One more week and I will be en route home. I cannot believe it’s happening so soon. I am wrapping up my project here, learning the Sunday tropars of Znamenny chant to record and then perform this week, while mastering square notation and ancient church slavonic. Tomorrow I am traveling with my Orthodox choir to several villages to go on a kind of singing pilgrimage, as a part of the monastery’s mission. I spent the better part of today with my host mother and host sister. I will miss them all dearly. My elderly host father, he is 82, tried my peanut butter the other night. I wish I could accurately describe just how carefully he dabbed the foreign spread onto his tongue so as just to taste it and not actually eat it, for fear it might be an unpleasant experience and his perfect manners would be spoiled in the reaction he might be forced to let out and would then become knowledgeable to me. He smiled afterwards and thanked me. I explained we all ate this with jam as children. The previous night my host mother made blini, which are Russian pancakes that are almost the same thing as crepes, Russians feign any knowledge of what a crepe is, and I often wonder if the French would as well if blini were mentioned. 🙂 We had not had blini yet at home here and I had also not seen the jam that is so often spread on the delicious pancakes. My father, stooped down and from one of the low cuboards in the kitchen began to pull out huge glass jars, covered with wax paper and rubber bands. The jars were full of “jam”. He was quite excited as he opened them, spooning out a little bit of each for me to taste as I helped to cook the blini. The first bite was enough to make me aware that this jam was old enough to have begun to ferment. The taste of alcohol was pungent and sharp as I laughed and began to protest that in fact this must be old jam! Both my host parents agreed and when we all sat down to dinner continued to dwell upon my remarks about the jam. I ate cheese with my blini that night, I could not handle the jam. I have no idea just how old the jam was but my family had a wonderfully pleasant evening. 😉
I heard a tale from Riley the other night, of her host sister’s former boyfriend. Apparently he was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, and it was decided by all members of the family, including himself, that it would be best for the two of them to end their relationship. Marriage for him, it seemed was out of the question, his life expectancy and the seriousness if not the stigmatism attatched to it, required this decision. When I heard this story I was immediately forced to remind myself as I have to time and again that I am not in a first world country. And even more, I am not in a third world country. Russia is truly one of the only countries that is actually a second world country. While children diagnosed with Type I Diabetes in third world countries face death, and most children in first world countries are able to live a halfway normal life, this idea of what might lie inbetween was aroused in my mind. Then I began to remember other things I have realized about my disease here. No one knows what my insulin pump is. When I go through security at airports, stores, protests, my pump is completely foreign. When I explain what it is, it still makes no sense to them. I realize this is because the technology that I take for granted on a daily basis is simply not affordable or even available here. While insulin and the necessary supplies to inject it, as well as blood sugar machines can be found in every Apteka, I have never seen anything in any Magazeen that would allude to its existence. While Type II is known by many, to be the American disease, Type I because it is an entirely different disease is not categorized with Type II in any aspect. If only America would do so as well! I hope to do some research when I return to the states about Diabetes in second world countries.
I will miss it here dearly, and hope that I can return someday and visit my host family. Tonight at dinner my father suggested that my family could come and live in their apartment, and he talks daily of me staying and going to Sivastople for the summer with them. I only wish I could invite them to visit America. It is unbelievably difficult for Americans to visit Russia and vice versa. The American government has consistently sent us notices of the “dangers” we face here, and I have no doubt that if they could they would not allow us to visit here under any condition, which is why we had so many problems with our government and the program from the start. I can only hope that our relations as countries improve.
Well, it’s eleven and the sun is still out, but I should be heading to bed, as I must be on the metro by 5:45 tomorrow morning. I can’t wait to be back and to once again hear my language and see my alphabet!
Tags: Travel
kobradov