Coming unhinged.

Jack sent me this quote.  It's perfect.  This has been the fact of my semester--this coming unhinged to the place where, right now, I am completely and totally head-over-heels for Romania and the people here.  I don't really want to leave that.  But I guess that's the bittersweet beauty of loving people in more than one place, eh?

Anyway.  Enjoy.  (Thanks, Jack.)

"A sweet shame comes over them, not a bitter remorse but more like the shame one feels when falling in love. The visitors feel themselves losing their grip; or better, they feel the world losing its grip on them. What world? The world made up of important people like them and unimportant people like their hosts. As the poet Yeats says, "Things fall apart;" the visitors' world is coming unhinged. They feel resistance, naturally, to a current that threatens to sweep them out of control. They feel a little confused--again--like the disorientation of falling in love. In fact, that is what is happening, a kind of falling in love. The earth trembles. My horizon is opening up. I'm on unfamiliar ground, entering a richer, more real world."

[Dean Brackley]

All hot and bothered.

I finished my paper for Sustainable and Human Development this morning.  It's gotten me all worked up.  I'd include it here, but it's long, so I'll spare you the agony of reading through it... though if you'd like to see it, just email me and let me know; I'd love to share it (not because I think I'm all that eloquent or anything, but because the research in it is troubling).  However, if you're curious, just take a look at these two sites: one's a good overview of the US budget and humanitarian aid spending; the other shows the proposed federal budget for 2011 and relative spending in various areas.  (By the way, did you know that economists predict the war in Iraq costing $1.3 trillion dollars by the time it's over?  Do you know how much less it would take to feed everyone in the world?)  Grr.

Snowed in.

We’re snowed in on top of Straja!!!!!!!!

I would put in even more exclamation marks to capture how happy this makes me, but that might get obnoxious to read, so I’ll resist.  But rest assured that I am more than just a little excited about this turn of events.  Before I tell you the exciting snow stories, though (and put up some pictures), a brief recap of recent events.

I haven’t written much lately.  We’re entering our final full week in Romania (aaaahh!) and I’ve been trying to spend as much time living as possible (which means as little time as possible on my computer).  Classes are wrapping up, with four papers due this week instead of final exams, and on Friday we leave Lupeni for a few days in Bucureşti before we fly back to the States.  It’s weird to be this close to the end.  I try to imagine what it’ll be like to be sitting in my parents’ kitchen in nine days, and I simply can’t—the worlds are too far apart right now.  Please pray for my transition.  I’m not sure how I’m going to handle the reverse culture shock.

But anyway.  This Thursday we celebrated Thanksgiving out at the Bates’ house, which was lovely—so much delicious food (I even got to eat stuffing, hooray!  …I’m kinda a stuffing freak), a beautiful little hike to a gorgeous view of Lupeni… really, a comfortable and homey afternoon.  Thursday evening we drove up to Straja (the ski mountain above Lupeni where Viaţa is held in the summertime) to stay at the Fundaţia cabana for a couple days.  We intended to leave on Saturday evening, but it’s been snowing almost nonstop since we’ve arrived, so the road down the mountain was too treacherous to drive last night.  So we’re still here!  And it’s glorious.

I’ll try to demonstrate with a few pictures how beautiful it is up here, but there’s no way to capture it.  Last night as Julie and I came back from our hike (more about that in a second), we stopped and stood in silence, just feeling it—the icy wind on our frozen cheeks, the scent of chimney smoke and evergreens, the sound of Romanian radio from ski cabanas whispering faintly in the wind, the firmness of the snow-covered ground beneath our feet, the dark of the sky punctuated by familiar constellations, the Jiu Valley scattered with town lights like fallen stars or spilled golden glitter, the silhouettes of mountains stretching into the distance in a 360-degree panorama… I can still feel myself atop that mountain.  It’s beautiful here.  I don’t want to leave this.

 The stations of the cross end at the top of Straja

Ski lifts run up and down the peak

The church atop Straja

Straja, looking down toward Lupeni

Yesterday in the afternoon we decided to go outside and play for a while (to burn off some of our energy… most of us had been writing papers all day).  We bundled up and started climbing the mountain towards the big cross which sits above the Straja church.  Julie and I found a tree to climb on the way, but eventually we all made it to the cross… and promptly started a snowball fight/wrestling match.  I bowed out for a while to take pictures, and they’re hilarious.  (I really love these people! …even if they wrestle me to the ground and shove snow in my face.)  Eventually we calmed down and kept walking, finding this path winding into the forest.  It was beautiful—huge, tall evergreens, their boughs heavy with snow, laced overhead as we walked underneath… gorgeous.  Eventually the path ended at another ski slope, this one significantly steeper than the earlier ones we’d seen—so of course, Julie and I look at each other and decide to climb it.  The others bowed out, saying they didn’t think we’d make it to the peak by dark, but we headed up anyway. 

The view partway up

It might have been one of the more foolish things I’ve ever done, but it was completely worth it.  They were right; we couldn’t make it to the top by dark (it’s hard to make good time when the snow comes up to mid-thigh and the angle’s often steeper than 45 degrees).  But it was fun.  Julie… uh… well, she doesn’t have very good balance, so we stopped a lot for her to return herself to right-side-up, but that was fine—it was a good opportunity to check out the view, which just got better and better the higher we climbed.

The lights of the Jiu Valley, far below.

Eventually, though, it got dark.  We were at the tree line and decided we should probably listen to the voice of reason and head back down to the cabana, to prevent the others from worrying if nothing else.  But we didn’t think we’d be able to make it back the way we came safely, so instead we decided to cross a ridge of snow and head down the other face of the mountain (which was a more direct shot to Straja anyway).  It was a good idea.  Mostly.  The wind hit us as soon as we were over the ridge (which was, by the way, simply a cliff of snow about eight feet high).  It had swept some of the snow away so that portions of the mountain were now shallower (maybe 6 inches of snow, which was great); however, the wind had also created a thick crust on the snow in other parts, hard enough to make it difficult to break through but not hard enough to support our weight—so it was exhausting, pounding our legs into three-foot-deep snow, jolting through the crust and sinking deep with each step.  Occasionally we would army crawl (or, in Julie’s case, roll) instead, because then our weight was more evenly distributed and we wouldn’t break through the crust… but then the crust would get thinner and we’d find ourselves nose-diving into the powder, so we’d scramble to our feet and begin stomping again.  It was awesome.

OK, it was cold.  And once it was dark my imagination did wonder if there were still wolves and bears and dogs in these woods like there are on the other mountains surrounding Lupeni.  But hey, it added to the experience… I felt like we were exploring Everest or something.  Seriously, I might want to start climbing snowy mountains more often.  It makes you feel so alive!

Me and Julie... mountain explorers!

We eventually returned, snowy and frozen, to the cabana and spent the evening talking, playing games, watching a movie, and finishing up a couple papers.  It’s started snowing again, so I’m not sure what the plan is for today… but I’m sure we’ll get down to Lupeni somehow.  They’ve got the telescaun (chairlift) running, so maybe that’ll be our strategy…

Dragoste.

I have a lot of things to write about, especially about a magnificent weekend in Iaşi, but I don’t have time tonight.  I need to catch up on sleep.  However, I just finished my homework for Eastern Orthodoxy—our reading was on the “positive praxis” of all the theology our textbook (The Spirituality of the Christian East by Tomaš Špidlík) has thus far entailed.  And some of the quotes struck with me poignantly—I wrote them in my journal—so I wanted to share them here, too.  Enjoy.  Chew.

“The perfection of the Christian life resides in charity [love].”  (Thomas Aquinas)

“We were created to love, because we are ‘children of love’.”  (the Epistle of Barnabas)

“Apart from the love of God, neither knowledge, nor the understanding of mysteries, nor faith nor prophecy avails anything—without love all are hollow and vain.”  (Irenaeus)

“God’s love cannot be ‘a desire for His own perfection,’ the Platonic eros.  Divine agape is a super-abundance.  The Father in heaven does not seek a more that would fill Him; on the contrary, He wants to open His own treasures.”

“Love of God is not something that is taught; it is within us as a basic desire, a predisposition, a seed…. All progress in love thereby creates life…. Love is the ‘queen of virtues.’  We are not impelled to it automatically, but it is of our free choice, which is the foundation of every virtue.”  (Basil)

“To love God for God’s sake also means to choose the entire work of God, to love all of creation and the marvelous order that reigns in it, that is, to observe the commandments, especially the second, which consists in loving one’s neighbor.  It is impossible, Maximus the Confessor says, really to love God without loving our neighbor, or really to love our neighbor without loving God.  And it is this inseparable union of the two loves which makes it possible for us to love with an agape that expects no reward, with a love that goes out to the another: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food…. Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?  I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:35-40).  Therefore, ‘The task of love is to behave towards every person bearing God’s image, almost as it does towards the Prototype'.”

Tuberculosis in Romania.

I thought tuberculosis had disappeared.

Honestly, seriously, I thought it was one of those diseases that was from the era of Ellis Island—one of those illnesses that would get your coat marked with chalk as you waited in line to enter America after a couple months at sea, one of those sicknesses that made you unfit for entry into the country for fear of a public health crisis.  I thought it was a disease only of the past, of the era of the plague and smallpox and yellow fever.  I thought it was eradicated.

It’s not.

Last week, a Ph.D. student from New York, Jonathan Stillo, came to our sustainable development class and delivered a lecture that’s still making my head spin.  He’s been studying tuberculosis (TB) in Romania for his doctoral dissertation as a medical anthropologist, and thus has been in and out of the country for the last decade, spending time at sanatoria across the country, talking to patients and doctors, learning more about the epidemic which is wracking lungs across Romania—an epidemic that no one will talk about.

There are about a dozen sanatoria in Romania, most of them remote, isolated from society atop mountains “beyond the sight of God.”  Jonathan described the road to one particular treatment center as treacherous, filled with potholes, impassable in the winter, winding in a series of wicked switchbacks up the side of mountains inhabited by bears but not by people.  Most of the people who work there live there—it’s impractical, if not impossible, to commute.  Few patients get visitors.  There’s only one maxi-taxi a day, and it’s expensive.  Plus, who’s going to spend a full day traveling up a mountain to visit a place full of patients with a disease that no one wants to admit they have?

Tuberculosis is a social disease.  There are economic and social conditions that predispose you to getting it—namely, poverty.  Malnourishment, overcrowding, high stress: all conditions of poverty.  All of them also will reduce your body’s ability to fight off TB.  So tuberculosis is a disease of the poor—but it’s not only a disease of the poor.  It’s highly contagious (so contagious that if you’re found to have TB in the United States, you will be locked in a hospital for months until you can’t pass it on), so rich people can get it too.  Back in the States, that’s less common—but in Romania, many of the patients at the sanatoria are taxi drivers, nurses, teachers, lawyers.  Not people in poverty.

We’d read Mountains Beyond Mountains in preparation for the class, a great book by Tracy Kidder about a medical doctor and anthropologist named Paul Farmer who’s doing great work with tuberculosis in Haiti (and all over the world, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll leave it there).  Farmer’s inspirational.  The book will make you angry, and make you sad, and probably make you feel guilty—and that’s as it should, because he gets it.  He cautions against the “immodest claims of causality” that anthropologists like to make—those exotic cultural habits that make foreigners seem ignorant, seem like the cause of their own problems.  He does more than caution, actually—he fiercely berates that practice, calling it ignorance in its own right.  Instead, he reminds us, there are political, economic, and social realities that are the real problem behind global health epidemics and poverty.  These are the real issues.  And it’s our duty to amend them.  It is our responsibility to create a “preferential option for the poor.”

And he’s right.  Looking at Romania (especially while living here) my heart jumps to my throat and I wish, for a while, that I was pre-med.  I want to help, you know?  I want to go to the sanatorium, to the hospitals, be a doctor who’s not corrupt, nurse people back to good health.  But that’s not my place.  That’s not my calling.  I’m an international relations major.  I have a good, solid understanding of the role of politics and economics and sociology, and the ways those things affect poverty and health and, ultimately, human life.  (Or at least, I hope that’s the understanding I’m developing!)  And that matters too.  It matters a lot, actually.  Let me try to explain.

Health outcomes in Romania are the lowest of any country in Eastern Europe.  They have the lowest life expectancy, higher rates of tuberculosis, etc.  But, Romania also spends only about three percent of its GDP on healthcare, which is clearly not enough.  In this case, you get what you pay for… which is minimal.  Although under communism, countless hospitals and clinics were built across the country, they’ve fallen apart, many of them dilapidated and under-staffed.  Doctors don’t get paid enough here.  It’s only going to get worse, with the financial strain of IMF policy causing a 25% cut in pay throughout the public sector—so the corruption that’s already prevalent in the medical system is only going to increase, as doctors still need to feed their families.  People here don’t go to the doctor if they can help it—they go six times less often than people in the Czech Republic, another former socialist country that’s fared a lot better financially in the years of recovery from communism.  And if they do go, it’s usually not until late—until the symptoms have become unbearable, and they’re suddenly coughing up blood. 

No one wants to hear that they’re sick.  But especially, no one wants to hear they have TB—and especially not in Romania.  There’s a huge social stigma against it here.  Many people will describe it as a “lung disease” rather than name it.  They’ll blame the coughing on years of smoking, and they’ll try to hide their symptoms, rather than seek treatment—even though TB treatment in Romania is free.  Better to hide it than to face being ostracized by the community, anyway—because that does sometimes happen.

But when people finally are diagnosed and given treatment, a new set of issues emerges.  First of all, there’s the issue of the treatment itself.  Sometimes there will be a shortage of drugs in Romania, often for unknown reasons.  Simple miscommunication or corruption, perhaps, but regardless, it disrupts patients’ treatment cycles and makes the already-awful side effects even harder to deal with.  Tuberculosis treatment (especially under the World Health Organization’s DOTS program) is extremely regimented, with big handfuls of pills every day for months on end.  If it’s missed, the bacteria—which is highly evolved, since tuberculosis is the oldest disease known to man—quickly evolves into a drug-resistant strain.  Most MDR (multi-drug resistant) strains are almost impossible to cure, involving long-term treatments with expensive drugs that produce terrible and frightening side effects.  But MDR-TB is becoming more and more common, especially as the first round of treatment options fails on patients due to such simple causes as an interruption in the drug supply.

But there are other issues involved in treatment as well.  Sanatoria, a seemingly-outdated method of care for infectious diseases like TB, fill a social welfare role in Romania that increases the difficulty of really helping and healing patients.  There really aren’t homeless shelters or nursing homes here, and many of the patients who, in the States, would be serviced by such places, are left without options in Romania.  Some patients will skip drugs on purpose to set themselves back in their treatment, because they know that if they leave the sanatorium, they have nowhere to go.  It’s not fiscally responsible at all to keep treating these patients in sanatoria—they’re high-cost centers, far less economically efficient than a nursing home would be.  But because none of those social services exist, doctors keep patients longer.  In the words of one such doctor, it would be ‘against her Hippocratic oath to ‘do no harm’ to let the patient leave’ without having a strong support network in place—and that’s often entirely lacking.

The issues go on and on.  It’s a troubling issue, full of nuance, but also—in the eyes of people like Paul Farmer and Jonathan Stillo—strikingly black and white.  People are sick?  Treat them.  It costs too much money?  Treat them anyway. 

But the root causes remain unsolved.  Thankfully, Jonathan agrees with Farmer: to merely study the epidemic and do nothing about it would be futile—in fact, it would be wrong.  Observation alone is impotent.  Documentation isn’t the point.  From objectivity we’ve got to move to activism, to taking the step of asking how to better the situation.  I don’t want to end this post on a cheesy note, but I do want you—whoever you are, reading this—to think about it.  If nothing else, read Mountains Beyond Mountains.  Begin thinking about how to control Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  Begin thinking about liberation theology.  Begin thinking about the issues of development, of the troubling connection between a 41% poverty rate in Romania in 2001 and a skyrocketing TB rate here in 2003.  Begin thinking about the fact that over 60% of the patients in the sanatoria never receive a visitor.  Begin thinking.  And let it move you to action.

Down in the valley.

For Romanian Culture and History class, we were asked to compare the Jiu Valley (where Lupeni is located) with other places we've traveled in Romania.  What I wrote gives a pretty good picture of development here, I think, so I'm adding it to my blog so you can understand better the place I currently love to call home.

The Jiu Valley is probably the most beautiful part of Romania, at least in my estimation (Sinaia’s a close second).  The mountains are beautiful and almost surprising, especially when you first see them from across the countryside, driving back from somewhere like Cluj-Napoca.  They spring out of the flat land unexpectedly, and before you know it you’re among them, driving on a narrow, winding road between them, entirely forgetful of the fact that you were, previously, somewhere else.

In some ways, that description is accurate for the whole of the Jiu Valley, not just for its mountains.  After a few months here, I sometimes forget entirely about the world outside.  When we visited Cluj, I felt like a little kid again—the wide-eyed girl from Iowa, who can’t help but gape and stare when she visits malls in big cities.  Compared to Lupeni, Cluj was not only enormous, but shiny.  Seriously.

Everything in the Jiu Valley is gray, worn dirty by years of smoke and coal and dust.  The dogs are everywhere—literally everywhere—and though by now I’ve grown somewhat fond of them, they’re still somewhat-ominous indicators of neglect.  Lupeni is a tattered city.  Garbage overflows from dumpsters onto the ground, where dogs (and sometimes people) pick through it, looking for a prize.  The buildings are crumbling at the edges; holes remain in the metal doors of apartment blocks where people once pried their way in to pop the lock.  You don’t see that in other places in Romania.  Even other small towns we’ve visited—Sighet, for example—were better-maintained and less destroyed than Lupeni.  Some of the difference is the result of history: coal mining is a rough industry; it destroys places just as it destroys people’s bodies.  The Jiu Valley bears the scars of that industry.  Some of it is due to corruption—it’s so rampant here, so ingrained in this valley's culture, that the lost resources, the failed projects, the half-finished buildings, and the destroyed infrastructure simply sit there.  People are angry about it, but they've mostly given up on finding a systemic solution.  There are no institutions to appeal to here, not really.  Not in the same way that there are in bigger cities, where the influence of foreign direct investment and big-city, internationally-minded culture helps hold governments accountable.  It’s different in the Jiu Valley.  Here, when communism collapsed, all that was left were a bunch of pissed-off miners, who worked out their frustration in sometimes-violent marches towards Bucharest (see Gallagher, “Theft of a Nation”) and by drinking a lot of alcohol. 

That’s a sweeping and unfair generalization, of course, but like Gallagher wrote, communism’s downfall left “an ‘institutional abyss’ being ‘the legacy of a leviathan Soviet state which, when it collapsed, left behind only administrative and economic rubble devoid of the judicial, accounting and police procedures necessary for a modern society’.”  Unlike in the bigger cities of Romania, or even in the small towns in other regions which were less stripped-to-the-bone physically and economically, the Jiu Valley never found the resources to rebuild itself entirely.  Development’s beginning to come, but only in bits and pieces.  As I walked through Lupeni tonight, I kept smiling at the strange conglomerate that exists here: sleek, modern cell phones sit on top of rotting wooden crates on my host family’s farm; TV antennas poke out of broken glass windows in the back neighborhoods; teenagers walk the streets in more fashionable clothes than most American kids but return to a block apartment where the stairway reeks of mold and they share a room with their parents.  Modernization and globalization have come to the Jiu Valley, but in fits and starts.  That’s how it is across most of Romania, of course—just here, it’s further behind.

It's a long one.

It’s Sunday, and I’m sitting in the kitchen listening to jazz (and the frantic noises of our washing machine, which always sounds like it’s trying to take off when it gets to the spin cycle) and thinking about how many stories I’ve failed to share on here in the last week.  Sorry.  I’ll try to play a little game of catch-up this afternoon… here goes!  In no particular order…

1)  Random thought number one: I don’t know what the heck is wrong with mosquitoes in this country, but in the United States, there are not vast hordes of angry, blood-sucking mosquitoes still alive in people’s homes in mid-November.  (Can you tell I’m a bit frustrated?)  Seriously.  I’ve killed over a dozen today.  No exaggeration.  I’ve started talking out loud to them, threatening them with imminent doom if they show their faces or do that obnoxious buzz-in-my-ear thing when I’m trying to sleep…  There are no mosquitoes outside.  They have all decided to winter in our apartment.  And it drives me nuts.

2)  We’ve had a really great week of classes.  For instance.  Monday, in Romanian Culture & History, we were talking about the distinction (or lack thereof, really) between public and private propery under communism.  One of the books we’ve been reading is How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a collection of little vignettes about life under communism by Slavenka Drakulić, a Croatian author and journalist.  She’s great.  Honestly, now that I’ve lived in Eastern Europe, everything she writes about (in this book and Café Europa) rings so true.  Little things—things you would never have even noticed—are uncovered in her writing, and suddenly you realize that, for instance, laundry is more important than you ever thought.  Let me explain.

“On Doing Laundry.”  Drakulić is writing about hands, about the red, chapped knuckles of old women who have beat and scrubbed and rinsed and wrung out laundry for their family for fifty years; about women who buy a washing machine as a symbol of wealth but leave it covered with a lace cloth, preferring to scrub clothes by hand because it gets them cleaner; about the fact that everywhere in Eastern Europe, boring apartment blocks are made more interesting by the lines of laundry on balconies, flapping in the breeze.  She’s writing about how you can read laundry lines and tell who lives there—small children, a miner, and a woman with a penchant for fancy lingerie.  She’s writing about how much time laundry takes from the lives of women around the world—how much of their time could be spent doing something less repetitive, how maybe that’ s important.  She’s writing about how we perceive the weather, how we rejoice on sunny days.  And then?  Suddenly I see the world differently.  I look outside, on this warm, breezy fall day, and think to myself, “It’s a good drying day.”  It is.  On almost every balcony in Lupeni, clean clothes flutter in the breeze on days like today, pinned up with colored clothespins and billowing like miniature sails.  Laundry’s beautiful.  In fact, it’s a symbol of love—usually of women’s service to their families, service that is repeated over and over and over, leaving no legacy other than the memory of the smell of the breeze in your sheets and the cracked, red knuckles of your grandmother.  I never would have seen it before. 

Check this out: it’s a photo gallery of laundry around the world, and it’s lovely.  

3)  We’re working on projects for our Eastern Orthodoxy class, in which we’ve chosen a few icons and are studying the symbolism and theology present inside the art.  I didn’t expect to love this project as much as I have.  I’m studying two icons from Orthodox feast days—Palm Sunday (“the triumphal entry into Jerusalem”) and Pentecost (“the descent of the Holy Spirit”).  I’ve come to love them both.  There’s beautiful theology inside of them—much in the same way that there’s often a practical theology at play when you enter a church.  I’d go on and on about it, but I won’t for now.  I’ll just encourage you to look them up, and then ask me about them.  It’s beautiful.  It really is.

Speaking of beautiful... the view from my host family's farm.

4)  On Friday, I went up the mountain to go visit my host family, as has become habit since moving to the apartment a couple weeks ago.  I love these visits.  Climbing up Straja is one of my favorite things to do in Lupeni—the scenery is beautiful, the walk is cathartic, and I always love returning home.  It does feel like home.  Last week, Mădălina and I played outside for three hours non-stop, hitting all her favorite games, running almost-frantically from one to the next.  This time, she chose her favorite, so we played “house” for a couple hours.  Well, sorta.  It was more like a mix of “house” and “school” and “birthday party.”  The “house” is one woodpile (it also doubles as “restaurant” when we play that game) and the “school” is another woodpile, so we run back and forth a lot… and this week, it was perpetually our birthday, apparently, because she’d say we had to go find presents for each other, and we’d split up and scour the farm for something to hide behind our back and give to the other.  (Appropriate gifts are things like rocks, which you pretend are candies, or sticks, which you pretend are pens, or broken plastic toys, or sticks with leaves impaled on them, which you pretend are bouquets of flowers.  Inappropriate gifts are metal rods, apparently, ‘cause when I ran out of ideas and gave that to Mădă, she just smiled kindly and shook her head.)

But.  I had quite the shock when I first arrived at the farm this week.  I was just coming into the second meadow (I go through two gates and two meadows from the road to get to the house), when I looked to the right and saw Florin and two other men digging.  Interesting, I thought… and then I suddenly realized where they were digging.  See, it’s tradition in some parts of Romania—particularly rural Romania—to bury your ancestors on the family property.  I didn’t know my host family did that until I’d already lived there for a few weeks, and then suddenly one morning, as I was walking to school, I realized that there were two crosses with names on them stuck in the ground right next to the vegetable garden.  It was a bit startling then, but I’d since gotten used to the idea.  But that’s where they were digging—Florin and his two brothers, the three of them taking turns passing around the spade, digging two new graves. 

I was rather worried.  Obviously.  As soon as I got into the house, I asked Andreea what was going on, and she shook her head.  Apparently Grandma and Grandpa decided they wanted to dig their graves now, just to be prepared.  They’re not sick or anything, I guess they just felt like getting everything set up… just in case?  Andreea kept shaking her head.  “It’s weird,” she said.  “They even made their own… what is it?” and she made the sign of a cross with her hands.

“Tombstones?” I asked.

“Yes, yes!” she answered.  “They wrote their names, and drew their pictures; everything.”

“But they don’t think they’re going to… die, do they?”

She shook her head.  “No,” she responded.  “It’s very strange.  Not normal.  This is not normal.”

I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.  On the one hand, I guess it’s nice to be prepared... it’s almost funny, in some sorta-morbid way.  (When I saw Grandpa later and asked him what was up, he answered that they were building a new house, and laughed when I answered that it had a beautiful view…)  But Andreea was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of two graves, yawning open on their property for the next who-knows-how-long.  I can see why.  Strange.  Very strange indeed.

5)  Don’t go to the ATM on Friday.  Friday is payday.  And in Romania, most people only get paid once a month, and it looks like they get paid by direct deposit… because every now and then, always on a Friday, there’s a queue about a mile long outside the bank’s one ATM, as everyone waits to withdraw their check in lei and bani.  Last Friday, we counted seventeen people there at once.  A few hours later, when we walked back the other way, the number was bigger.  Ridiculous.

6)  I have a new favorite food.  Well, it’s not really new; I’m just re-confirming my love.  (If nothing else, the year of 2010 has been a really good one for adventures in eating!  I mean, come on… Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Italy, Hungary, and Romania?!) 

But seriously.  On Friday night, we invited Julie’s host brother Emanuel (we call him Mani) over to teach us how to make sarmale, which is… well, it’s greatness wrapped in cabbage, that’s what it is.  Minced meat and onions and carrots and lots of spices and pepper paste and rice, wrapped into boiled cabbage leaves and cooked on the stovetop for an hour or so… it’s amazing.  I have to admit, one of my favorite aspects of apartment living has been getting to cook all the time… between me and Marit and Julie, we eat pretty well.

Look!  We can cook!   

(This is crem de cremeş, not sarmale... and Julie doesn't look so sure.)

7)  Saturday afternoon I was going a bit stir-crazy from sitting inside and doing homework all day, so I decided to head out to the park to read for a while.  I don’t make this decision lightly—every time I’ve gone out to the park to read, I get funny looks from every single person who passes me.  Apparently, only old men sit on the bench to read, and they only read the newspaper.  Not books.  The only thing that a young woman like myself would do on a park bench is canoodle with her boyfriend, apparently… at least, that’s what the couple at the bench next to me thought.  (PDA is completely acceptable here, so couples make out all the time.  At first I was a little annoyed by it, but I’ve almost grown fond of it.  I was talking to a Romanian about it, and she said she thinks it’s fine—she said it doesn’t make sense to her that people would try to hide how they feel about each other, and that makes sense to me... but my American, Midwestern, reserved side still sometimes is a little surprised by the slurpy, smacking sounds next to me in the park.  Zach’s taken to rating their style on a scale of 1 to 10, actually.  I like that strategy.)

Anyway.  So I went to the park.  On the way, I stopped and said hello to the little old man in the brown coat who owns the little shop at the bottom of our apartment—he’s really fond of the American girls, and always asks us what we’re doing when we leave, usually patting us on the head or pinching our cheek in adorable little-old-man fashion.  I showed him my book, which he grabbed and looked at bemusedly (“Engleza?!” he remarked), and then went on my merry way.

It was a lovely day, and one of my IMPACT girls stopped by to talk to me for a while, so I was pretty happy when I decided to head back in after an hour or so.  I crossed the street in front of the Pentecostal church and walked back to the apartment, saying hello to the little old man again—and then he surprised me.  “Stay!” he commanded (in Romanian.  He doesn’t speak a lick of English.)

So I stayed.  He poured a little plastic cup of coffee—Romanians drink a lot of coffee in these tiny plastic cups, which I’m always afraid will melt from the heat, but never seem to—and dumped in sugar for me, then handed it to me, motioned to a chair, and pointed to where on the shelf to set the cup.  I obliged.  And there we sat, me sipping my coffee and speaking my broken, elementary Romanian; him in his little cap and ever-present brown coat, talking about random things.  I think he was lonely.  His wife, who makes langoşi for them to sell every morning, was at home in the house.  I asked if he had kids, and he said they had died.  I apologized.  I asked if he liked working here.  He shrugged noncommittally and took out a cigarette.  I declined his offer, and watched him puff for a while.  I asked if he went to church.  Yep, the Orthodox one.  He said something about Father Ciocan that I couldn’t catch.  He asked me if I was staying in Romania.  Until December, I answered.  Christmas.  Are you staying for Christmas? he asked.  No, I responded.  I’ll be with my family in the States.  That made me smile.  He smiled too.  I asked him if it would snow soon.  He shrugged again. 

Eventually his friend stopped by, so I left.  I see them playing backgammon or something outside together when business is slow (so pretty much every day), and I didn’t want to interrupt that.  Plus, I’d about exhausted the topics of conversation I can hit with my vocabulary.  But I might try to study something new tonight so I can ask him more questions tomorrow.  I like this little old man.

8)  Julie and I found another church this morning.  Well, we didn’t really find it—I’d seen it before, a really big church by Lupeni standards, with a weird crooked steeple with a staircase inside it.  It’s a Baptist church, which is the only other Protestant denomination (besides Pentecostal) represented in the Jiu Valley.  We decided to check it out.  The service was at nine, and we had extra time to get there, so we wandered through some beautiful back alleys in Lupeni and eventually snuck behind someone’s garage to get to the churchyard.  We weren’t really sure where to go, but we figured we’d just go inside.  As soon as we opened the door, we were greeted with the confused stares of a mob of elderly men and women.  (It’s typical by now.  I’m not really phased anymore.)  Thankfully, two of the women bustled on over to us, greeting us in rapid-fire Romanian, taking our hands, smiling gentle, toothless grins, and ushering us upstairs.  Pretty soon we found ourselves dragged to the fourth row of a fairly-full sanctuary, then shooed into a pew between two old women.  The woman on my left, who had whisked us upstairs from the lobby, was adorable, and kept looking at me and smiling and patting my hand.  Occasionally she’d lean over to me and whisper things in rushed Romanian… to which I’d smile and nod and respond as best I could, since I could probably have barely understood her if she spoke English, so soft was her speech.  But I did pick up that at one point she asked me if I was saved, and when I said yes (I didn’t bother discussing it) she asked me if I wanted to go up front and share my testimony.  I declined.  She also asked me if I was coming back for the 5:00 evening service, to which I responded with a noncommittal “nu ştiu” and a smile, which she seemed to accept, since she smiled back, patted my hand, and turned back to the front. 

The service lasted about three hours.  There were six pastors, I think—at least, there were three pairs of men who came up at different points to lead Scripture reading and short sermons.  (And then there was the really old man at the end, who gave a looooong sermon…)  After the service, one of them came up to me and Julie and asked us if we spoke English (we responded with a grateful yes) and told us about their young adults group on Friday nights, and about their evening service, and on and on.  I wish we had gone to this church earlier in the semester, because I would have liked to have visited the Friday night service.  Sigh.  He also mentioned that last week they’d gone to Braşov to take the youth to a Michael W. Smith concert—it was a little loud for him, but the youth liked it, he said.  I tried not to chuckle.  Oh, Michael W. Smith… I didn’t know he came to Romania!  Globalization is a crazy thing.

9)  I know this has already been an extraordinarily jumbled and long post, but one last thing.  I’ve been wrestling a lot this semester with what it means to be a Christian and a citizen, with how to love God and my neighbor.  And this afternoon, I found this posted on my friend Ben’s facebook wall.  I don’t know where it comes from (perhaps him; he’s a great writer), but I’m ending with it because it’s beautiful.  And I believe it.  I love Christ; I choose Christ.  That is what—at the end of my wanderings and questionings—I keep returning to.  Because, in the words of Peter (John 6:68), where else would I go?  He alone has the words of life.

To believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ; and I tell myself with a jealous love not only that there is nothing but that there cannot be anything. Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.