One and a Half Year Later

This month 50 years ago, Americans responded viscerally to the clarion call of our government and the Peace Corps was established. Thousands of young Americans signed up to travel to different countries for twenty-seven months with only a rudimentary knowledge of the local language and culture, living far away from loved ones and familiar surroundings.  The mission then and as it is today, is to provide technical help of an unknown nature, adapting and developing ideas from learned theoretical processes and applying them to the situation at hand.  This, together with sharing American culture and values and bringing back an understanding of the local culture and mores to share with others at home is what PC service is all about!

Though it could be argued that volunteers are more prepared than ever with information available through high tech gadgets and the internet, this visceral response remains the same today as it was 50 years ago. Even with 7% of the volunteers over 50 years old and an average of 28 years today, volunteers are still open to the idea of learning a new language and culture, choosing months of maybes, why not’s and lets see coupled with days of isolation and loneliness, just because beneath it all they are cocksure and foolhardy to think that they can conquer anything, anytime or anywhere.

The PC mantra is not only a safe and moral choice about helping others, but it is also to prove to ourselves that we can do it.  Though we sign up for any number of reasons and use different coping skills, each one finds an inner strength to live, work and return, with a better understanding of self and that all human relationships are based on fragile, cultural norms.

Macedonians I have learned define nationality by culture, tribal or bloodlines, and not by territory or citizenship. So, the citizens’ are Macedonians, Albanian, Roma, Vlach, Bosniaks, Turks, etc. even if they have lived here for hundreds of years! My readings of the Balkan people suggest that it is also true elsewhere in this region of Europe.  The people are not integrated in the rural towns and villages; they live parallel lives, at times with little or no social interaction beyond public life.  In small towns and villages they remain segregated and a recent fight between two students (one from a neighboring town (Turks) and one from here (Macedonian) at the local high school quickly took on an ominous overtones of them and us..

Beyond that great divide, a year and a half later, I no longer see Macedonia with ‘foreign’ eyes, loosing that observer mindset, as the daily activities concerned with work and life have insidiously seeped into me.  I enjoy the “let life happen” attitude and take things and events as they come, with a shared sense of working towards common goals and a collegial feeling with coworkers.  The focus of local government is still on finding ways to get grant money to take care of ambitious municipal projects, to rebuild the town in the manner of a great metropolitan city and less on improving maintenance of the infrastructure or encouraging investment in the shuttered factories in town.

Though I still have difficulty fully comprehending the subtext of a Macedonian conversation, the mothers’ voice the same concerns and anxieties I had about raising kids. We are equally concerned over changes in generational values and mores. Yet I see the comfort and ease with which different age groups talk and interact with each other.  This may be more widespread in the villages and small towns with fewer economic resources, but is in stark contrast to the trendy adult living communities, in the US where families with children cannot purchase or rent a home.

On a closing note, I met an incredible woman, a soul sister, separated not by ideas or thoughts, only by a different language.  We manage to communicate and understand abstract notions by a combination of hand gestures, analogies, and isolated Macedonian and English vocabulary, albeit occasional misunderstandings.  Once she told me that if only she could speak English, together we could introduce new ideas in her school and community filled me with hope for the future!

Airplanes, Airports and Destinations

When I first boarded that Air India flight in August of 1970, I was as much in awe of the opportunity to cross the ocean by air as today's generation would be of boarding a commercial rocket. Though I grew up on an air force base with Dakota's and DC-3's buzzing in the air and even got a turn at the wheel of a 'glider' in the city of Poona while in high school, I was impressed by the spacious cabin and service of the flight attendant. Were they even called flight attendants in those days or steward and stewardess?

Back then my family walked with me on the tarmac to the plane's boarding steps at Delhi airport - which was just an expanded air force station. As I entered the plane they retreated to the safety of the building, where they could stand and wave to one of the many faces peeping out of the windows as if they were waving to me.  I couldn't wait for my adventure to begin and since it must have been written all over my face, the steward quickly brought Air India Maharajah writing paper and a beautiful pen to start my scribblings right away.  I was bound for graduate studies at the University of Florida's Food Science Department in the College of Agriculture armed with the knowledge that once I reach Jacksonville, Florida all I will have to do is find the Greyhound Bus Station and make my way to the campus.  Alas, if I did write on that vellum, I didn't mail it home or save those scribblings.  So sporadically did I write letters that they didn't even fill the shoebox my mother kept my mail in.  Years later I found no letter written on the plane or my impressions of the world on my first long journey away from home. 

During this flight from Chicago to the city of Ohrid, Macedonia, I negotiated my way through a maze of security checkpoints arriving at my gate about half hour after I said good bye to my family at the check-in area of the airport. Gone from economy class was the linen service with it's starched white napkin and gleaming silverware, porcelain plates, complete with a glass goblet for water and in it's place I was handed a hastily made sandwich with a smear of mayonnaise, cheese and a lettuce leaf wrapped in cellophane and a plastic glass for water!  This modern airplane seat was narrow with just enough leg room for my knees to bump into the seat in front of me. Heaven forbid if (being in a window seat) I needed to go to the airplane's 2'x3' lavatory (who uses the word 'lavatory' any more?) to freshen up or use the toilet with the people sleeping soundly between me and the aisle.  It takes courage to wake them up and have them unbuckle and stand in the aisle for the few minutes even as I would have edged my way out, half-folding my body at the waist and trying not to rock the headrest of the passengers sitting in the row ahead. On the first and longest (7 hours and 45 minutes in the air and about one hour cumulatively before takeoff and after landing)) leg of my flight, I somehow managed to stay put even after drinking at least 4 glasses of water.

When my last segment of the flight into Macedonia from Zagreb, Croatia was delayed and diverted due to heavy fog blanketing the Skopje airport and most of the country and I was in a window seat - you can imagine my amazement that I could see clear to the ground without fog obstruction when we crossed over the mountain ranges south of Skopje.  I felt some of that same excitement I did on my first plane journey, when I tried to find landmarks I could identify and saw an odd shaped lake, which I excitedly told everyone on my descent was Lake Koziak- a dammed lake formed by the River Treska as it flows through a narrow gorge into Lake Matka and finally emptying itself into the River Vardar.  Vardar once lent it's name to northwestern Macedonia and may still! Only later after searching for the shape of the lake on "google earth" did I realize it was Lake Mavrovo that I spotted!

The plane flew south above a couple of mountain ranges separated by narrow valleys - which I believe has kept the ethnic Albanian communities relatively isolated from the rest of eastern Macedonia's villages and small towns. The valleys were a shade of deep green while the peaks were oasis of white snow and with the low altitude maintained by the pilot during this descent I could see the narrow mountain roads as they zigzagged along the sides of the mountains.

When we arrived around 3:30 pm at Ohrid, the city was not visible through the fog.  It took about 10 minutes for me to collect my baggage, roll it past customs and place it on an angled luggage belt to offload on the upper street level and into the arms of taxi drivers trying to grab your suitcase and negotiate with you into their unlicensed cabs. The airport authorities had lined up two buses to transport all the passengers to Skopje and though I hoped I could use them and hop off one third of the way at a city named Kichevo, I couldn't resist taking a cab right away to Kichevo, enabling me to board the connecting combi (minibus) to Makedonski Brod.  I had been worried with the flight delay that had I arrived at Skopje airport at that time, I would most likely have missed the last combi from Skopje to Brod and would have to knock at a fellow volunteer's door to put me up for the night or spend a fortune on a taxi to get home. Thank you heavy fog at Skopje!