La mulți ani, America.

It was the 4th of July yesterday, and I almost forgot -- but our colleague Andra didn't.

We walked into the office yesterday morning to be greeted by, "La mulți ani!" (the traditional Romanian birthday greeting, which literally translated means something like, "Many more years!")  I was a little taken aback by it, so I laughed and asked, "What?"  Andra looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Kelly, it's America's birthday!  La mulți ani!"

Then she handed me a small butterfly pendant and gave Jack a red rope bracelet.  In honor of America's birthday.

Uh.  

And she wasn't the only one!  Other colleagues wished us the same, and also seemed a little surprised that we weren't wearing red, white, & blue, or launching fireworks, or that we hadn't brought  chocolate chip cookies to the office to celebrate.

Oops.

At first it was just kinda funny to me, and really sweet that our Romanian friends knew that it was America's independence day and wanted to recognize it for us.  (Also funny how many stereotypes and assumptions our Romanian friends have about the 4th of July from American movies!  But I digress.)  After the third person congratulated us on our nation's birth, I started thinking about how strange it is after all that we weren't doing anything.  Granted, Jack and I are pretty careful about trying not to bring unnecessary attention to the fact that we're foreigners.  Neither of us have ever been the most patriotic, in the sense of flag-waving, stars-and-stripes-wearing, firework-shooting July 4th celebrants.  And living overseas, as an American in particular, brings with it a fair share of baggage... especially in the fact that most of the youth we know and work with here in the Jiu Valley think that America is something like heaven on earth, that this fertile mountain valley is somewhere close to the opposite, and that success in life would include moving to the United States to live, work, and party.  We spend a fair amount of energy trying to dispel that myth, telling people about the realities of racism, immigrant discrimination, poverty, unemployment, and loneliness that exist in the US too.  (We're such cheery missionaries.)  But it seems important to me that the people we live among know that we didn't sacrifice some perfect life to move into a godforsaken, poverty-stricken valley.  It is important to me to help the kids we work with here see all the beauty that exists here -- in the mountains, in the food, in the people, in the history, in the potential.  I know we'll always be Americans living here, never "locals," but I want to value the richness of this place, even with my outsider eyes.

But yesterday I was reminded that the place we come from is worth celebrating too.  Jack and I have talked about this a lot -- how at the beginning we tried to "blend in," and when that didn't work, it took us a while to settle into this skin of being outsiders in a small community, and owning our Americanness.  In the last 9 months or so, we've started to invite people over for American-style meals, delighting in introducing people to the flavors and tastes of the place we come from.  We have started to talk more about our hometowns and our families, not shying away from the fact that we miss them, ache for them sometimes.  And yesterday I was reminded, once again, that there's a lot to celebrate about the United States of America (even as the social justice-international development-foreign policy parts of me sometimes wince).  Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion.  Civic engagement and volunteerism.  Democratic elections (okay, even if they're corrupted by money) and remarkable levels of access to publicly elected officials.  Civil rights (slowly, slowly, but still) and public dialogue.  Brownies and Chicago-style pizza and Iowa corn on the cob.  I love living in Romania -- but I loved living in the US, too.

So la mulți ani, America.  To many years ahead.