and 7am and all day Sunday during which times the electricity is one-half as expensive as during the other times.  Can you see what is coming? In order to keep expenses low, I must run my electric water distiller at night, or on Sunday. It takes about 4 hours to make a gallon of pure water. Oh, the public water is potable, but laden with chemicals and heavy minerals. So, I distill it. Speaking of saving costs, I feel it prudent to do my laundry and house cleaning on Sundays when the electricity rate is half that of other times. However, despite having low electricity rates all day on Sunday, I must start early in the morning in order to get the laundry done before the water is shut off.  It is also necessary to do the laundry early if I am going to hang everything out to dry. Otherwise, I have to leave it out overnight and hope it will be dry the next day. When we do get rain, it is more likely at night. I do not know of any Macedonians who have a clothes dryer because of the high electric rates. The few stores that sell washing machines do not even have clothes dryers on display. Still, I feel fortunate when I realize that some of my fellow PCVs must wash their clothes by hand.

Then, on top of dealing with all of these challenges, there is the constant mental effort involved in all activities throughout every day. I must consciously be thinking ahead of what I am doing and try to have comments and questions formulated in Macedonian, using my limited vocabulary and grammatical abilities in creative ways to express even the most common thoughts and questions in ALL interactions. Responding to unexpected comments and questions from others is always a stress-inducing challenge. It is exhausting.

As a result of all of the above, I am feeling tired most of the time. I have come to realize that I am beginning to feel soooo old. On the bright side, the enthusiasm I feel among the younger PCVs and their accomplishments which I marvel at provide some compensatory incentive for me to continue going forward in my service. Above all, the enthusiasm which I see in the faces of the beneficiaries at my NGO when I organize trainings, workshops and sport/exercise activities and the eagerness they express to be involved in yet more such activities gives me an incentive to continue to try to overcome most of my fatigue. They seek me out and talk to me excitedly and rapidly in Macedonian with their various dialects and speech impairments and never react negatively to my language limitations. In fact, we often laugh together at the creative ways we have developed to communicate. We have developed our own, humorous individualized means of communication which always helps me feel that I am filling a needed role here.

So, as I reflect on what has transpired in the past 16 months I feel a renewed initiative to work toward even more improvements for the lives of the intellectually challenged beneficiaries of my NGO.  Focusing on this helps me to realize that the various annoyances in my daily activities do not really matter all that much.

THIS makes perfect sense:

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) is Australia’s national science agency. The CSIRO, in collaboration with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

 Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other by-products are produced.

Now, I understand.

Is there any hope?

Human conflicts have been going on since the beginning of time, and now they have reached new heights (see news article copied below).

The Middle East conflict at 35,000 feet

By Paul Moss BBC News

It is not just the election results that show that Israelis have different views about who should be running the country: a flight to Tel Aviv can provide a glimpse into some of the simmering tensions in the Middle East.

The conflict was awfully familiar.

The Israelis were arguing with the non-Israelis, and indeed with each other – over who was entitled to what territory.

Some were polite, but others more hostile. It was an ugly scene. At one point, I thought people might well come to blows.

And still they could not sort it out. Who was supposed to be in what seat? The plane had not even taken off yet, but already Flight 2085, from Luton to Tel Aviv, had become a microcosm of the Middle East.

Some argued from a point of legal entitlement. They held up their boarding passes, the seat number clearly visible.

“I have a right to be here,” they protested. But others simply pointed out that they had got there first. I felt I had heard this before somewhere.

Meanwhile, bolder passengers were simply shoving their luggage – and themselves – into the places they wanted. You might call it “establishing facts on the ground”.

They ignored the would-be occupants towering above them, now waving boarding cards in their faces, like title-deeds to a house.

“Sit down,” yelled the exasperated air [flight attendant], sounding like a teacher dealing with unruly children on a school bus trip. But no-one was listening to teacher that day.

Eventually, the captain’s voice came over the intercom, more imploring than commanding.

“If you do not take your seats soon, we will miss our slot, and take-off could be delayed by a very long time.” In other words, if the fighting continued, everyone would lose.

That kind of reasoning has never seemed to work too well in the Middle East, and it certainly did not make an impression on Flight 2085. The stand-off continued.

Tensions rose and so did voices in English, in Hebrew and in Russian. I only speak one of those languages but I am quite sure I was being treated to a crash course in their finest insults and for the first time I found myself awfully glad that metal implements are no longer permitted in carry-on luggage.

And then she appeared. The heroine of the day. I do not know her name, I guess I never will, but she seemed like Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa all rolled in to one.

A clever, sensitive [flight attendant] came up with a compromise. “Sit down where you are for now,” she said, “and we can sort out who goes where, once we are up in the air.”

Brilliant. The passengers looked at her, they looked at each other, and they meekly obeyed. Those wanting a window seat accepted an aisle; couples hoping to travel together agreed to be rent asunder.

It reminded me of the Oslo Agreement, back in the day when that seemed like a solution to the Middle East problem. Let us all calm down for a bit, live in our respective places for now, and sort out the final agreement later on in the day.

The [flight attendant] had brought unexpected calm to a conflict-ridden flight.

I thought of telling the [flight attendant] she had missed her métier, that instead of serving gin and tonics to rude passengers, she should be working for the United Nations – she certainly could not have made a worse job than others who have tried.

I drifted off into a reverie, imagining this diplomatic wonder-woman circling the globe, perhaps still wearing her Easyjet uniform – she would shuttle between North and South Korea, between the US and Iran – everywhere bringing her home-spun approach to international crises.

But I soon snapped out of my fantasy, because a while after take-off, a new problem arose.

A group of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews had been given space at the back of the plane to hold a prayer meeting. They bowed, and recited, but in the process they attracted more worshippers and, who knows, perhaps new worshippers converted to the faith by this stirring display of mid-air religiosity.

Eventually there were so many offering their thanks to God that they were blocking the aisle, and the non-observant passengers found they could not reach the toilet.

One unfortunate lady found herself stuck inside the lavatory, pushing on the door but meeting resistance from the mini-congregation now gathered outside.

Soon the secular bladders were causing real problems to their owners, who began to complain that the religious people were getting things all their own way.

Now that is a complaint you will hear in Israel itself where there have been furious quarrels between zealous followers of God and those of a more skeptical inclination.

But here we were nearly a thousand miles from the Holy Land and quite a few thousand feet up in the sky.

I searched in vain for Easyjet’s unappreciated ambassador-of-peace – the [flight attendant] who had brought unexpected calm to a conflict-ridden flight.

But she had gone back to serving gin and tonics – and it looked like this time, she just did not want to get involved.

_______________________________

While reading that story, and for quite a while afterwards, I had so many thoughts whirling through my mind; there have been some airlines which have recently abandoned seat assignments to allow “Open Boarding” to avoid such conflicts. This flies in the face of the original reason for seat assignments, which was from the pre-DNA days and the need to have a way to identify bodies in the event of a fatal crash. However such attempts are nothing new, and have been attempted in other aspects of life, as in land ownership. Results have varied.  The Middle East is dotted with examples of people vying for establishing settlements for a stake in territory claimed by others. Our own American history has some significant examples, such as the “Boomers” and, later, the “Sooners” in the opening of the Oklahoma Territory. Could “open borders” ever really work?

Reflecting back on the story, it represents my experience every time I take an inter-city bus here in Macedonia. Each ticket has a seat assignment number, but the fun begins even before boarding the bus, when everyone pushes and shoves everyone else to try to get on before others without regard to social status, gender or age. In fact, babas (grandmothers) are among the most aggressive. This seems to be consistent behavior at ATMs, cashiers, ticket windows and other similar situations. Then, after boarding the bus, everyone takes whatever seat they please and they put things (coats, packages, etc) on seats beside them to prevent anyone from using that seat. If anyone displays a ticket with a seat number corresponding to the occupied seats, the most common response is a shrug of the shoulders and one of several verbal statements to the effect of, “sit anywhere else.” I find this extremely odd because in most person-to-person interactions anywhere in this country, people are extremely pleasant, warm and hospitable. But, suggest that people Queue up and you will either be ignored, or given ridiculing remarks and scornful glances.

What might happen if every country would accept that people will have conflicts regardless of any international diplomatic strategies, or military posturing? What if they would redirect the money they budget for weapons and apply it to greater efforts for cross cultural understanding and acceptance, such as we do with our relatively small Peace Corps budget?  What if more funding were to be directed internally toward their own human service issues? Will international conflicts always involve the possible escalation to all out warfare? Really, is there any hope?

2012 in review

While struggling to post some sort of review of the past year, I received the following information from WordPress about my blog. It’s not what I would have written, but it just saved me a lot of time.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

 This blog got about 3,300 views in 2012 from people living in 91 different countries.

Click here to see the complete report.

Treasure Hunts and Charades

Living in a foreign land and trying to learn the local language while simultaneously going about daily living activities and attempting to be productive at work requires a willingness to move beyond the usual and familiar comfort zone. Specifically, this requires 1) a willingness to take risks with your use of self and your relationships with others (often strangers), and, 2) a fairly healthy sense of humor including a willingness to engage in impromptu theatrics.

Having any experience with treasure  hunts and charades is a big plus.

But, everyday?

This was proven necessary once again today. It was Sunday and I purposefully got up early. I had laundry to get done before the town water supply shut down as it does daily for a few hours in order to allow the limited water treatment system to catch up with citizens’ demands. I also had other activities on my agenda. It was not going to be a day of R & R. But, it was a dreary, overcast, cold, and rainy morning and my bed had been so nice and warm with the extra comforter I had put on it last night.

It was a cold, dreary, overcast morning. I could tell how cold it was by looking out my window and seeing the smoke indicating the number of wood stoves that had been started across town.

With the Christmas Holidays coming and a gathering of PCVs  planned for next weekend, I had to make the cookies I had promised to contribute to the feast. So, I started the laundry, showered, dressed, and sat down to write my shopping list and then work with my language books, dictionary and computer and practice the vocabulary I would need to do some grocery shopping for my contribution to the feast, as well as for the PCVs who would be staying in my apartment before and/or after the feast that will be in the apartment of fellow PCVs in a neighboring village. Then off I go to the stores to search for what I need. I begin by going to the deli counter and asking for bacon which was fairly easy; “May I have a half-kilogram of bacon and please slice it (in Macedonian).” With that success behind me, I boldly try to be self-sufficient and I look in isles where I think I will find the other things on my list. Well, of course brown sugar is not near the refined cane sugar and honey is nowhere to be found near sugar or in the baking or breakfast sections and how in the world will I find vanilla, or sprinkles? I resort to asking store personnel; “Do you have honey?” Where is it?” What do you mean what kind do I want?

Both are Мед (Med = Honey) , but the print font seems to say MEA. Then, to differentiate, one is шумска (forest), and the other is цветен (wild and color).

WAIT! The Macedonian language makes multiple uses out of the same words and differentiates by contextual usage. You have to deduce that these two jars of honey are woodsy/mountain forest and colorful/flora flowers.

Do you have sugar that is a brown color? (I couldn’t find a Macedonian word for brown sugar in my dictionary, so I did not think I could ask for brown sugar properly). Most of the time I forgot what I had practiced and had to act out what I wanted and even use some other things off the shelves as props, such as the white cane sugar which I pointed to and said in Macedonian,

Шеќер – 100% рафиниран шеќер (Shecher – 100% rafiniran shecher) – - – - – - Sugar – 100% refined sugar

“This, but brown color.” Who would have guessed that I should have looked in the health food section? How was I to know that the honey was next to raisins? And SRINKLES?

украсни трошки за колачи (Decorative coolie crumbs) = Sprinkles! Yes, the window in the package would give it away, but it is a tiny package and I was hurredly scanning labels.

That was some of the best charade work I have ever done.

But, if you persevere and act out things and forget about feeling comfortable, or safe, you can get a lot done, perhaps meet more Macedonians, who certainly won’t forget that you are a very animated/funny American. The next time you are in that store, they might greet you by name, and will most certainly offer to help even when you might just want to find something for yourself.

Finally, with the cookies made, the day is turning out just fine.

The sun tried to break through the overcast and the whole day seemed to be just a little bit brighter.

Once more, a day of being reinforced for pushing past the boundaries of my comfort zone and learning new things, meeting more people and feeling just a little more acculturated in a strange land.