Shared Experience

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.