I look back to the idyllic couple of days spent with my daughter in the first week of February. Introducing her to the best of Macedonian cooking – shopska salad, selecting fresh meat from a platter and by far her favorite, mountain tea, which is surprisingly available only as the fresh plant and not yet packaged by some intrepid entrepreneur. Watching her look of surprise when drinking rakia, the high alcoholic content drink,
followed by pivo (beer) and then some wine during the fancy meal! Traveling to the aforementioned town of Ohrid, first in a Yugo (remember the Yugo?) through a heavy snowstorm and then by public transport – an intercity bus. The driver driving dangerously fast on the slippery mountain roads! We stayed at an elegant waterfront rooming house with a private bedroom and ensuite bathroom facing the lake in the old town area. We were able to walk to and from the landmarks and stroll through the empty post-season streets of the market. The joy of watching a DVD movies together at night and even the pleasure of introducing her to my new ‘opstina’ family at work or just deciding simultaneously to forgo wandering around the city of Bitola in pouring rain.

Back home in the States, all was not all well and I had to fly home suddenly on the 10th when my husband landed in the hospital with meningitis and needed surgery to clear the problem disks in the neck region of the spine! He is well on his way to recovery – but it took me away from site for the remainder of the month!

January Wrap-up

Editor's note: Though I wrote this piece back on February 1st, events caught me off-guard and delayed the posting till today. After much debate with myself, I decided that I will go ahead and post this and quickly follow-up with last month's news.

In the last week of January things have started coming together at my workplace. I am comfortable in my adjunct role as a teacher of conversational English, which in turn has created an atmosphere of learning and sharing. I have started understanding many of the functions of the workplace and find everyone more forthcoming about what they are doing as they realize my understanding of their explanations in Macedonian and English was getting better. Soon we will be able to exchange complex ideas along PDM lines. This is an exciting time of discovery for me as I begin to see possibilities.
I am also involved with Camp Glow, a brainchild of a Peace Corps volunteer in another country a few years ago. It is a girl’s leadership camp and its design has been adopted successfully across the globe. In Macedonia it is in it’s 5th year, bringing approximately 80 girls in the 14-18 year age bracket from all areas and ethnicities in Macedonia for a week in the summer. Many of the participants have returned time and time again as junior and senior counselors, putting into practice the skills they learned!
What an invigorating and exciting time, rejuvenating me with the possibilities and reinforcing the choice I made to become a volunteer. Things are going well at the home front too– and I am more relaxed and have fewer daily obligations compared to those back home. My only challenge seemed to be able to create new dishes from the available ingredients and at times I miss ingredients such as whole-wheat flour to make Indian roti, paratha and poori etc. However, I do manage to create tastes of home, like the sandwiches I wrote about in my last posting.
To top all this, I am going to have another family member visit me. One daughter is coming for a few days, arriving in three days on February 4. Although not ideal weather - a bit cold but nonetheless we plan to spend the weekend in the city of Ohrid, listed in the New York Times travel guide as one of the 30 places to visit in 2010.