What a week
So I just finished a week of work. Woah.
One of my guests was the VP for UPS for Goverment relations. He is doing a 6 million dollar border project with the Ukrainian government in a village of 1000 in Ukraine. He has been there 17 times. It is about 40 miles away from where I live, and has a Peace Corps volunteer who I know, and lives with a relative of a good friend of mine. I've been invited to the village many times and almost went 3 weeks ago.
One of the ladies on my trip, who has a daughter a bit older than me (I can leave Ukraine, but people are still always trying to fix me up) was dancing barefoot on the table at our cooking school and broke a wine glass in the process.
Our hilarious teacher, Viviana at cooking school with plenty of wine
There was a huge fire burning across one of our biking routes on the 4th day.
Some other rather unbelievable things happened, but quite depressing, so I'll leave that out. This was all because the scheduling woman in Berkeley called me in Ukraine to ask me to do the season research and this first trip, because the woman that was supposed to do it, is still injured from a slip in the bathroom at the last hotel on the last trip of last season of THIS trip. I was supposed to be on that trip with her, but I had had a last minute schedule change to fix a problem somewhere else.
An interesting question
As we were sitting around last night, one of my fellow leaders, Tavis, asked if it was difficult or strange to come from Ukraine development work to Backroads because they were so different. I had thought about this in the past a good deal, and wanted to answer because I thought I had something to offer, but Backroads leaders like to talk, which is important for our job and the conversation carried on without my answer. I later thought that you all might also be interested in the answer. If I addressed this last year, I apologize; it certainly isn't the first time that this question has been asked.
The answer is two parts. First, of course it is difficult and strange. I have culture shock sometimes, but because I have moved back and forth between poverty and luxury so many times (from the Keys to Yosemite, from Peace Corps to Backroads, etc.), the shock comes in little sparks. Something catches you funny, or makes you emotional, but it usually passes as fast as it came. It may be a problem with Backroads guest that is rather trivial, but reminds you of a similar complaint by a boy who has no family at all. This is difficult.
But there, is a selfish part of me, that gets a similar shock but in a very pleasurable way from the thought of eating prosciutto or mozzarello, or from sitting around with friends having a beer, or pizza and wine with my favorite toppings, or going for a bike ride alone, or taking a passegiata (evening stroll) with friends.
The second part of the answer, is that it really ins't such different work. You are recognizing needs in both situations and serving them. What a human being needs most is just someone to listen to them, and that is something that both Backroads guests and abandoned children have in common. Both jobs are all about the relationships that you build.
The conversation went on to talk about leaders who have guilt because they feel they are destroying the environment, or foreign cultures, with this job. This is really what I wanted to address most, and a question that I struggle with a lot. Once a place becomes a National park or a World Heritage Site, its amount of visitors goes up astronomically. In the Keys, we would "shuffle" across sea grass beds, effectively killing a delicate ecosystem that is imperative for the success of the reef. Here in Backroads, people fly thousands of miles using jet fuel, so that they can bike around for a week. These things troubled me at first and still do, but it is one of the few times in my own personal ethics where I have settled for the lesser of two evils. In all these situations, the people that are doing the destruction become advocates for the places. Often they don't realize the effect that they personally have had, but just by being better educated about the places, they often work to defend them. The idea of the National Park Service intially with its historic luxury lodges, was to bring wealthy Americans into the parks, so that through their love, they would fight with money and political weight back home for their preservation.
Tavis mentioned an analogy of a new Backroads leader, who like a new teacher, quickly becomes disillusioned with how much impact they will have. I suffered from this too last year, but I now think it is more a disillusion with the visibility of the effects of the impact. The impact is there, but it happens in subtle and small ways that we will often never see.
With Backroads Leaders, I think their struggle stems from another source. We have these intense local experiences every week, but don't ever integrate into the local community. We can't get involved with local politics, schools, volunteer groups, and this aggravates are feelings of helplessness in our job. It contributes to feeling disconnected from a place, even one that we may know intimately; and I think that disconnect, more than anything else, is what makes someone unhappy with their situation in life.
When you meet a foreigner...
If you were to meet a foreigner - in a class, at a bus stop, on public transportation, if you were a taxi driver - what would you ask? These are the questions that I am always asked, no matter how fresh the introduction.
In Ukraine the questions are (usually in this order):
Have you found yourself a Ukrainian girl? (or if I am in class, one of the girls asks if I am married)
Do you like the food?
What do you do?
What is your education?
I know someone that went to the USA.
Does the USA take Ukrainian volunteers?
Do you have the tradition of (insert seasonal example)?
Even with backroads, we ask each other a lot of questions upon first introductions, but they run more:
Where are you coming from?
Where are you scheduled?
And the ever popular: Where are you from?
To which the answer is inevitably: "well, that's a good question," or "where am I not from," or "I grew up in ________ but I haven't lived there for a long time."
Quote of the day:
Their photographs, it must be noted, however, do share a strong affinity to those odd vernacular moments – from the familiar to the unnerving – that can be found in the family album, stuck to the refrigerator, or dog eared in the wallet. They look at life as it really is – disorganized, unpretentious, to totally unpredictable.
Blog Flood
Two days ago, I woke up in an ancient monastery in Ukraine. A priest drove me to the airport to say thanks for my help. Then in the afternoon I did a 30 km bike ride in Tuscany with my jet setting friends. Life is incredible sometimes. I am working in Italy for the next two weeks, and for the first week, I will have regular and consistent internet, so I would love to hear from you, and hope that you will be hearing a lot from me.
Have fun.
