When I was on the plane last week heading to the conference, I almost started crying thinking about how everything would be in English. I don't think we'd even left the runway yet. When we landed in Birmingham and I asked people in the airport for help finding the train station, I didn't actually cry like I expected, but to hear my language, to speak in it... there's a sort of ownership there--there's another word I can't think of at the moment but it conjures up the image of being 'on my turf now.' And to have polite small talk with strangers! I don't know if it was English or England, perhaps both, but it was wonderful.
It's a strange feeling. In one sense, I still wasn't in my culture. The language gave the sense of it being a sort of cousin culture, but on the other hand, there was a feeling of being home in a way I haven't felt in these last six months. It keeps coming back to this, no? Writing about feeling at home. Snatches of it in Romania, in England. You catch and lose it and run after it again, elusive as always. All this longing, and it's one thing I'll never doubt: "But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ." And, from this amazing song:
I am a pilgrim, a voyager
I wont rest until my lips touch the shore
Of the land that I've been longing for as long as I've lived
Where they'll be no pain or tears anymore
But doing this sort of work changes you. I am not Romanian, despite the things I've picked up. And while I'm American, I suspect I won't fit as well when I go back. And so in a group of people who are all living and working cross-culturally, who are learning languages, loving and teaching students, you find people who understand. It's a sort of sub-culture, even, a culture of cultures. And I didn't want to leave.
It sort of hit me the day before we left. We had some extended time to go off on our own and pray and as I sat down to read my Bible, I felt so ornery and aggravated that I was arguing in my head with everything in the passage. So I finally put it down, thought a minute and came to this conclusion: I'm really going back tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be in Romania. And oh man I did not want to.
Weird, right? Sara loves Romania so much, she loves working there and the people and the language and so on. True, but something about it wears on you in ways that are hard to pinpoint. The obvious things--being away from friends/family/more prone to loneliness, the general frustrations of cross-cultural living--all these things are bearable and certainly the life God has led me through has prepared me very well for this sort of thing. And you think, yes, I am handling this well, no? You feel like you are. But it weighs, it is heavy here and it pulls on you in subtle ways and then suddenly you find yourself on a bed telling God you're not ready to go back. Despite the assurance that 'you are in the right place,' despite loving it, even.
Well. I'm back, so there's that. I know this is normal, so there's that too. And the awareness that we have one gracious God, one who waits patiently while his petulant child throws a fit because she doesn't want to do the thing that she really wants to do. So then there's the sucking it up, the shouldering-in even when it's not flowery and easy and even now there's some thankfulness in being back. And enter grace: he works despite the ways we mess it up, despite our attitudes, despite how what we want changes as often as the weather. And there in the mess of it he's teaching us, teaching them, transforming and redeeming and so far it doesn't seem to be any easier but I am grateful. Or I'm being taught to be--a little of both.
One of the people leading at the conference, one I knew was a pastor before I found out just by the way he prayed, led a seminar on grace and he said something that seems to have stuck. He talked about the unforgiving servant, how he had no idea how huge his debt was and therefore just how much grace he had been given. I could write posts and posts on this, but for now I feel like God is showing me in small pieces the grace he's giving me. How that relates to coming back here and doing my job and his work here, well, we'll see.
No neat ending on this one. Just lots of thoughts. The messy work of it all and a God who came down here and got his hands dirty, if that makes sense. Well, if he did, guess we ought to too.
I spent most of Friday hanging out with two Dutch friends killing time while waiting for our flights. We ended up at Subway--I could have cried over my six inch spicy Italian on wheat--and after eating began to teach each other language stuff. They taught me some Dutch, I taught them some Romanian.
Just for fun, I started with probably the hardest sound for native English speakers: ɨ (close central unrounded vowel). If you click the link you can listen to it. So Americans usually pronounce a word like pâine (bread) as if it p-w-i-n-e. But after I pronounced it for them I decided to write it down as well and they got really confused. Where's the l? they asked. The l, what? They were hearing an l.
Turns out the l in Dutch is this one: ɫ (velarized alveolar lateral approximant). Think that Russian-y one that sounds like swallowing. They sound much more alike to me when the Dutch one is said after a vowel as opposed to how it's initially pronounced in the link.
Anyway, I don't honestly know enough about this to say much of anything intelligent and it's been four too many years since my linguistics class (in Spanish!), but something at least feels similar in the way I make these two sounds, so even if I can't tell you in technical terms what's going on, I can hear/feel it. However! I looked it up and Wiki tells me that with lateral approximants (like this one: ɫ), the center of the tongue makes solid contact with the roof of the mouth. And of course with ɨ your tongue lifts toward the roof of your mouth (but doesn't touch).
Well of course! That makes so much sense! It made me so excited when they insisted they heard their l. I love this sort of thing, though. Example, with l and r (the tap). The first time I learned to say te extrañare in Spanish, I heard te extrañale and proceeded to say it like that for over a month until I finally heard it again and saw it written out with, to my surprise, an r. It happens in Romanian, too. A word like locurile gets my tongue a little twisted with the l and r that close and I have to slow down about half the time to get it out.
All you linguists, feel free to correct my fumbling descriptions. And language lovers, aren't these sort of things exciting? So much fun! Do any of you switch up sounds like this sometimes?
Well, curled in my bed eating lemons with salt to cure a sore throat and otherwise still sort of spinning from this past week at a conference in Germany. Lots of thoughts and reflections about the talks, particularly one on grace, and just how difficult it is to return to Romania after spending a week among people who do what you do, who love students and long for home too.
But that's for tomorrow. For now, the shenanigans and fun leading up to, during and after the conference.
First, I have Bucuresti to thank for being possibly the only city in which nearly getting run over by a car helps keep you from being eaten by a dog. Yeah, that happened. I was walking to the bus stop the day before I left with two big backpacks and one of the street dogs that usually hangs out in the area (and has never bothered me before) decided because I was much larger and formidable-looking than normal that it was his job to chase me out of his territory (read: the part in front of the bloc where you have to walk).
So there he was behind me, barking really loudly. Normally they don't bother me and when they I do, I talk to them. You'd be surprised but heeeei ce faci, ma? cum te cheamaaaaa? works wonders. Probably people think you're crazy and possibly the dogs do too, but it's kept me from being bitten so far and these dogs get pretty aggressive. Anyway, this dog was entirely too aggressive to converse with so I just kept walking quickly and hoped he'd stop once I got out of his territory (again, read: the street).
About a second later I noticed that there was a car coming. Split-second decision-making, pros and cons. If I stop, I will not be hit by the car but I will be eaten by a dog. If I keep walking, I might not get bit (bitten?) but I might get hit--although the dog might too. Second option: more pros. (Six months ago I would have been appalled to hear people joking about running over street dogs... turns out Bucuresti nudges you out of that sensitivity.) So! I stepped in front of the car driving toward me and all in the same second, he slams on brakes, I side-step the car (pretty spry for a kid with twenty kilos on her back), dude is laying on the horn and shouting and the dog bites my leg. Luckily it was more of a nip and I was wearing jeans. However once I was on the other side of the street I turned around and yelled:
Nu mi-e frica de tine! Which means: I'm not afraid of you. Sucker.
Just as a fun factoid, I was reading some newspaper at the conference about some people who cycled across Europe raise money to buy a minibus for a church in Romania and while in this country they reported being chased by wild dogs. Yup, sounds about right.
Second, for the fun night at the conference we got to do ceilidh dancing. Before the actual night, they called for volunteers to help demonstrate to the rest of the group and being deprived of dancing for the last six months, I decide to volunteer myself. Good fun, right? Cross-cultural jumping-in, no? Well, then. Let's just say that while, at one point in my life I could salsa like a boss, I started out less than graceful at the ceilidh dances.
Anyway, finally got the hang of it, and let me tell you, it was a blast. I love dancing anyway, and this sort involved lots of swinging around and stomping and dancing with everybody. So as not to disappoint, I even fell on my head once. Yup. Grace, too, is a gift from God.
And third, the last evening a handful of us played a pick-up game of soccer. I was barefoot and even scored one pretty baller (buh) shot. The best part about it though was that about halfway through a Ugandan guy joined us. One fast dude. When I went after him when he had the ball, I could never tell which way he was going to go. In fact, I even told him that at one point. I said, my feet get so confused when I'm in front of you, left? right? what? Without pause, in the most African way you can imagine, he says:
It is okay to do a little dance!
And one last one, one of the many gems from this weekend, our resident French girl on trying England's pork scratchins:
It is like ze food for cats!
