The Cost of Doing Business

In case you were wondering, I do get paid here at my little Peace Corps gig. And I will now outline how much I get and how much a few things cost. So far, it doesn’t seem like that much of a hardship. Maybe that’s because I keep getting ridiculously nice care packages—including corduroy pants and tea. So you know, the exchange rate is around 3 lei to a dollar.

I have a bank account here with a debit card. Every month, Peace Corps deposits money into my account. My rent for a one-bedroom apartment is 849 lei a month. My stipend for living allowance is 821 lei, with a bump to 901 in winter months to cover increased utility costs. This is intended to cover food, household supplies, communications, clothing, transportation, personal items, recreation, reading materials, and said utilities. In addition, I receive 74 lei each month as vacation money. And I get reimbursed for my language tutoring which costs 14 lei an hour. I try to do 6 hours of tutoring each week.

In general, I spend my money on food and transportation the most. I definitely go over on the suggested transportation amount and have spent my vacation money on that. Otherwise, here is a general overview of how I spend my money:

Cheapest acceptable Romanian-made guitar: 195 lei
Bus to Bucharest from Tulcea: 60 lei
Round trip to communities around my park: 30 lei
Round trip transportation to Iasi last weekend: 115 lei
Dinner at Lebanese Restaurant in Iasi: 36 lei
Monthly cell phone fee: 20 lei
Monthly bloc fee (heat and water): 34 in warm months, I’ve been warned it will be 200 lei in winter
Electricity: 30 lei a month
Propane Gas for my oven (canister that lives under my sink): 37 lei/tank (I’m still on my first tank after 10 weeks)
Theater ticket in Tulcea: 16 lei
Pizza and soda at restaurant: 18 lei
Small frozen pizza: 6 lei
1 kilo of fresh ground pork (1 kilo=2.2 pounds): 15 lei
Coffee out at a café: 5 lei
½ kilo of ground coffee: 15 lei
Quart of milk: 4 lei
1 kilo of flour: 1.49 lei
1 kilo of sugar: 2 lei
1 kilo of rice: 3.49 lei
Dannon yogurt, strawberry, 500 g: 4 lei
Muesli cereal, 1 kilo: 10 lei
Butter, 200 g: 5 lei
Bread, small loaf: 2 lei
Green cabbage: .8 lei/kilo
Apples or pears: 2 lei/kilo
Parsley: 1 lei/bunch
Carrots or Onions: 1.5 lei/kilo
Tuna: 5.50 lei/can
Eggs: .49/each (usually sold in groups of 10—we don’t have the concept of dozen here)
Medium Big Mac Meal: 15 lei

November looks to be a tighter month as I’m planning to travel both north to see friends and then down to Bucharest for Thanksgiving. But so far, I’m finding this allowance to be perfectly sufficient. Also as we head into winter, the piata will have fewer fresh fruits and vegetables which are very inexpensive. We can get a good selection of frozen vegetables in the grocery store, but they are cost more. We eat a lot of cabbage and potatoes in the winter. It really helps that I like to cook for myself because eating out is prohibitively expensive to do very often.

For My Yiddish Speaking Friends

This is for anyone who has ever lived in Brooklyn, either in fact or in spirit, and likes to throw around a good farkacta, shlep, or mishegas in their conversations. In Romanian, we have one word that hits that Yiddish button every time: şmecher, pronounced shmecker. It means smart-ass. Both the sound of it and it's meaning thrill me so, I get farklempt.

Weekend in Iasi

Took off for a long weekend which served a few purposes. The first and oddly most gratifying aspect of my trip was that I learned about an opportunity, I learned more about the opportunity, I made a plan, and I successfully executed a plan. Big deal, you may say. Actually, around here, yeah.

Peace Corps volunteers here have a few committees which I declined to get myself on because I knew I'd be oh so busy at my site. But this weekend's meetings of two of the committees were open to all, so I took advantage to see a new city and hang out with english speakers. In addition, ate delicious Lebanese food, took trains, taxis, and city buses which is all new for me here, and secured some fun homework for one of the committees.

My next trip looks to be Thanksgiving. Friends Veronica and David up north are having some of us in for dinner the weekend before Thanksgiving. I've promised pie. Then I'll go down to Bucuresti. We've been invited to the Ambassador's for the big day. I think I'll have to get out my velvety dress.

Til then, lots to do in Tulcea. Back to work tomorrow. And I hope I'll have more to report on my secondary project soon. I had a successful meeting on Friday with a dear woman who runs a social service agency here, something to do on weekends.

*Note to Andrew's Mom: I saw him. He looks good--healthy, contented, engaged. I hope you are proud of him and proud of yourselves for raising him.

Attitude Adjustment

Getting an attitude adjustment, I was thinking, is like having a lobotomy—except that you have to do it every week or two. Recently however, on the occasion of receiving a Trader Joe’s care package encasing more sin than Beatty, Nevada, I remembered a handy lesson from my dear friend Bob, the sender saint of said package. Bob once gave me some advice on being in awkward social situations—dinner parties with strangers, party parties with strangers, car rides with strangers: play 20 questions. OK, not the real 20 questions, but your own “I have 20 questions to figure out what is interesting about this person.” And even if it feels like a bust, it’s a good way to pass the time. And until you get to 20, you MUST KEEP GOING. I think if you get to 20 and the person still isn’t interesting or interested, you’re off the hook.

So as I devoured my chocolate-covered-peanut-butter-filled-pretzels (read that one again slowly, droolers) I wondered if this advice somehow relates to my current situation of growing frustration over the lack of anyone in Tulcea, Romania caring if I am here or not. What if I can’t even think about starting to hint of complaining until I have made twenty valiant, long-term attempts at integration. So far, at best, I’ve gone out of my way to get to know ten people. Wow, not even halfway there and I’m getting cranky! So last weekend, instead of moping and complaining about things like “I wish I had my binder with all my downloaded songs in it…wah, wah, wah,” I actually downloaded fifty-some songs which I’ll print out one of these days. Then I started researching NGO’s in Tulcea to see if any orphanage in town needed help on weekends. And yeah, I listened to too much weekend NPR, but instead of feeling guilty about it, I let myself enjoy it while I made quiche.

Then the new week started, and the universe smiled back with a vengeance. I received an open invitation to all Romanian PCV’s to come to some cool meetings in a city north called Iasi. I secured free lodging and affordable transportation. The rain stopped. I found a great quote about butterflies and light in my Rob Brezney horoscope. Fiddlin’ Pete responded to my previous blogpost. And then, best of all, the woman at the NGO I contacted, wrote me back saying roughly, “I rejoice very much at your message, no one least you can imagine. You chose a moment in which I am very discouraged, this morning I cried. I am not succeeding to face the problems anymore. I believe that God sent you to give me hope to keep going.” I can’t argue with that. I need a purpose and she needs hope. We’re having coffee tomorrow.

So, in summary:

the up and down ride of a Peace Corps Volunteer…followed by the heading-for-the-rocks falling, flailing, sinking-into-oblivion feeling…Wait! What’s that I see? Is it a butterfly?maybe I could become a butterfly…and fly off and live in the sunshine…"It is eternity now; I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is immortal life." - Richard Jefferies

Cooking, Romanian Style

I have talked briefly here about some of the fine culinary experiences of Romania—the roadside barbecue, stuffed peppers, and chicken legs. There is more to know. I will say, however, that Romanians are not known for their food, especially—not like the Italians, Greeks, or French. But also not negatively like the poor Brits! Romanian food, it seems to me, is a culture of necessity and deep tradition. The food is good, but were I not a Peace Corps volunteer with a blog, I would probably not find it anything to write home about. Since I am a PCV, feeding myself here for 2+ years, a few things are worth noting.

Bread: Ah, forgive me Romania, but bread is not your forte. We are a country in love with bread, but to my liking, it falls short. Bread here tends to be bland, pale, and it falls apart too easily. I can buy it fresh-baked or sliced in plastic. I think the problem falls, once again, to Communism. For so many decades, people of little means were forced to eat dark, heavy bread. White bread was a luxury for the privileged class. Today, when people can buy what they like (more or less, and certainly bread) bland white bread is what people want. Ugh. I do have one grocery that sells moderately dark rolls with sesame seeds on them. I buy those when I can. We also have a product known as covrig (plural covrigi). This is dough shaped into a ring, most resembling a street pretzel, but not nearly as salty (alas). These were very popular in Târgovişte, and Gina fed them too me at every meal (even breakfast, until I clearly established that I wanted only yogurt, banana, and muesli—not omelet, ham, sausage, cheese, and other things that would call out for bready accompaniment). Covrigi are harder to find in Tulcea and we only eat them as snack here, not meal accompaniment.

Pastry: We do love the bread/sugar combination here. Pastry shops are very common. In the small community of Greci, next to the park, there is a cake/cookie factory. Their products are in all the city stores. In Greci, a small patiserie faces the town triangle and is a nice place to get a beverage, cake, coffee, etc. before or after a hike. They say the éclairs are better at the store itself because they can use fresh ingredients that don’t travel well out of town. That may mean I’m eating raw eggs, not sure. And in town, I can pass three or four pastry shops on my way to work. If I bring struedels or donuts to work, my coworkers can make a day’s eating off those. We also have something here called pie which is more like a strudel or an empanada-style pocket food. I made an American apple pie for my coworkers, which I thought was delicious and a fine example of pie. They commented nicely, but it did not get all eaten—until I took it home and did so. So I’ll not make pie again for Romanians. I’ll have to figure out what is so good about Romanian pie. Or stick to my chocolate chip cookies which seem to be more popular.

Breakfast: At training, when I lived with Gina, it seemed to me that they wanted to feed us breakfast as if we were to go work a farm all day without lunch. Honestly, she made me enough food for three meals. I have never even considered a 5-egg omelet—yet there it was entirely for my consumption along with my tomato and cucumber salad and my aforementioned yogurt, banana, and muesli. Gina, bless her heart, would make any assortment of French fries, sausage, ham, cheese, fried eggs—all of it absolutely delicious—for my breakfast as I headed out to sit at a desk all day, and be fed a large lunch. It helps if you can cry on command, because another day with yet more food, I almost did cry. It wasn’t long after that that I won the breakfast battle and my intestines returned to normal. Other trainees were having similar problems and battles. Previously I had considered my big bowl of breakfast to be just that—big. Today, I am smart and tell people that I really can’t eat breakfast, not so early in the day (anyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with eating breakfast). That way I can get away with just having toast and jam, or something similar instead of a side of pork.

Lunch: During our 11 weeks of training in Târgovişte, we had lunch ladies who served us in the school cafeteria. We were told repeatedly that lunch is the most important meal to Romanians, and that is why throughout the heat of summer we were served both soup and a hot meal every day. More on soup in a minute, but egads! In the summer? Anyway, I do like the idea of a big lunch and then a simple dinner. I sat at the vegetarian table and we often had cold, fried soy patties or (blessed day!) fried cheese. But usually we had the same lunch as the carnivores, minus the meat and added some fried zucchini or eggplant or mushrooms. With sides of cabbage or potatoes or another vegetable. And always white bread which was good to sop up soup. Nothing fancy, but wholesome enough. Here in Tulcea, my coworkers rarely eat lunch, and certainly not when the Director is around. I don’t think this is the norm; Aurelia, my tutor, works for a private firm and they get normal breaks and lunches. She is surprised that we don’t. Anyway, I always eat lunch, and occasionally they join me. We tend to eat breads and spreads and salads. I have found a pretty good vegetable pate in a tin. And soft cheeses that spread nicely and are pretty cheap. I sometimes take tuna or egg salad. We also share a lot of things. Whether it’s our actual lunch, or someone will bring chocolate or fruit or pastries. We also have a cup of coffee at some point in the day, and I’ve brought a half-kilo of coffee to share for that too…So I don’t know what to believe about the importance of lunch. Again, if you’re a farmer you want a big lunch. In an office, something more modest suffices.

Dinner: In Târgovişte, Gina served perfect dinners, albeit much too big at the beginning. Nearly every night, I ate a bowl of stewed vegetables with a chicken leg floating in it. Sometimes we had fried or mashed potatoes, although we also had a stewed potato/floating chicken leg option. Along with the hot dish, there was also a bowl of soup or a cabbage salad. This is generally where it got to be too much. But the food was all delicious and very healthy. Oh, of course, with the covrigi.

Pork: Although I didn’t get much in Târgovişte, my life has become largely about pork. If Romania has a national food, it is pork. Someone I met joked that his favorite vegetable is pork. I have joked before about all the chicken legs, which are cheap. But the real show is pig meat. I’ve seen cows, a few, but I think they are mainly for milk—milk, butter, yogurt, and sour cream are readily available in stores. We also have goats and sheep, also I think more for the dairy than the meat. Maybe wool too, I haven’t studied our sheep culture too much yet. But pork is king. The tradition in small communities is to kill the family pig just before Christmas for a year’s worth of nutritional goodness. Part of the tradition involves a slow, rather unbearable (and unbearable sounding) death for the pig. Part of the agreement for Romania joining the European Union is the outlawing of this practice, but I don’t think that’s going well—pigs still die the slow way here. Anyway, many of the most significant foods here in Romania are pork-based: I’ve already discussed pork-y Romanian bbq and my favorite stuffed peppers. Even more important to the national culinary psyche is sarmale. This is the stuffed cabbage roll that takes many forms around this part of the world. I have not yet made sarmale, but I’ve been given directions and I would like to share them:
• Pickle your cabbage. You can evidently buy, at the piaţa in winter, leaves of pickled cabbage ready to be sarmale-d. Or you can put your own head of cabbage in brine, covered, for a few weeks or months. Or you can use a shortcut and buy a package of special lemon salt and soak you cabbage overnight in its brine. Anyway, you can’t use raw cabbage.
• Mix your pork. This is the same recipe as for my stuffed peppers, and here’s how I do it: 1 kilo of ground pork. Ground pork is ubiquitous here, fresh or frozen. Cook a cup of rice, I use plain white rice because it’s what we’ve got. Saute 2 onions and a few finely diced carrots, throw in some chopped parsley. They use a lot of lovage here, which although not tasting like parsley does serve a similar generic herb purpose. Because I happen to have garlic powder, I throw some of that in too. And salt and pepper. Mix all your ingredients together.
• If you are making peppers, you now stuff your empty peppers, pile them into your large soup pot, cover with a 50/50 mix of broth and tomato juice, and simmer till done (45 minutes or so).
• If you are making sarmale, you cut your cabbage sheets into rectangles, fill, and roll. No idea how Romanians keep them together. I’m not above using toothpicks.
• Put your 50/50 mix in the pot. I like using vegetable broth. If you can find pork broth, use it. But I wouldn’t use chicken or beef, using veggie keeps it neutral. Put a cabbage leaf down on the bottom to take the brunt of any burn. Then layer your little sarmale gems into the pot for cooking—again probably in the neighborhood of 45 minutes.
• I find that the peppers are better the next day, like lasagna. Don’t know about sarmale. You can also make stuffed rolls with grape leaves; that was the first meal Gina served me. Yummmm. Oh, and they are supposed to be served with sour cream, which I can’t stand but perhaps you find delicious. And in winter, wouldn’t it be good to serve them with a salad of beets, walnuts, and oranges? “Pofta buna,” which is what we say instead of bon appétit!

Soup: Any culture worth its salt knows that soup is an excellent way to eat nutritiously and cheaply. A curious variation on soup here is ciorba (chor-buh), which is sour soup. It has an ingredient which is like fermented lemon juice. I don’t really get it myself; it’s not bad, just sort of sour, and can have ingredients just like many other soups. I often see the signboard at a restaurant down the street advertising “ciorba de burta,” burta being stomach. Mmm, sour tripe soup. Generally soup here is just the regularly vegetable kind, often featuring one particular vegetable, like green beans, or with chicken or beans. When Adela was telling me about her recent wedding and describing the food, I asked if there had been a soup. No, of course not, soup is peasant food—not for a wedding. So I guess getting married means that for one day you don’t eat soup. Being a fan of soup, I like the soup culture and make my own soup. I’ve got a white bean and rice soup in the fridge now with tomatoes, onions, carrots, etc., aided by my care package spices from home: cumin, coriander, and Cajun spice.

Coffee: Gina didn’t make coffee at home; we drank tea. So every morning, I stopped at the corner store and bought a coffee from Elena and Doina. They, like most similar establishments, had a push-button machine that made a small amount of coffee that is then served in a plastic Dixie-type cup, generally very strong. Today, I rarely buy coffee out as I can make it at home, and we have our workday coffee. But we don’t have normal coffee pots. We have ibrics. An ibric is a little pot that goes on the stovetop, higher than it is around, and with a single long handle. I boil water in the ibric with a bit of sugar, then when boiling, I add a few scoops of very finely ground coffee to the water. Remove it from the heat and let it sit for five minutes or so, for the coffee to settle to the bottom. It’s very simple, and I’ve found I’ve gotten used to a little sediment in my coffee. It’s really not that much. And we drink it out of little cups, not mugs like at home. Most people don’t drink it with milk, but sometimes I do at home, particularly if I’ve added too much coffee and it’s ridiculously strong. And coffee time at work is such a nice treat. We don’t take a break for it, of course, but it’s a nice mental break to have my cup of sweet strong goodness.

The Dream: Kauflands is a chain grocery from Germany and we had one in Târgovişte. There are signs advertising a new Kauflands here in Tulcea next to what really does appear to be an active construction site. Kauflands has bread/roll bins with whole grain seeded rolls. If you slice them open and eat them with the soft, spready cheeses and some sliced tomatoes, you can imagine it’s a bagel all the way from Essa’s on 1st Avenue. Also Kauflands sells a sushi-making kit with nori, rice, vinegar, and a rollie mat. Melody sent me powdered wasabi that waits patiently in the cupboard. Sushi and bagels. In Romania. I’ll be good and eat my ciorba and learn to make sarmale and have grit in my coffee. But who would deprive me, so far from Yamatani and the Great Basin Bakery and the Ithaca Bakery, a little dream…

Rain, Rain, Rain

All around my world, this has been the week that winter arrived. Here in Tulcea, we are having rain--five days in a row now forecasted. And elsewhere in the country, volunteers are experiencing the first snow of the season. The Sierra Nevada were hit with their first snowstorm this past week as well, raining in the Owens Valley. Mom emails that upstate New York is expecting 6-8 inches of snow today. Erin reports the Wyoming snow on facebook. The other Delta, New Orleans, had some flooding (three feet of water in parts of Eastbank), writes Ami. And Larry flew back to England today after six summer months in Texas, which will feel like winter no matter the weather.

My week, workwise, has actually had some purpose--and I still have quite a bit of work to do before I can call a weekend. Adela gave me three tasks: 1. Help her pull together text for a park brochure; 2. Develop some lesson plans (specifics to follow); and 3. come up with ideas for hosting a Biodiversity Day for schoolchildren in partnership with our local Danube Delta museum. YAY!! Projects. Work. (Let's ignore for the time being that we're not sure any of these projects will grow wings.)

First, the brochure. Two weeks ago today, Friday, my director told me that we have money from an EU grant to create a new brochure. He handed me a glossy park brochure from a park in Austria, the brochure being incredibly similar to a glossy that you'd get at any National Park in America. OK, good sign, I thought. He is drawn to quality... But then, as I was imagining our possibilities, he started discussing how many pages our brochure would have, indicating that the glossy would not be our model. I spent the weekend pulling together some other examples to show him. Then the following Monday we had a meeting with some well-dressed stranger who, it became obvoius, was going to be making our brochure. Good=I'm not responsible for pulling off this project in an impossible time frame (the end of the month); bad=so much for my new project. One week later, this past Monday, Adela asks me if I've done anything for the brochure. I say, no, I thought dapper dude was making our brochure. Well, yes, but we need to get him some text. So while Adela cut and pasted a lot of info from our website and other sources, I contributed the one thing I could think of in our Romanian race against time: I said, "We need a message from the Director, and while we're at it, a message from our Biologist." Oh, they don't have time to do that, said Adela. That is why WE, as the interpretive staff, write it for them. We don't want them to write it anyway. (I won't divulge all my secrets, such as having people read out loud the quotes you write for them so that it is true that they said them) And in this way, there are now four paragraphs--in what is looking more and more like a book--that are interpretive: they contain ideas and abstract values, instead of simply facts, figures, directions, and names. Strike me down, Sam Ham, it was the best I could do. And Adela loved it.

Second, the lesson plans. From early on in training, it was emphasized to me that I would probably be doing a lot of environmental ed in the classroom. While I don't fancy myself a teacher, nor overly enjoy this type of stuff, two things are true: it's incredibly valuable here, and I love developing lessons. Alas, I don't really know if I'll have the opportunity, and I wish we did. Adela is great with kids, and her job title includes env. ed. so we are dreaming of the opportunity. This week she tasked me with two different lessons: the first is an hour-long, stand-alone, lesson on plastic; the second is a three-parter, with a visit to the park included, on any relevant subject that I can make work. Ultimately, we will write a proposal to present to the person in charge of such things at the school, and enter into a formal partnership to present such lesson/s. It's a very formal process here, which strikes me as odd since they don't have anything like standards that we are familiar with in the states. But I shall play the game. So I spent one whole day creating a three-parter about biodiversity, since that is a huge theme at our park--with our truly unique diversity of life--and one of my favorite topics in general. I used some great lesson plans from the Great Basin National Park website and some Peace Corps ed resources and created a one-hour in-class, followed by a two-hour park visit, followed by a one-hour in-class wrap-up. Lots of games and activities. I handed the English version off to Adela before she headed out for three days of meetings in Brasov. I hope to have it translated by Monday. Then I set my sights on plastic. Found a great lesson plan from the NYTimes. Modified that for Romania, and added a Tzu-Chi video about recycling plastic bottles into blankets. Must finish translating that as well. The theme of this lesson is that we can do a better job of making the life cycle of plastic truly a circular model. Blah, blah, blah, recycle. But it's a lot more interesting than just how bad plastic is for the environment. Turns out the plastics industry is right--we do need plastic. But the rivers and oceans don't. Ugh, there is trash everywhere here--along the streets and roads, in the park, in the waterways. My friend Julie who served in Bulgaria ten years ago tells a not-so-funny funny story about arranging a large trash clean-up of a river, then lamenting afterwards that they hadn't taken a "before" photo: "Without missing a beat, another volunteer quipped 'Just wait a week or two. Then we can take the 'before' shot.' And verily it came to pass." It is popular with volunteers here to organized trash clean-ups, but I find myself too cynical to attempt that; in truth, though, that type of thing is not about the trash, it's about civic engagement which is the name of the game. Anyway, to come back...I like my plastic-y lesson plan.

Third, biodiversity day. We have, on our enviro calendar, a world Biodiversity Day on December 29th. Alas, who works anywhere in the Christian world that time of year? But we'd like to do something partner-y with our friends at the Danube Delta museum, a very nice facility a block from our office. And as I said, we love us some biodiversity (you should too!!) so it makes sense, in the slow season of January, to make our own Biodiversity Day. I haven't even touched this project yet, but it is right up my alley. I love planning things-events, dinner parties, trips, classes, and anything capitalized and ending in "Day." I see face paint...scavenger hunts...musical chairs...

Today is Friday. Adela will be back Monday. I have stayed home today, due to the rain. In anticipation, I brought my work materials home with me. I'll finish tranlating my lesson plans today. Then tomorrow, instead of going to the countryside to see another monestary (in the rain) I'll go to the Delta Museum where I have been before, but now with the eye of having an event there. They also have a temporary exhibit on stuf that I've wanted to see.

Would be great if any of this could happen: brochure, classroom visits, BioDay. If it does, you'll read about it here...

More Letters From the Land of Small

And Then I Cried For Real

The week started out dismal and grew, as Veronica puts it, craptastically crappy. We had a meeting where a project that I thought was being given to me—to create a comprehensive park brochure—was actually being contracted out. Better, actually, given the impossible time frame. But after a long meeting in rapid Romanian, my director asked me if I had any comments. Not knowing what had already been discussed (I understood in general, but not details) I said I didn’t really know how to comment on it, as the contractor is packing up… Then I tried to ask for some information from another coworker about some field guides that I’m trying to order. Easily available, mind you, on Amazon.uk except that we don’t have credit cards, can’t send a check, and Amazon doesn’t take Western Union. I’ve been tasked to get them because others have failed and I speak English. Well, I found a few of them through a Romanian book company that my tutor told me about. But my coworker doesn’t know about my task, so she’s a bit freaked out that I’m about to spend that much money. Of course she’s been in the room for all of the conversations about me finding these books, but because it does not involve her, she hasn’t paid attention—actually a pretty good survival strategy in our office. But it adds to the frustration about the lack of communication in general that pervades our work life. I almost teared up telling Aurelia, my fantastic tutor about it (honestly, she’s part therapist! as long as I say it in Romanian).

Finally, Tuesday, I order the books, after more ridiculousness over whether I have the authority to order the books. Came home and roasted a chicken, adding the following note to my facebook: Roasting a whole chicken for the first time in forever. Yeah, it came with its feet, but they were wrapped up nicely inside with the tasty guts and made a smooth transition right into the garbage. Bad PC volunteer. Eh, when you can buy a chicken, plucked and cleaned at the grocery store and then cook it in an oven that holds 375 pretty well, can you really call it a PC experience? Will someone tell me why I’m here? (Bless you: Ami for your awe, and Tom of accusing me of having skills)

I decided I needed a field trip to the park on Thursday, since Adela is out most of the week (nobody’s getting paid anyway, half the country took the week off in protest) and I don’t have tutoring after work on Thursday. Alas, even though I can take the bus out there by myself and hike by myself, it turns into something else entirely. Wednesday afternoon, my director tells me not to go to Luncaviţa, but to Greci, and meet Bogdan our biologist. OK, not sure why, but evidently this way I can go into the park with Bogdan. It only becomes apparent on reaching Greci Thursday morning that my director had documents that needed to get to Bogdan and I was supposed to take them and that he waited for me at the bus station for half an hour. Alas, he was waiting for the bus that I would have taken to Luncaviţa, while I had gotten an earlier bus to Greci, having no idea that he was intending to meet me at the bus station. I’m sure it was just a mistake of language when he accused me, later over the phone, of lying to him.

And then I spent my field day with rangers Cristi and Silviu GPS’ing an old forest road as a bicycle tourist track and never got to my destination of the beech forest. Nevermind, it was fun and relaxed. Silviu asked me at one point if I was bored. Never in nature, I honestly replied. And they were very nice to be with, speaking in calm, slow Romanian so that I could actually converse with them. Cristi even laughed and told me that when our director speaks so fast, he doesn’t even understand him sometimes. Then at the end of the day, Bogdan picked us up on the other side of the park. In the morning, I’d agreed to spend the night (although unprepared for it). So we went to his house and fed his dog and cat and looked at his garden, then went to the house of his girlfriend’s family.Bogdan and Mariana, above, and below, oxen pulling a cart getting it's tire filled with a pneumatic pump.We made a barbecue and they had friends over. Her mom thought my hair was a hoot and marveled over every Romanian phrase that I said. And later as the not-too-cold night continued and the food was good and the company was pleasant, my ear for Romanian was spent. Bogdan asked me at one point if I understood, and I responded that I was picking up enough words that I could create my own story about what they were talking about. For instance, one friend asked Bogdan and Mariana if they had plans to get married and Bogdan said that he had his dog, and then his friend asked him where he could buy one (my version). I spent the night in a spare bed at Mariana’s and she took me into the park’s field office in the morning (after she made me yummy coffee), where I waited for Bogdan to finish some papers for our director and he put me on a bus back to town (1.5 hours). Note to the girlscout in me: congratulations for always carrying the headlamp, extra water and food; think about always carrying a toothbrush in the future.

Finally made it back to the office, and then home and had tutoring. Aurelia and I talked about our Nobel Prize winner for literature: Romanian born Herta Müller. Aurelia said that she didn’t need to read Müller because she, Aurelia, knows enough about living under Communism to last her a lifetime, but that it would probably be good for me to track down her books. I’m anxious to do that and to increase my perspective of those horrible times here. And I mean horrible. On the bus ride out to the park, I pass the remnants of a couple of collective farms, now abandoned and falling down.

And speaking of the bus, on the ride home, which I quite enjoy because of the scenery and the relaxability factor, the radio was blaring as usual: an odd blend of Romanian folk favorites, the latest Whitney Houston, and a lot of 80’s new wave classics. Then, beautifully and poetically and well-timed, my week was all brought into perspective for me by John Lennon’s Imagine. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one.” And I cried a little, really, finally having something worth crying over—certainly not the frustrations of my office, but rather a purpose, as intangible as it might be. I must keep reminding myself that it doesn’t really matter if I make a brochure or order some books, although those things are helpful. What matters is that I share good times with people who are astonished to come across me, like John Nichols wrote of the sheepherders he came across out bumbling around his northern New Mexico landscape being the “oddball gringo in the middle of nowhere.” And that I expend all of my energy not becoming frustrated and angry. Certainly the people here do not need a lesson in that; they’re full up.

And tomorrow we begin again. Imagine…

Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Got a wonderful letter this week from my NPS friend, Loretta. It’s the time of year that we should be getting together for a picnic up in the Yosemite area. Must instead be grateful for the time we have shared in the past. And the letter!

Loretta shares her musings on a book that I sent her by Terry Tempest Williams titled, “Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Terry tells of spending time with the prairie dog researchers at Bryce Canyon. That’s where I met Loretta and she lived right next to the prairie dog colony and knew those folks and their work. Terry’s book also interweaves stories of Italian mosaic-making, and the aftermath of horror in Rwanda. I like her work because it is about Utah and the land and the people, life, death, and hard-won survival. Loretta shares this passage, “’This is how I know God,’ Louis says.” He says this to Terry, his adopted American mother, Loretta explains, as they sit on a granite cliff overlooking the Maine seashore. “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find…Finding beauty in a broken world becomes more than the art of assembling. It is the work of daring contemplation that inspires action.” Throwing down the gauntlet, Loretta asks?

In the midst of the news of the suffering on Samoa and in Indonesia and Vietnam, a sad friend tells of the suicide of a young man she cares very much about. We lose touch, we don’t know… How much distance is there, alas, between our precious souls that one so dear cannot be reached. And with such finality that it cannot be reassembled. A piece of my friend’s heart becomes part of a mosaic that tells the story of this human experience.

I suspect Loretta’s place to know God is somewhere in her beautiful Sierra Nevada, near a tall pine tree that smells good in the warm sunshine. I know that pine tree, and mine is near a lake. Or where the sun comes streaming down through oak trees to the waiting sunflowers. And I breathe in the sunlight and promise each day, with renewed strength, to be a part of creating something better. The world doesn’t look quite as broken if I can smile.

And Then the Government Collapsed

Coalition Government in Romania Collapses

I don't think this is really that unusual, or problematic for my life. My coworkers haven't been paid in two months anyway. But it does point up why they still need services like Peace Corps. At least the California government hasn't collapsed yet, right? RIGHT?

Not Sure Where to Begin

So I’ll start with Sunday. I had a nice little aventura on an autobuz to a mănăstire. See, Romanian’s not that hard to learn. Ugh. OK, nice monastery. Went inside, head covered, kneeled til my knees were numb, then headed back out into the sunshine. I’ve realized that it’s acceptable, more or less, to come and go at an Orthodox service. Of course it’s better if you do go for three hours… Then walked 6 km down the road to another town with a little museum. Couldn’t find the museum on my own so I bought a really big cauliflower from a woman on the street as an excuse to ask her for directions. Made for a nice outing. Came home and cooked for Tuesday.Translated, we have plastic, glass, metal, and paper. Alas, it's noteworthy. I know, you've seen cows before, but isn't she pretty in her bell. there were cows and sheep together in the field, with their herders nearby, chatting in the grass.

Monday attended a meeting with park staff, mayors, some other interested parties about this road that the granite quarry wants to build through the park for their trucks. We had the meeting at a conference room in a local hotel, so they made us coffee and pastries. My lack of language skills pretty much necessitated noticing the coffee as the highlight of the day.

Tuesday. Made my pork-stuffed peppers on Sunday, plus an American-style apple pie. They have something they call pie here, and it’s good, but it’s more like struedel—rolled up. Cooked all this fabulous food in preparation for dinner guests Tuesday night. More about that in a minute. My director, last minute, invited me to come on the field trip of mucky-mucks to the park on Tuesday. He could not guarantee me arrival at home by 5 p.m. but I figured there are these little autobuzurile (plural-ish) running around the county. So I went. We were looking very good on schedule until at the very end we swung into a restaurant, just when I thought we were heading home. OK, poor communication. The problem is, my director actually speaks English. Fortunately I was able to hail down the little autobuz, and I was only an hour and a half late getting home and my friends met me (stinky, tired, dirty) at the bus station. The lesson that I’m learning doesn’t seem to be “go with the flow” but rather “don’t be just prepared, be super extraordinarily prepared for anything.”The spoils of a trip to the piata. Notice our peppers are light green, and they taste milder than green peppers in the states. Although there are other peppers here, these are the stuffers.

And so because I was super extraordinarily prepared, dinner was a grand success. My guests were: our Peace Corps Romanian doctor from Bucuresti; our PCRO safety and security officer from Buc; and a visiting doctor from PC Washington. They were on a tour, and the visit served many purposes, including my apartment inspection and my mandatory flu shot. Seemed a little crazy in retrospect to actually cook Romanian food for Romanians, when they would have happily taken me out for dinner. But I think they got an accurate view of my life and my apartment. And the pie turned out really well, even though (yeah Dad, I know…) I forgot to put the cinnamon and nutmeg in with the apples and ended up sprinkling it on top, as an afterthought. Anyway, these men are all very warm and wonderful. Only problem was that they each had their round of questions for me and I don’t think I let them get a word in at all. As I've said before of PCRO, it’s nice to have these people on my team. They deserve to be well fed. Oh, and I also fed them the must (fresh, rapidly fermenting grape juice) from my neighbor. I didn’t want it, and turns out they loved it. YAY!

Wednesday, I thought I was going to more meetings but was suddenly and abruptly not invited. Did get an invitation to go back out to the park today (Thursday), but I had to go to the poşta and get a package. I can only pick up packages on Monday and Thursday from 1-3 p.m. The park will wait. I got to revel in some new kitchen goodies from my sister, notecards, thumbtacks, and Wallace Stegner’s “Marking the Sparrow’s Fall” which will reinspire me about the mission of national parks and all things natural, in general. Stegner’s legacy is as one of the premier thinkers and writers on what the west ("out west") means to the human and American spirit. Funny, our visiting doctor asked me what on earth I found appealing about the desert. Lovely man to offer me such a grand stage on which to speak. And great thanks to my dear sister and her creativity, even if she does need to learn to wrap that peanut butter better. Aye, the casualty.

And now, for all the adventures of my little life, I am watching with great dismay the suffering of disasters in southeast Asia. As you may know, the National Park Service has a site in American Samoa that currently employs two of our former Manzanar people. Fortunately they are marathon runners and super-hikers and were able to run it out. I think they have earned themselves a Tzu-Chi blanket and I hope they have the help they need in the days and weeks to come. I know the NPS is mobilizing an emergency response team to go there, and we already have a specially trained representative on the ground working with FEMA. In case anyone is particularly interested in this story, another member of the NPS community there is keeping a blog. I don’t know this woman, but the story is important and maybe somehow we can help: tropicalbrowns.blogspot.com