Travel

Traveling is always an experience, but traveling Eastern Europe is THE experience. Let me just share about my last European traveling experience. Basic outline: tiny, little bus from Skopje to Sofia, sketchy overnight train for ten hours to Bucarest, sweet double-decker train into Galati. The outline of our experience. We crossed out of Macedonia, into Bulgaria, out of Bulgaria, and into Romania within 24 hours. Each boarder crossing meant getting checked out by one country on to get checked in by another country two minutes down the road.That is a lot of stopping and starting! Hearing phrases such as: "American peoples?" or "Its a Turkish toilet...down over the hill," "Don't worry, everyone in Bulgaria will try to take your money," and "Galati? Why are you going to Galati. No one goes there," gave us memories we will never forget, and made every step of our journey interesting. Of course I cannot leave out the fact that I got yelled at by a clearly angry Bulgarian woman, but I had no idea what she was obviously unhappy about. On the other hand, we met helpful people who translated for us, or who helped us exchange currencies or buy tickets, and a few even gave us directions. We met a little old man who was so proud of the tiny, ancient church he worked in that he let us walk through it for free. He even gave us a little tour switching back and forth between Bulgarian and German...so of course we followed exactly what he was saying. We saw groups of guys playing djembes and didgeridoos in parks, and standing around surrounding intense games of chess. We rode on trams and trains and bought tickets attempting to use languages we didn't know. We sat across from a sweet, middle aged Bulgarian woman and watched as she cringed away from her seatmate (a 28 year old man covered in tattoos, drinking beer, and talking about his favorite hardcore bands). We had the joy of sleeping in seats on an overnight train which was definitely built during the communist era, smelled like urine, and bumped and creaked more than an old rocking chair. We were shocked when our entire train car -with the exception of ourselves- emptied out at two in the morning. We were woken up abruptly multiple times for passport checks and ticket checks in every country, and each time we were not really sure what was happening. We discovered the importance of a well packed pack, brushed our teeth in a park, and found out more about Romania's bitter history. All in all, quite a grand adventure I must say :)

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?

Broken Pieces

I sit amidst the noise of a college coffee shop, and with my feet propped up on the chair across from me I lean back leisurely in this relaxed environment. Silence is unheard of in such a place and I am truly bombarded with sounds from every direction. The voices of students and professors bantering about group projects, studying Spanish vocabulary, and discussing the latest world catastrophes are all mingling with the sounds of grinding coffee beans and sudden outbursts of laughter. These noises create a musical tapestry which illustrates what life is like here. I sit here, and yet I am not here. A part of me is –yes- but not all of me. In the midst of this cacophony of overwhelming stimuli my mind has travelled to another place. As I sit here among my peers, I feel quite unconnected and even solitary. I just watched a close friend of mine walk away; walk away toward something unexpected, hurtful, and life altering. Walk away for perhaps the last time –ever. He walked away from me like others have done before, but as he walked away I felt the piece of my heart that he carries with him grow evermore distant. I could almost make out the thin line tying the empty crevice within myself to that piece of my heart he holds as the line stretched, bent, and was pulled further away from its original home. At that moment I realized something; I realized that I have thin -almost too thin to be any more than imagined- lines connecting pieces of my heart to their broken places within my chest. I could feel, all the more keenly at that moment, how bits of my heart had been torn out and handed to so many places and people in the world. I could feel where I had timidly handed a part of myself to a person, or a group of people, in my life, and I knew in that instant that my heart would only continue to be further pulled apart. I knew right then that I would never have all the pieces of my heart in one place again as long as I was on this earth. I discovered in that moment that I possess a broken heart. Yet, there is still one who can hold my heart. There is still one who deserves all of its broken pieces, and who asks for them. In return I ask Him –I plead with Him- to carry my heart even as it is dispersed around this big, blue marble we call “home.” I implore Him to fill all the empty spaces within me so that I never run out of heart to give, and that I am giving His heart along with mine. So, I sit here in this lighthearted –ha- atmosphere and soak in my surroundings. For you see, while I am here, I am not really here. My mind has travelled to a place far distant and I sit here among my peers feeling unconnected and solitary.

Your Eyes

Your eyes are speaking to me; speaking messages that belie the falsities in your words. Here you stand before me with a smile plastered across your face. Do you think I miss the frown in your eyes, the pain pouring through the mixed brown and green? “I see you,” I want to scream it! “I see the words your eyes are saying and I am ignoring the empty movements of your mouth. Don’t you know that I see you?” But no, your smile never slips an inch and your eyes never stop their pleading. If only...if only –what? If only you would be honest with me, with yourself? If only you would stop hiding and accept healing, accept truth? But, just as your lips are pouring out phrases of nothingness, so my words would fall on deaf ears. So I will sit here quietly -imploring you with messages in my own eyes; hoping that one day soon you will speak from your eyes rather than from your mouth.

And She Smiled

I walk this crowded street alone. The intensity of the Mexican sun warms my back and shoulders in a matter of seconds, and soon I am uncomfortably warm. I glance up at the sky and think to myself for the millionth time that somehow the sky is bluer here than it is at home: more piercing and perfect. A glance to my right takes in a woman sitting outside her chocolate store with a serious expression cloaking her face. I glance to my left to see three men talking softly as they sit outside a home; each one with hard angles and creases crossing his face and not a hint of merriment touching his lips. Another woman walks ahead of me carefully holding a baby in her arms so that the sun does not shine in his eyes, and she tightly holds hand of her small daughter who is quietly walking beside her. Suddenly three mangy dogs up on a roof begin to bark at our passing simply for the joy of making noise. At a glance behind me I swiftly move from the street to the sidewalk to let three students piled onto a single bicycle pass by. Every face I see holds a somber expression, a serious demeanor is held by all; but, as I walk by the woman selling chocolates I look her in the eye and say, “Buenos Dias” with a smile full across my face. Immediately her eyes light up, she nods in my direction as she returns my greeting, and then… she smiles. The change in her face is so dramatic that I am caught by the beauty of such a sudden smile. Creases that before showed a hard life now crinkle in the perfect places to reveal her true beauty. The little girl walking ahead of me looks back at the noise behind her and our eyes meet. I softly say, “Hola” and offer her a wave and another smile. At first she simply stares at me over her mother’s hand unsure. Then, she glances up at her mother’s face, and finally turns forward to face the street in front of her. One quick moment passes and something marvelous happens. This little child shyly turns back my way and offers me a small, bashful, beautiful smile. She smiled. She smiled at me. There are times when I watch a picture be taken here and I wonder why no one makes an effort to smile; times when I look through my own pictures and realize that only the Americans are smiling, and my heart misses the merriment of a simple smile. Then I have days when I walk down the street and everyone I greet gives a quick, simple, pure smile, and I am struck once more by the beauty of an unexpected smile. Occasionally I wonder if perhaps saving smiles makes them more special. I wonder if maybe I give mine away too often; maybe the Mexican way is better. Then, I realize that she smiled. She smiled at me when I smiled at her. My smile takes no effort –I am used to smiling when I see people- but this time my smile caused others to smile too. She smiled. She smiled at me.

Touching A Star

I touched a star today. Literally! I touched a star and I didn’t even know it at first. I hadn’t expected to touch one today, and it didn’t feel the way I had always imagined holding a star in my hand would feel…but it was wonderful nonetheless. I remember as a child being in awe of the stars so far above me, and how even when I reached as high as I could I never got close enough to touch one. I dreamt of dancing with one, taking in the brilliance of it –of the warmth those faraway lights must hold-- and today I touched one, and I didn’t even know it. I found myself at an orphanage across from the Bible College here in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. 20 or so children were running around of all different ages. A few were still in diapers while some of the older ones were verging on their teenage years. Kids were tugging on hands and spinning in swings. Some were running after a ball, and others were preparing to feed and milk the four cows. All at once I had a little girl asking me for a piggy back ride. Of course I obliged and found myself not a pig, but a horse galloping down the length of the barn. I spun around and continued on in the other direction. Her giggle was all the added energy I needed to run along. At the end of the hall, I stopped and spun her around in front of me. As I held her in my arms I realized I didn’t even know what her name was. I asked her, “Como te llamas?” and she replied softly, “Estrella.” I looked at her face joyfully smiling at me, and I realized that her name means star. I was holding a star in my arms like I had always dreamed of, and it was better than all of my imaginings could have been. It was impossible to not take in the brilliance of this beautiful child, the warmth of her laugh and smile. I danced with a star today, and my dream came true.