Ok, ne problem.

Week one is over.

It went pretty fast and I have to say I’m not having a hard time adjusting or anything. My relationships with my host family members are getting richer all the time and I can’t wait to talk to them in Albanian. My hypothesis for why I am not freaking out is that I’m not particularly attached to any particular way of life. Shower without a curtain or showerhead holder? Ok no problem. Each strange food at every meal? No problem. Iron my underwear? Ok no problem. (Yes, they do that. There is decent reasoning too. Ironing serves as a way of sterilizing air dried clothes.) Being around people all the time? Surprisingly, no problem.

Im taking everything as it comes. Nothing has gotten me to the point of hysterics and I am skeptical that I will get there at all. Maybe once im on my own in skopje. I trust my host family implicitly, so much so that it does scare me a bit that I never once considered the fact that I am completely reliant on them.

I went to Cherkese today to meet Razija’s family. Razija was happy to drive the car. I had a great time with her family. And, I came home with the following in my bag: A Chicken Leg and a Package of Pantyhose. I didn’t eat lunch before we went to Cherkese because I had a feeling I would end up being offered about 10 different food items and about 5 glasses of regular Koka Kola. So we get there and round 1 is soda and Turkish coffee. Round 2 is soda refill, even though I declined. Round 3 is eat cookies. Round 4 is eat freshly cut melon (very yummy). Round 5 is eat chunks of strange, tart pears, compared to US pears, dipped in straight up sugar. Round 6 is someone pushing a bowl of seeds in my direction and me pretending not to see them. Round 7, more soda. Round 8- CHICKEN LEGS? That one came from left field. All of a sudden, I hear the word “Puhle” or however it is spelled and I know that means chicken. Then voila! Two Chicken legs are in front of me, on a left over foil bag from a snack mix. Well, I ate a leg. I don’t have enough Albanian skillz to politely decline and Razija tells me to eat it. No one else is eating anything so this is totally awwwwkwaard. After the one, I say thank you. Then, Albanian conversation directed at me, which amuses me since everyone knows I have no clue whats being said. The English speakers then tell me to take the other leg home! I try to say no, but that didn’t work any better than my other attempts at ‘jo’. So, I re-wrap the leftover leg of chicken in the snack mix foil and toss it in my bag.

On the way out, Razija’s sister in law shakes my hand, we exchange “diten e mir”s, and then she tucks a small box of knee high pantyhose into my hand. Why? I have no idea. I saw her and Razija’s mom pointing at my feet earlier, I was wearing black socks. Maybe girls don’t wear socks? I don’t know. But I now have some extra knee-hi pantyhose.

To get to Cherkese from Romanovce, you have to go through Kumanovo, if you are driving. There is a walking path to Cherkese, but it takes about 45 mins to walk and you need a big stick to ward off stray dogs. We roll back into Kumanovo after visiting and its shopping time. We pull up onto the sidewalk, that’s how you park your car in the Balkans, by the big market. As we walk toward the market, Razija checks the prices of peppers and tomatoes and eggplant from street vendors. I know what this means: Ayvar. Its ayvar time! Ayvar is this delicious spread that I have been eating for breakfast this week and I will definitely bring it back to the US. Razija cooks scrambled eggs and then mixes in ayvar. Yummms. After perusing the market, we walk back to the car and Razija buys her vegetables in bulk. I’ve never seen someone buy so much vegetables at once for non-commercial consumption. The peppers are now chilling out in the courtyard area drying.

After buying vegetables, we went to the stores to look for a huge pot/pan. Its gigantic. I’ll try to take a picture of it. I noticed that the store has all of the furnishings I’ve seen in our house or the houses of people we visit: the bedspread on my bed, the chai glasses, the bread dough plastic tub, the light fixtures. Everything.

We head over to the Musli Market and Razija charades to me that I can get anything I need with my money while we are here. We also meet a relative of Benson’s host family who works there AND speaks English. She helps me find tea bags, but there were no boxes of black tea. I wanted to make iced tea. I settled for mint tea.

I just got back tonight from another house for coffee/tea. The family had satellite tv and the father put BBC on. Well, can someone clue me in on what is going on in the global economy? I’m having the time of my life here in this fun little village but it looks like the rest of the world is falling apart financially. British banks are biting the dust? Are we totally screwed?

Kombi to Kumanovo

I shared the community 'bus' to town with my fellow trainees today. We got out at a market at a place that i thought i recognized- apparently i did not.

I took the scavenger hunt route (thats a real concept, we had a scavenger hunt of kumanovo back during orientation week and that was the only way i could find my destination. it was a scenic route to the Dom na Kultur. this isnt too abnormal in macedonia actually. there are no street numbers and although there are street names, no one knows em. so when you need to get somewhere, people use visual cues, even when directing taxis. i was looking for the Euro College. I was to meet my practikum partner and go to DAJA, an NGO for Roma women. We will be working there 2 hours per day, 2 days a week to get a feel for the working life of a non profit in macedonia. it should be interesting. Our counterpart, Dilbera, wasnt in when we finally found the place, but we delivered our letter and we expect to get phone calls for a time to meet in the near future.

i learned how to play bridge last night with my host family. mitat, arjad and ferxhan showed me the game. i say 'know how to play' in a very light way. i still have no clue how to count points and some of the other finer aspects of play, but it was fun. the bridge game grew out of a quick idea to play tic tac toe with Arife, one of the cousins who was sitting all alone as the boys crowded around the computer and the women talked over chai tea. you dont need language to play tic tac toe. suddenly everyone was into playing tic tac toe and it went on for a good half hour.

i also had an amusing milk/dairy situation arise. during training last week, Dr. Mimi said not to consume dairy that was unpasturized. ok. well, in the past week, i had not heard cow mooing. then, bam, there are obviously cows in one of the sheds surrounding the 'driveway' type area. that night, Razija plunks down a glass of fresh milk from a jar. im not sure how to proceed. i tell Arjad that peace corps told me not to drink milk that wasnt from a carton and he said thats fine.

then, there was yogurt. Razija put a container of yogurt on the table and i figured, ok its good, it came from a labeled plastic container that says YOGURT, but in Macedonian and Albanian and Language X. I eat some and Arjad looks at me funny. The yogurt, apparently, comes from the same cow the milk comes from. As in, the one in the shed out front. So, score one for heidi, total cultural miscommunication. (ps. the yogurt and cheese is amazing! i can taste the cow it came from, no lie.)

Sunday we had a meet and greet pony show to take all of us to each other's homestays. It was an 8 hour coffee, rakije (brandy/moonshine), Koka Kola, fanta, seltzer water, wine and yummies fest. Eight hours for 6 houses. The 6th house was our teacher's house, which is amazing. he is renting from an older couple and when they saw us, they came over with their homemade wine and chocolate goodies. My host mom made Byrek, it was fantastic. she makes all the bread for the house, she makes me ayvar n eggs for breakfast. Thankfully, the village is all hills and mountains, so im (believe it or not) losing weight throughout this adventure.

im going to find a way to post some pics and a video of folk dancing, so im going to cut this entry short. Hope you are all doing well in the US.

Ciao!

October 6, 2008

Day three of homestay. I feel like I am getting more comfortable with my family. Certain things that happened in the first day or so gave me impressions of my family that were not entirely accurate. I am now able to get around the village by myself, not that I am ever really by myself, but if I had to, I could.

What do I mean by saying that I am never by myself? With the exception of my going to bed and locking the door to my room, there seems to always be someone around. If I can’t see them, it seems that they can see me. People watch us crazy Americans walk up and down the street: to school, to the top of the hill (or mountain, whatever you want to call it) for soccer, to the store, to our houses etc. Children follow us to speak English with us or just to stare. Most people stare, and they smile when you say hello in either Macedonian or Albanian. We are too new here to know the difference yet, I’m not sure there is more to the separation than language and loose adherence to opposing religions. You can’t tell either from a pacing glance.

Back to my homestay family. I live with Mitat, Razija, Arjad and Ferxhan. They are really awesome. Arjad is 17 and Ferxhan is 13 or 14? When I first got here, I thought Arjad had said he was 17 and Ferxhan was 16, but Razija showed me a picture of them as young boys and Arjad was 7 and Ferxhan was 3? All of our communication goes through Arjad, as he is the only one speaking English. When relatives pop in, some speak German, but not enough to go into details.

Mitat is great, he is very funny and friendly, he makes me feel less nervous. He lived and worked in Switzerland (I think) for 12 years so he understands what it is like to be in a strange country and not know the language. I must say, I’ve done pretty well in Macedonian for only being here a week, and I’ve picked up a bit of Albanian in the past 2 days as well. I can count and introduce myself. Voila!

My first night here I offered to help cook with Razija and to my surprise, she actually let me help. She took my hand and guided me through pouring oil and seasoning on potatoes and stirring them. The next day I was vacuuming the house. The night before, we had visited Ree’s host family (neighbors and relatives of my host family) and Ree’s host mother, said that Razija is happy to have a girl in her house since she has only two sons. So then I got a bit nervous that I would become surrogate daughter.

My paranoia was not helped by my first meeting of Mitat and Razija at the ever classy Hotel Satelit (SATEL-EET! Not ‘satellite’). I had Mitat pinned as a farmer and Razija was wearing a head scarf. I thought, oh no, they are very conservative. Nah. They are just like any other family I’ve ever met. Their sons spend most of their time on the computer/internet, chatting and playing Counterstrike, the version we played back in high school. It was so exciting to see them playing counter strike! Then I remembered that I never installed it on my laptop.  Razija only wears the scarf outside the house and she doesn’t seem to mind my wearing short sleeve shirts except that she keeps asking if im cold.
I really enjoy my homestay situation more and more, I think that Valentina did a great job matching personalities and interests between families and volunteers.

First Night: October 4, 2008

Recapping the most eventful day of the past week: meeting the homestay family.

Saturday started off with us finding out our training site groups and location. I knew that I would most likely be placed in one of two training groups in mixed communities in the greater Kumanovo area, so it wasn’t too much of a shocker to find out which village I was in.

After finally finding out where and with whom I will be spending my next months, they sat us down for the best Macedonian lesson yet: the Alphabet and How to Write It. Macedonian is a completely phonetic, what you hear is what you write. Mak-e-don-i-a = Мак-е-дон-и-ја. Д is ‘d’, н is ‘n’, и is ‘e’ and ј is ‘ia’ or a ‘yah’ sound. It was so painstakingly slow to learn 31 letters in groups of 5 that I will never ever forget what the letters are. There are some letters that represent sounds that are new to me and my lazy American tongue can’t handle yet, above and beyond my inability to roll an ‘r’. An overview of the trouble letters for me:

Љ
= Л + Ј, mashing an ‘L’ sound and a ‘y’ sound together into one letter that sounds like something French.

Њ
= Н + Ј, which is ‘n’ + ‘y’, a letter that one would recognize in the word ‘[ny]et’, which is not the word for ‘No’ in Macedonia. Tricky to get the right amount of ‘y’ in there without sounding nasty.

Ѕ
= ‘d’ + ‘z’. Tough. D and z are two letters that were destined never to meet. Our packet likens the sound to the end of the word ‘be[ds]’.

Ц
= ‘t’ + ‘z’ like the sound in pi[zz]a or ca[ts].

But anyway, I’ll write out some names and words in Macedonian for hahas.

Џаш is Josh, Сарита is Sarita, Ден is Dan, Џилиан is Gillian, Хаиди is Heidi, бриџид is Brigid. Благодарам ‘thank you’, ве молам ‘please’, шише вода ‘bottle of water’, добар ден ‘good day’.

The alphabet lesson was in preparation for us to participate in a game to reveal who our host families are later on. We each got a simple sentence on a slip of paper in Macedonian. Later at the ceremony, we would read the paper until we found a family that recognized the description. Mine was ‘Митат е висок чорек’ which means Mitat is a tall man. To say it, think like this: Mee-taat ee vee-sock choh-wreck.

We had our final Hotel Satelit lunch, some tasty mashed potatoes, meat and gravy dish with cabbage salad (I love cabbage day). The peace corps trainees were herded upstairs afterwards to wait for the families to come in. After receiving our water distillers and Macedonian cell phones, we spent the waiting time copying email addresses and phone numbers off of large lists. I entered in 35 cell numbers in record time. And, I can text US phones. Nifty.

Let the festivities begin. We come down to the hall with our sentences and we are led to groups of families organized by community training site. I pick out the tallest man and state, Mitat is a tall man. He laughs and points to Mitat next to him. Turns out, the man I performed my Macedonian for is my host father’s cousin. Ree is with them next door. We see Albanian and Macedonian folk groups, and then we all get together to dance a hora (?). My family didn’t dance, but I did. I don’t know if they aren’t into it because they don’t dance or because it was a Macedonian hora and they are Albanian. Sadly, my language skills are not at the level where I can ask.

They drive me and my luggage to through Kumanovo to get to my village. I recognize the places I have been this week and then, we keep going further. Then we leave the city. Then, we turn onto dirt roads that wind between cement walls. Then we are pulling into a driveway with chickens roaming around and a garden. I meet the family in waves, something that doesn’t stop until now, when I am alone in my room. I met Mitat and Razmija at the ceremony. I meet Filjan (spelling?) and 2 other 20-something men. One of whom, thankfully! spoke English. (really wanted to hug him at that point, awwwkwwward.) Then I met Aromet(?), then the 80 year old bed bound grandfather whose name escapes me right now. After that, a pleasant lull in introductions. Then later after dinner, Razmir makes hand gestures like, going upstairs to bed which turn out to be ‘walking to the neighbors to see Ree and meet more people.’ I meet the family of Mitat’s cousin. When we leave the house, we come back to my host familys house with Ree and a couple others around my age. Most of the younger people speak English. Another woman, Mitat’s sister in law, comes in and I chat with her in german and show her my photos.

I was pooped by 10pm. No wonder though, my Albanian vocabulary has grown from 0 words to about 10 in half a day and the number of people I know in Macedonia has increased by about 8000%.