A few years ago, after returning from my junior year abroad in Warsaw, Poland, I concocted another in a long line of wild schemes pertaining to my future. Following a late night/early morning, alcohol induced conversation with my friend Sam, we hatched our plan. Over the course of a year, we would travel the world, each week visiting another Jewish community. In our minds the trip would take us from Melbourne to Mexico City, from Johannesburg to Yemen, from Lima, Peru to London, England.
For Sam and I, it was not simply a thirst for adventure that fueled this quest. We had both grown up in the Conservative Jewish movement, we both had Jewishly active parents and grandparents, and we both felt a personal connection to our faith and culture. Sure, we wanted to see the world, but we also were looking for something we knew existed, however veiled and convoluted this something may have been.
Eventually our around-the-world dream puttered out. Financing was hard to come by, a combination of a bad recession and the mild insanity of expecting wealthy Jews to indulge a couple of hyperactive upper middle class lost in the depths of their own thoughts and perplexed notions of society.
We wanted to see if we felt it. We wanted to know if we could show up at a Synagogue with a bunch of people who didn’t look like us and couldn’t speak with us and didn’t seem to be like us and still feel a connection. We wanted to know the strength of this shared experience, the Jewish experience, and to see how strong were these ties that purportedly bind.
Last week, I attended a Peace Corps conference in Kiev about volunteerism in Ukraine. The conference was great for a variety of reasons---I spent a weekend with Natalia, I got a lot of great ideas about volunteer projects I could start in my community, Tamila (my counterpart in Boyarka) and I were forced to really have serious conversations about what we could accomplish together. For me, however, the most jovial part of the conference was the chance to relax and revel and reflect with 30 or so other Peace Corps Volunteers in Ukraine.
The majority of the conference participants arrived with me in Ukraine just a few short incredibly-far-away months ago. But almost a third included stragglers from older groups, volunteers with a wealth of experience and knowledge garnered simply from living a life far different than most can imagine. I also had the chance to see many of my old friends for the first time in two months, familiar faces who I feel like I’ve known a lifetime.
Stephanie is actually the Peace Corps volunteer I’ve known the longest. She was my GSI (graduate student instructor) in a Public Policy class I took at the University of Michigan. In celebration of just another in a long line of understatements, we didn’t quite hit it off at first. As she alleges (and I hardly remember), after the first day of class I came into her office and told her she was being too intense. As I allege (and she hardly remembers) she once saw me out at a bar and refused to acknowledge that I was waving in her direction. Yet it was a brief conversation we had that pushed her to apply to the Peace Corps, and it was a bizarre turn of events that landed us in Ukraine at the same time. As a fellow Wolverine, a fellow Jew, a fellow American, Stephanie and I are able to share with and trust each other in ways I suspect is not often so easy among two strong willed individuals. Furthermore, we have seen each other perhaps a combined 10 days in the last 5 months. But something about being here, something about not understanding the same language and gasping for laughs at the same cultural misunderstandings, makes everything that came before matter a little less.
Bernie is 79 years young, and resembles a caricature of a Jewish grandfather one might find on a mildly hilarious TV sitcom. Back in New York City, where he is from, it probably would be a little strange for me to call him up out of the blue and ask him if he wants to head out to the bar. But that is exactly what we did, every night at the conference. As we knocked back the beers (as a side note, Bernie regularly outdrank me and lightly chastised my lightweight status) and scoped out Ukranian (and sometimes American) girls, it felt like just a few bros having a good time. I sometimes jokingly refer to Bernie as my Peace Corps grandfather. It is probably more accurate to just call him my friend.
Tommy was my roommate at Peace Corps staging in Washington, D.C., and just the simple fact that we knew each other one night before the rest of the gang assigns us to a level of “old friends” that is both completely ridiculous and makes perfect sense. Tommy thinks I’m hilarious, and he has a way of taking my jokes to a whole other level, raising our comedic duo to epic proportions. One of these days, we say, we will have our own t.v. show, our own stand up routine. For now, it suffices for us to keep each other on our toes, and happy.
Dan is practically like a brother at this point. We lived together in Borova during our three months of training, through our ups and downs. Although I am definitely the moodier of the two of us, so more likely my ups and downs. That man is a rock, a running back who pushes back against bullshit lineman thrown his way. His site has been less than ideal, his counterparts less than supportive, his language suffering greatly because they speak Romanian in his small village on the border. But Dan pushes through, because that is what Dan does.
Do i really know any of these people? Its hard to say. But just the chance to roar about football saturdays in the Big House or to klink the occassional glass or share the occasional smile or remember the battle before us is a nice respite from our day to day experiences and challenges.
We understand each other. We express a million emotions back and forth with a smile or a gesture or a Ukranian phrase or a less than desirable toilet.
It is nice to not always be an enigma, a puzzle, an alien, a foreigner, an intricate exhibit. For life is good when we can sit back and relax and revel and reminisce about our shared experiences, to have someone know who we are without it really mattering who we really are.
We are all changing, and yet we are changing together, perhaps not in the exactly the same way but certainly in the same direction, and its a road that no one who hasn’t been where we’ve been can ever understand.
Oh how it is nice to clink the glass and empty the bottle into the wee hours of the morning, discussing everything and nothing, Ukranian women and Ukranian Jews and Ukranian anti-Semitism and Ukranian neighbors and Ukranian smiles and Peanut Butter and Chalula Hot Sauce and the New York Jets and the Appalachian trail and the best Bagel with Cream Cheese and Lox on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
And as we sit with the bottle gradually less and less half full we swap stories and lay future plans that weren’t quite like that and may never be we all seem to understand that we’re just trying to comprehend the shared experience and individual meaning of this wild ride.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Last week, I built a seat for my toilet.
Shitting has always been an important part of my life. When I was younger, I used to spend a significant amount of time on the toilet, usually reading. It was my first place of solace, the only room in the house with a lock on the door. I relished in the room’s silence, in its solitude, in its sanctuary. My parents would often begin screaming my name at the half hour mark, warning me of a future hemorrhoids infection or bed sores, et. all.
I was never one of those kids who could shit in the woods. My senior year of high school I went on a three or four day hike in Israel with my classmates, and I remember the unfortunate difficulty I experienced popping a squat just a few hundred feet from our campsite. Suffice it to say the experience did not go well, and constipation kicked in as a sort of self-preservation reflex.
A bad genetic pool (dad, heres to you) has given me a buttox of excessive size and costume, and I have always felt this relegated me certain needs not necessary for the common man’s poop. I need more space, I need more toilet paper, and most of all, I need a place to sit down.
When I first arrived at Natalia's, I was a little hesitant about her toilet. Outdoors, a wooden board hovering over a deep hole, I never imagined I could get used to using such a device on a regular basis. But after a month or so or mentally induced constipation (or physically induced because I started drinking water from the well) my trips to the outhouse became more routine. I got used to it.
When I first arrived at site, Natalia’s outhouse seemed liked the ritz carlton compared to my new accommodations. No place to seat, a hole that was not very deep at all, plus a need to burn my poop every once in a while because otherwise things would start to get sticky and unfortunately that language is not very figurative. The first few weeks were tough, and I would often time my bathroom visits to coincide with my time at school, a safe haven with all sorts of fancy gadgets like toilets that flush.
But then one day I decided enough was enough. I was going to grab hold of my constipation and trepidation. After consulting with my landlord, I grabbed a bunch of bricks and stack them one on top of the other over my pooping hole. I lined the inside with plastic from old bottles, so cleaning shit off of bricks wouldn’t become a weekly activity. I bought a toilet seat in the regional center and placed it on top, and suddenly I was living the high life. Suddenly I could sit down while I shat.
What was perhaps most absurd about this whole procedure was its relative normality in my every day life. The previously inconceivable had become commonplace, even trite. Challenges of last week had became daily rites of today, the life I used to live had become a remnant of some futuristic time into which I had had a momentary, 22 year long glimpse. How does the abnormal become so very normal?
There is a laundry list of daily activities that were once unimaginable and yet now seem all too casual. Every day in the early afternoon I head to the well with two empty buckets of water. Usually I’ll then take one of those, climb the ladder to the roof of my outdoor shower, dump it in, and then refill it, to make sure Ill have enough water for the next 24 hours. If I have to do laundry I’ve got to allot 2-3 hours, so that the water can boil and that I can be sure to get it all done, space being scarce in my limited amounts of buckets.
I don’t remember why people use dishwashers.
If I don’t go to the bazaar on Saturday in the regional center (which means catching the 630am bus) I’m going to have a tough time finding food for the week). But I have to be a little careful walking to the village center so early in the morning because the cow poop is extra fresh, littering a road that is more often trodden on by hoofs than the wheels of a car. Tractors not included.
Free time is a distant memory, kids constantly asking me to play in a foreign language that sometimes I understand and sometimes I don’t, a confusion wrought more confusing by the mix of Russian and Ukrainian in the everyday surgically constructed village tongue.
And yet this is all so normal.
For me, this speaks to the great adaptability of the human spirit. I have often thought here of my uncle, a man who lived a life of crime, who drank and stole and conned his way through about 20 years of his life. And then, he changed. He became a new man. He became a man of God. My uncle is now a Rabbi who runs a rehab center in Los Angeles, He has traded his former surroundings for a new one, a better one, and it has made him a better man.
I, too, am undergoing a transformation, although perhaps not quite as drastic. But that which once seemed right and wrong, that which one seemed hard and easy, has mutated. The scope of what I can and cannot do is being self-examined under a new lens.
They say that change comes from within, and maybe, to a certain extent, thats true. But I think the first step of real change is changing the expectations you have of the world around you.
In the internet age, the world must be at our fingertips 24/7. So when our BBMs take half a minute to go through or the touch screen on our Iphones are slow to respond, the world comes crashing down. But what if instead of expecting the world, we only expected a newspaper, and if instead of expecting to have the ability to talk to everyone, we were contented to have the opportunity just to have a real conversation with a friend or a lover or a relative or a neighbor next door. Change what you expect from the world, and the remainder will be infinitely more rewarding.
I no longer expect a faucet with water and I no longer care about cow poop lining the streets and my fingers are calloused from scrubbing my clothes together. But this is a new world I live in, and consequently a new me, and inadvertently, this was a part of what I was looking for. CHange your situation, and your expectations, and you can change your life.
Although there is nothing in the world like being able to sit down while you poop.
Shitting has always been an important part of my life. When I was younger, I used to spend a significant amount of time on the toilet, usually reading. It was my first place of solace, the only room in the house with a lock on the door. I relished in the room’s silence, in its solitude, in its sanctuary. My parents would often begin screaming my name at the half hour mark, warning me of a future hemorrhoids infection or bed sores, et. all.
I was never one of those kids who could shit in the woods. My senior year of high school I went on a three or four day hike in Israel with my classmates, and I remember the unfortunate difficulty I experienced popping a squat just a few hundred feet from our campsite. Suffice it to say the experience did not go well, and constipation kicked in as a sort of self-preservation reflex.
A bad genetic pool (dad, heres to you) has given me a buttox of excessive size and costume, and I have always felt this relegated me certain needs not necessary for the common man’s poop. I need more space, I need more toilet paper, and most of all, I need a place to sit down.
When I first arrived at Natalia's, I was a little hesitant about her toilet. Outdoors, a wooden board hovering over a deep hole, I never imagined I could get used to using such a device on a regular basis. But after a month or so or mentally induced constipation (or physically induced because I started drinking water from the well) my trips to the outhouse became more routine. I got used to it.
When I first arrived at site, Natalia’s outhouse seemed liked the ritz carlton compared to my new accommodations. No place to seat, a hole that was not very deep at all, plus a need to burn my poop every once in a while because otherwise things would start to get sticky and unfortunately that language is not very figurative. The first few weeks were tough, and I would often time my bathroom visits to coincide with my time at school, a safe haven with all sorts of fancy gadgets like toilets that flush.
But then one day I decided enough was enough. I was going to grab hold of my constipation and trepidation. After consulting with my landlord, I grabbed a bunch of bricks and stack them one on top of the other over my pooping hole. I lined the inside with plastic from old bottles, so cleaning shit off of bricks wouldn’t become a weekly activity. I bought a toilet seat in the regional center and placed it on top, and suddenly I was living the high life. Suddenly I could sit down while I shat.
What was perhaps most absurd about this whole procedure was its relative normality in my every day life. The previously inconceivable had become commonplace, even trite. Challenges of last week had became daily rites of today, the life I used to live had become a remnant of some futuristic time into which I had had a momentary, 22 year long glimpse. How does the abnormal become so very normal?
There is a laundry list of daily activities that were once unimaginable and yet now seem all too casual. Every day in the early afternoon I head to the well with two empty buckets of water. Usually I’ll then take one of those, climb the ladder to the roof of my outdoor shower, dump it in, and then refill it, to make sure Ill have enough water for the next 24 hours. If I have to do laundry I’ve got to allot 2-3 hours, so that the water can boil and that I can be sure to get it all done, space being scarce in my limited amounts of buckets.
I don’t remember why people use dishwashers.
If I don’t go to the bazaar on Saturday in the regional center (which means catching the 630am bus) I’m going to have a tough time finding food for the week). But I have to be a little careful walking to the village center so early in the morning because the cow poop is extra fresh, littering a road that is more often trodden on by hoofs than the wheels of a car. Tractors not included.
Free time is a distant memory, kids constantly asking me to play in a foreign language that sometimes I understand and sometimes I don’t, a confusion wrought more confusing by the mix of Russian and Ukrainian in the everyday surgically constructed village tongue.
And yet this is all so normal.
For me, this speaks to the great adaptability of the human spirit. I have often thought here of my uncle, a man who lived a life of crime, who drank and stole and conned his way through about 20 years of his life. And then, he changed. He became a new man. He became a man of God. My uncle is now a Rabbi who runs a rehab center in Los Angeles, He has traded his former surroundings for a new one, a better one, and it has made him a better man.
I, too, am undergoing a transformation, although perhaps not quite as drastic. But that which once seemed right and wrong, that which one seemed hard and easy, has mutated. The scope of what I can and cannot do is being self-examined under a new lens.
They say that change comes from within, and maybe, to a certain extent, thats true. But I think the first step of real change is changing the expectations you have of the world around you.
In the internet age, the world must be at our fingertips 24/7. So when our BBMs take half a minute to go through or the touch screen on our Iphones are slow to respond, the world comes crashing down. But what if instead of expecting the world, we only expected a newspaper, and if instead of expecting to have the ability to talk to everyone, we were contented to have the opportunity just to have a real conversation with a friend or a lover or a relative or a neighbor next door. Change what you expect from the world, and the remainder will be infinitely more rewarding.
I no longer expect a faucet with water and I no longer care about cow poop lining the streets and my fingers are calloused from scrubbing my clothes together. But this is a new world I live in, and consequently a new me, and inadvertently, this was a part of what I was looking for. CHange your situation, and your expectations, and you can change your life.
Although there is nothing in the world like being able to sit down while you poop.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Camp Part Deux
There is a certain loneliness here, a sense that no matter how hard I try I will continue to remain at the periphery of their lives. Sure, there are brief moments of acceptance which though possibly feigned feel increasingly real. But then the next day or possibly the next hour when the alcohol has settled or the moment has passed I return to the sidelines where I belong. I want to help, but I think in their minds I am little more than an experiment, an American to observe and to be observed.
My three weeks at camp were a rush of comedy and drama and excitement and education. I learned a lot, my language progressed, my vantage point of this country and its people continued to morph.
When I first arrived, one of the prospects of the camp experience that excited me most was the other counselors. Ranging from the ages of 18-25, these were a group of young, educated, intelligent and motivated adults, patriotic, interesting, outgoing. These were the people who could become my friends in my increasingly isolated world.
My first hour at camp, not a soul spoke a word to me. I was understandably a bit nervous, unsure of what exactly I was supposed to do or where exactly I was supposed to go next. Finally, somewhere in the middle of hour number two, Katya, the 25 year old head programmer, started quizzing me on my background and purpose and why the fuck am I here, the usual hodge-podge of queries which were old habits by this point. Silence followed by intense interest, strangers to best of friends, this was the beginning of my roller coaster ride at Ukranian summer camp. I wavered between being an asset and a burden, much of the group seemingly undecided as to whether or not they were glad I was there.
The counselors were, for the most part, a tight knit group. I arrived at camp at the start of the second session, the majority of the group having already spent three weeks together, bonding, getting to know each other. And in comes striding this American, with his fancy gadgets and strange attitude and slightly odd sense of humor. And why the hell is he always smiling? What the hell does he have to smile about?
The third night in, the Director of the camp asked me if I would stay up and have a few drinks with some of the other counselors. I readily agreed, eager to ingratiate myself to the group. For the first time I really felt like I was beginning to connect. We were laughing and joking and prodding and poking and we were friends and I was happy. Then the next day came and the reset button had been hit. I was again extraneous. I was again alone.
This was a common occurrence, a few days going by where the counselors would drink without inviting me or the gang would hang out without nary a word to that silly American, then an invitation and a jolly good night followed by days where I was a pale ghost wandering the camp’s pathways. Why was I trapped in these middle school insecurities?
And sometimes, when they weren’t ignoring me, there were treating me like some combination between a child and a slave. Why don’t you go to sleep Jeremy? Why don’t you go shower with the kids? Why don’t you get out of bed immediately? Why are you still awake, reading deep into the night? Why are you here? What do you offer that we don’t, what besides your place of birth makes you special? Who the hell do you think you are?
Kids are remarkably perceptive, and they could often tell that the other counselors viewed me as something immensely less than. And so sometimes when I would tell them not to touch my things they wouldn’t listen. And sometimes when I would tell them to stop talking they would spit more words in my face. And sometimes they began to mimic the same questions as the counselors, who the fuck are you, why are you here, you can’t tell me what to do.
But these moments were all a collection of sometimes, a seeming indecision on the part of everybody there whether they liked me or grossly mistrusted me, whether I was one of them or a perennial outsider who could never belong. Their indecision became my indecision. Their uncertainly about why I was here became my uncertainty about why I was here. And sometimes I felt very alone.
Why aren’t these Ukranians clamouring to get to know me? Why aren’t they all groveling at my feet, imbued with gratefulness for all I have done for them? For all I plan to do for them? Why won’t they be my friends? Why wont they say thank you? Why do I need them to say thank you?
I began to reflect upon an experience I had two summers ago, when I was taking a Statistics class at NYU. A kid in my class was named Jacopo, and he was an art history student from Italy who was spending his summer exploring what he had always heard to be the greatest city in the world. Jacopo was fine---nothing special, not exuding coolness but not terribly bothersome, either. He took down my number, he friended me on Facebook, he texted me to hang out. And sometimes we did. But other time I just didn’t want to bother, it was to much work, his language good but not great, my patience wearing a little too think. He was fine, but I have my life. He was interesting to learn about, but my interest only stretched so far. He was a sometimes. Just like me.
I am now Jacopo. And yet do I regret what I did, how I treated him? Has standing in his shoes changed the way I felt? Unfortunately, not really. I had my own life to live in New York that summer, my own issues to deal with, my own struggles and challenges and girls and friends and activities.
And these people have their own lives, as well. This country will go on with or without me, summer camp would have been summer camp all the same. So how can I continue, knowing that I am forever an outsider? How can I allow myself to care, while knowing that sometimes, others won’t have the time to care about me?
One day at camp, I was shooting around the basketball by myself when I noticed a skinny girl of about ten playing volleyball by herself, if you could call it that. She was smacking the ball in the air as hard and as fast as she could, chasing it down, lathering, rinsing, repeating. The whole process looked ridiculous, and yet I sensed in her some of the same loneliness I felt in myself. She was too old to play on the swings with the little kids, and too small and not a good enough player to get in to the real game.
SMACK and one of her misplayed hits rolled right up next to me. I dropped the basketball and ran the volleyball towards her, and I asked her if she wanted to play.
Her accuracy didn’t get any better with a partner, her gauge of her own strength gave me plenty of exercise as I ran after wild bumps. But I learned her name was Ivana, and I learned she was wildly uncoordinated. I learned she had a great smile, too.
About ten minutes in, the kids needed an extra for their volleyball game, and asked me if I wanted to play. I said I would, but only if Ivana could play, also. The kids protested. So did Ivana. But I stood firm and soon there we were in the midst of a heated completely unimportant game.
When it was Ivana’s turn to serve, she tried to renege. Ya ne Mozhu, she proclaimed, I am not able. Mozhesh i Budesh, I proclaimed, you can and you will.
Turns out she couldn’t. Not on the first try, at least. The second and the third failed too (I convinced the kids to give her a couple extra whirls.) Ivana was devestated, but through a variety of funny faces and self deprecation I managed to dig out a smile.
The next morning Ivana and I practiced her serve for an hour. I showed her different ways she could make up for her lack of strength, how to hold the ball, how to hit the ball, how to believe she could do it. When we stepped into the game later that afternoon, the kids on our team groaned as Ivana stepped up to hit it. The groans morphed into gasps as she smacked the ball in its center out of her flat hand. Gasps turned to cheers of triumph as it sailed over the net and an older girl swung and whiffed, Ivana’s triumph in the form of an Ace.
It didn’t matter to Ivana that the next serve went about 30 feet out of bounds, and that she never really had a good serve the rest of the day. Until she went to sleep that night she had a smile on her face, the satisfaction of her momentary acceptance, the joviality of that brief instance where she was part of the team.
I realized that Ivana did need to always be accepted, she didn’t need to sit with the cool kids at lunch and she didn’t need to be loved by the world and she didn’t need everyone to be her best friend. She was so damn satisfied just accomplishing something, just improving something about herself, that nothing else really seemed important.
I will never be a permanent member of any team here. I will also be the alien, the foreigner, the American, the outsider, the short hairy Jew with contact lenses and fancy gadgets and strange customs and clothes and my God his accent is terrible. I may not become best friends with anyone, I may never truly make it into to some “inner circle.” I will almost certainly never be Ukranian. I can, however, learn to be satisfied with my best.
Accepting things the way they are has never been easy for me. I’ve never been one to take failure lightly. Yet if Ivana has taught me anything, it is that we cannot expect to wake up one morning and be the star, to change the face of a nation, or a village, or a person while standing on one foot. Life here has to be about incremental steps in a positive direction, about going up to the line and trying to land that serve and being happy if just one makes it through.
Sometimes we won’t be welcomed. Sometimes we won’t be thanked. Sometimes we will not be included and we will not happy and we will be lonely and I will be alone.
But other times I have to find ways to be content with small victories, to be satiated by those transient moments of success, however fleeting.
My three weeks at camp were a rush of comedy and drama and excitement and education. I learned a lot, my language progressed, my vantage point of this country and its people continued to morph.
When I first arrived, one of the prospects of the camp experience that excited me most was the other counselors. Ranging from the ages of 18-25, these were a group of young, educated, intelligent and motivated adults, patriotic, interesting, outgoing. These were the people who could become my friends in my increasingly isolated world.
My first hour at camp, not a soul spoke a word to me. I was understandably a bit nervous, unsure of what exactly I was supposed to do or where exactly I was supposed to go next. Finally, somewhere in the middle of hour number two, Katya, the 25 year old head programmer, started quizzing me on my background and purpose and why the fuck am I here, the usual hodge-podge of queries which were old habits by this point. Silence followed by intense interest, strangers to best of friends, this was the beginning of my roller coaster ride at Ukranian summer camp. I wavered between being an asset and a burden, much of the group seemingly undecided as to whether or not they were glad I was there.
The counselors were, for the most part, a tight knit group. I arrived at camp at the start of the second session, the majority of the group having already spent three weeks together, bonding, getting to know each other. And in comes striding this American, with his fancy gadgets and strange attitude and slightly odd sense of humor. And why the hell is he always smiling? What the hell does he have to smile about?
The third night in, the Director of the camp asked me if I would stay up and have a few drinks with some of the other counselors. I readily agreed, eager to ingratiate myself to the group. For the first time I really felt like I was beginning to connect. We were laughing and joking and prodding and poking and we were friends and I was happy. Then the next day came and the reset button had been hit. I was again extraneous. I was again alone.
This was a common occurrence, a few days going by where the counselors would drink without inviting me or the gang would hang out without nary a word to that silly American, then an invitation and a jolly good night followed by days where I was a pale ghost wandering the camp’s pathways. Why was I trapped in these middle school insecurities?
And sometimes, when they weren’t ignoring me, there were treating me like some combination between a child and a slave. Why don’t you go to sleep Jeremy? Why don’t you go shower with the kids? Why don’t you get out of bed immediately? Why are you still awake, reading deep into the night? Why are you here? What do you offer that we don’t, what besides your place of birth makes you special? Who the hell do you think you are?
Kids are remarkably perceptive, and they could often tell that the other counselors viewed me as something immensely less than. And so sometimes when I would tell them not to touch my things they wouldn’t listen. And sometimes when I would tell them to stop talking they would spit more words in my face. And sometimes they began to mimic the same questions as the counselors, who the fuck are you, why are you here, you can’t tell me what to do.
But these moments were all a collection of sometimes, a seeming indecision on the part of everybody there whether they liked me or grossly mistrusted me, whether I was one of them or a perennial outsider who could never belong. Their indecision became my indecision. Their uncertainly about why I was here became my uncertainty about why I was here. And sometimes I felt very alone.
Why aren’t these Ukranians clamouring to get to know me? Why aren’t they all groveling at my feet, imbued with gratefulness for all I have done for them? For all I plan to do for them? Why won’t they be my friends? Why wont they say thank you? Why do I need them to say thank you?
I began to reflect upon an experience I had two summers ago, when I was taking a Statistics class at NYU. A kid in my class was named Jacopo, and he was an art history student from Italy who was spending his summer exploring what he had always heard to be the greatest city in the world. Jacopo was fine---nothing special, not exuding coolness but not terribly bothersome, either. He took down my number, he friended me on Facebook, he texted me to hang out. And sometimes we did. But other time I just didn’t want to bother, it was to much work, his language good but not great, my patience wearing a little too think. He was fine, but I have my life. He was interesting to learn about, but my interest only stretched so far. He was a sometimes. Just like me.
I am now Jacopo. And yet do I regret what I did, how I treated him? Has standing in his shoes changed the way I felt? Unfortunately, not really. I had my own life to live in New York that summer, my own issues to deal with, my own struggles and challenges and girls and friends and activities.
And these people have their own lives, as well. This country will go on with or without me, summer camp would have been summer camp all the same. So how can I continue, knowing that I am forever an outsider? How can I allow myself to care, while knowing that sometimes, others won’t have the time to care about me?
One day at camp, I was shooting around the basketball by myself when I noticed a skinny girl of about ten playing volleyball by herself, if you could call it that. She was smacking the ball in the air as hard and as fast as she could, chasing it down, lathering, rinsing, repeating. The whole process looked ridiculous, and yet I sensed in her some of the same loneliness I felt in myself. She was too old to play on the swings with the little kids, and too small and not a good enough player to get in to the real game.
SMACK and one of her misplayed hits rolled right up next to me. I dropped the basketball and ran the volleyball towards her, and I asked her if she wanted to play.
Her accuracy didn’t get any better with a partner, her gauge of her own strength gave me plenty of exercise as I ran after wild bumps. But I learned her name was Ivana, and I learned she was wildly uncoordinated. I learned she had a great smile, too.
About ten minutes in, the kids needed an extra for their volleyball game, and asked me if I wanted to play. I said I would, but only if Ivana could play, also. The kids protested. So did Ivana. But I stood firm and soon there we were in the midst of a heated completely unimportant game.
When it was Ivana’s turn to serve, she tried to renege. Ya ne Mozhu, she proclaimed, I am not able. Mozhesh i Budesh, I proclaimed, you can and you will.
Turns out she couldn’t. Not on the first try, at least. The second and the third failed too (I convinced the kids to give her a couple extra whirls.) Ivana was devestated, but through a variety of funny faces and self deprecation I managed to dig out a smile.
The next morning Ivana and I practiced her serve for an hour. I showed her different ways she could make up for her lack of strength, how to hold the ball, how to hit the ball, how to believe she could do it. When we stepped into the game later that afternoon, the kids on our team groaned as Ivana stepped up to hit it. The groans morphed into gasps as she smacked the ball in its center out of her flat hand. Gasps turned to cheers of triumph as it sailed over the net and an older girl swung and whiffed, Ivana’s triumph in the form of an Ace.
It didn’t matter to Ivana that the next serve went about 30 feet out of bounds, and that she never really had a good serve the rest of the day. Until she went to sleep that night she had a smile on her face, the satisfaction of her momentary acceptance, the joviality of that brief instance where she was part of the team.
I realized that Ivana did need to always be accepted, she didn’t need to sit with the cool kids at lunch and she didn’t need to be loved by the world and she didn’t need everyone to be her best friend. She was so damn satisfied just accomplishing something, just improving something about herself, that nothing else really seemed important.
I will never be a permanent member of any team here. I will also be the alien, the foreigner, the American, the outsider, the short hairy Jew with contact lenses and fancy gadgets and strange customs and clothes and my God his accent is terrible. I may not become best friends with anyone, I may never truly make it into to some “inner circle.” I will almost certainly never be Ukranian. I can, however, learn to be satisfied with my best.
Accepting things the way they are has never been easy for me. I’ve never been one to take failure lightly. Yet if Ivana has taught me anything, it is that we cannot expect to wake up one morning and be the star, to change the face of a nation, or a village, or a person while standing on one foot. Life here has to be about incremental steps in a positive direction, about going up to the line and trying to land that serve and being happy if just one makes it through.
Sometimes we won’t be welcomed. Sometimes we won’t be thanked. Sometimes we will not be included and we will not happy and we will be lonely and I will be alone.
But other times I have to find ways to be content with small victories, to be satiated by those transient moments of success, however fleeting.
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