Pockets of the World

Most days I do not leave a three-kilometer radius. The locations of my office, my home, and my gym form a triangle and the stores where I buy milk and sunflower seeds are in the middle. Sometimes I leave the triangle to go to other villages to visit schools or conduct/attend seminars, and those days I feel as if I’m moving a little bit, but usually to get there I must take a van so stuffed with people that on occasion I sit on the dashboard, kneeling forward with the windshield. This position in the maxi-taxi is often better than standing in the midst of the van’s group embrace, smelling everyone’s breath and stale cigarette scented clothes, but when it has snowed (as it finally did this week) the dashboard seat is precarious for if the maxi-taxi was to actually lose control at any of the many times it fishtails on ice, only the window shield is at my back, and a lot of standing off-balanced people are at my front. So basically, every day in Moldova is an adventure.

Except for the days that aren’t. Because of my triangle, I sometimes get a claustrophobic sense of my new home. Though landlocked, it can feel like an island, a far away lily pad. I worry I may be wasting my edge, my youth, in an unknown town in a small country. Some volunteers complain about constant unwanted attention at their sites, I on the other hand, for better or worse, seem to blend into my surroundings. Perhaps it is my inherited Eastern European features, or the fact that I tend to dress it up for work like the ladies here do, but when I walk down the street people don’t look twice. When requesting a site I specifically said, “I want to be anonymous, I don’t want everyone in my business.” While I do not regret my request, now that I live here I’ll walk through town or the market and think to myself somebody look at me, please! Someone say something to me! or on my more patriotic and vain days, do you people even know I’m American? The answer is no, they don’t, and even if they did, the probably wouldn’t care. The solution to this, of course, is going out of my way to meet people, and make myself known.

My favorite small town instances are when my reputation precedes me. When introduced to someone as “The American” I love when they respond, “Oh, you’re the one teaching aerobics! What days are classes?” or “I heard about your English club, I want to join!” Those interactions balance my lonely, bored days around here, though I cannot say truly helps the claustrophobia.

I am not upset or suffocated by my surroundings, which I guess would be the more appropriate use of claustrophobia, but I feel as if I’m being stowed away. I’m dwelling in a little portion of the world, moving within only but a triangle sector. This is not an uncommon feeling to me. In Ann Arbor, my life too was sectioned off by locality. In the three years living there, rarely did I ever venture to the more student populated part of town and when I did I always needed help navigating through all the South and North University named streets. In New York, my family’s basement in Queens was my borough. When I worked in Greenwich Village I only knew the immediate streets, and solely visited the only other people I knew in the city at the time, my friends in Brooklyn, whom neither were New York natives. I’ve strolled slices of Europe, populated cities in America, the small, yet dense country of Israel, and too only in bits.

I see my existence, and scoping the world, as taking on compartments. Currently I live on the cold, yet quaint northern border of a small post-soviet country. Zoom in on me, ambling back and forth in my triangle, boarding public transportation out to cover alternate ground, only to inevitably return to my original segment, where I will continue to remain for at least another 20 months, before popping onto to a new lily pad elsewhere.