Robbery

City life: bustling, ever-changing, and unpredictable. Today I had an adventure in city life. Today I learned what it meant to not trust people. This is new for me –I trust people and they then have to work hard to lose my trust, but I do not make people prove their trustworthiness to me. But today, in the heart of the city, I understood I little more why people live by the rule: “trust is earned.” We had a free afternoon from teaching today, so the four of us decided it would be fun to go shopping at the bazaar and downtown. We walked from our home through the park, across the big stone bridge, and into the old city. We passed the venders selling old rugs, handmade jewelry, and sketches of the city. We travelled past cafes, ice cream shops, and ended up in the bazaar –the biggest open air market in Skopje. This market is filled with all kinds of things: from meat, to clothes, to notebooks, to toys, to mops, to vegetables…and to so much more. We turn the corner into a tight tent space filled with tables which are covered with shoes and begin our feeble attempts to communicate and to barter. As I am standing at one stall admiring a stand of long, flowing skirts I feel someone bump into my right side. At first I think it is nothing –I mean this place is quite crowded and it is very easy to run into someone, but for some reason this bump caught my attention. I realized that my purse was also hanging on my right, and all at once I felt my purse moving. I quickly turned around and grabbed the opening to my purse and then watched as a grown, forty year old man, pulled his hand out of my bag. This manicured, older man is wearing a bright pink shirt and I watch in astonishment as he quickly disappears into the crowd. I had watched him remove his hand from my bag and I knew that his hand had been empty, but I searched through my belongings just to be sure something hadn’t been stolen. The shop keepers all asked –in various languages- if I had lost anything and then warned me to keep my purse close to me. I was a bit frazzled to say the least, but the thing that kept running through my mind was the description of the man who tried to rob me. He wasn’t some poor little kid or some hooligan; he was an ordinary Macedonian man. Why did he try to steal from me?

Hopeless Eyes

Here I am, sitting in another noisy classroom observing yet another Macedonian teacher. I am here observing a young woman teach English to a typical group of Junior High students whose main objective seems to be chatting with their friends. From my vantage point in the room I can observe both the teacher and the students rather unobtrusively. I take advantage of my viewpoint and I begin to casually glance around the room. As my eyes sweep by various students, I notice that most of the students don’t even care that I am in their room with them. For many of them, I am just another “adult” to ignore. But then, my eyes stop sweeping and become locked with an intense blue-gray stare. Even if all the other students didn’t care if I was in that room, these blue-gray eyes did. She knew I was there. She knew I was sitting here and that I was looking in on her world for this split second. The intensity of her gaze made me break eye contact, but my mind would not allow me to forget the look in her eyes. In that brief moment when our eyes locked I saw something much more than a young teenage girl. I saw pain. Yes, I saw pain in her eyes. As I sat there during the rest of the lesson I found it difficult to focus on what the teacher said, or even what the other students were doing. The image I kept seeing was pain filled, blue-gray eyes. Near the end of the class I dared to glance around the room once again, and sure enough those same blue-gray eyes were waiting for me. Again, we locked eyes and this time I realized something more. There was more than simple pain in her eyes; there was defiance. What I found in her eyes was an attempt at survival –a cold, painful survival. The pain in her eyes was hopelessness. I quietly watched as the students filed out of the classroom and headed back to their homes, and again I could not shake the image of one face from my mind. Questions kept repeating in my mind: Will anyone else see her pain? Will anyone take the time to notice her eyes? Will anyone share a reason for hope with this girl? Here I was, sitting in her class on this one day, but I will never see her again. I will never be able to help this girl in her pain. Her eyes are still haunting me, and I want desperately to show her that I care –that there is a reason for hope. I want desperately to know her, but I cannot. It makes me wonder, if I saw this pain in the eyes of a girl I met once…have I missed the pain in the eyes of others around me? Have I missed chances to share hope, to care, to know someone? Have I allowed people I know to walk around with pain in their eyes when I could have helped them? How many times have I glanced past the blue-gray eyes of hopelessness?