April 29, 2002

May 7, 2002

It’s strange that coming to a small Bulgarian town on the Danube has been an eye-opening experience for us. It’s such a small world here. After all, an entire language ends at the Romanian border and Bulgaria is no bigger than our home state. Our university alone was twice the size of this town. It will be another eye-opening experience for us to return to our American home and begin contrasting what we’ve come to know here, with what we knew and what we’ve forgotten from our American lives.

I look at this town on the map or from the hill just outside of town and I realize just how tiny this place is. From a distance it looks jumbled and forlorn. It’s perplexing to imagine all of the 25,000 lives, which intermingle in the little town of Silistra. All of these stories put into one place.

But then I remember coming into Newark airport for Christmas and I saw Manhattan off in the distance. The city barely rose out of the earth and the endless ocean looked like it could swallow the whole city in a gulp, if it wanted to. The suburbs trailed off into green areas and the center of the world didn’t look so central from up above. It looked like a group of weeds in a field.

Everything can change when you see it from a new perspective. Entering Peace Corps, I had hoped that I would return with some greater understanding of humanity; to return with a clearer vision of life. I’m not sure that things are completely clearer, though I do feel that I have a little more understanding of things. At least it’s enough to know that there are too many things I don’t know. And there are many things just not worth knowing. But I had hoped to learn something ultimate; something that would be true, no matter where you are. The PC experience challenges everything you’ve been taught. What seems absolute and real in your home is irrelevant and obscure in another’s. It makes you wonder if we’re only capable of being born into one environment, growing up in it being taught all that is true within it, and then growing older to defend it with our lives, if need be. One person can’t come to know every person’s mind in this world, but removing yourself from your safe place and going into another’s can be exciting for some and dangerous for others. What you hold to be true can be rejected by some and, even worse, thought of with a look of indifference by others. What’s more important are the stories that shape us and make us, not the beliefs that follow, which we tend to wrap ourselves up in. All those beliefs that we expect so much from seem to be causing us a lot of grief in the end. Certainly it’s important to know what you believe and how you will answer other people’s criticisms but, especially when cultures cross, I think it’s important to remember that our beliefs are exactly that: “our” beliefs. Things begin to change for the better when you are able to truly imagine yourself in the place of another.

This evening I stare out at the randomly lit windows of the block across the street. I think about the lives that are happening just past the six-inch brick and concrete walls, which separate us from our neighbors. Our neighbor came by this evening to let us know that there won’t be any water tomorrow. Nothing out of the ordinary, just glad that we know this time.