#1: Based on what I had heard from students and staff that had visited Romania, I imagined a run down country like I had seen on the border from El Paso years ago when I played in the marching band at the Sun Bowl. Romania is not like Mexico's border towns. Life is simple in Romania, particularly in the villages. The pace of life is slower. There's less stuff. But the lack of stuff is filled with character. The people are beautiful. Life is valued for itself.
I realized that I am basically overstimulated all of the time, and because of this I struggle to construct meaning out of anything. This is likely why post-modern philosophy has grasped me. I see and live in the collapse of meaning and context everyday. I obsess over it because its important. The existentialists realized that life is absurd and that we had to rebel against the absurdity by, in some sense, embracing it with defiance. In the post-modern world, absurdity is multiplied by the rapid and decentralized deconstruction of meaning by the market place.
I cried on the plane on the return trip to the United States when I think of the conversation I had when I was told by one of the translators that she wished she could adopt one of the orphans, or at least take care of one during the summer. There was something about how she said it, where, for the first time in my life I saw someone talk about having a child not for her sake - but completely for the child. The selfless aching in her eyes was beautiful and hurt me and for the first time ever I suddenly realized that there's this large part of me that really wants a family of my own and I started to see what family can mean.
#2: The pain of major tragedies has crippled my sensitivities to simple human-to-human interactions. I think of Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, AIDS in Africa, poverty and the World Bank's investment in continuing the structural conditions that maintain institutional 3rd world status, the WTO's investment in capital over humanity, oil, health care, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and every other major failing by governmental and economic structures that leaves large numbers of people in pain, misery, or death. I am haunted by what I know, and yet endlessly angered and motivated to learn as much as possible to honor those in those conditions, educate as many people as possible and push to create changes in policy in any way I can.
And then suddenly I find myself in an orphanage, watching children climbing all over me that I've barely met. I see desperate hugs, pleading eyes, and somehow something like love. I'm embarrassed by my distance to my passion to fix the world and awed by the ease I see in others like my translator, who scoop the kids up with ease and commit themselves to these children with their all for the brief moments we had.
I put myself out there and struggle with accepting the ease in which the same can happen for me. How can these kids feel this way toward me? Who am I with this First World Guilt to come here with some money and a few days to step into this land and place my body with these kids? I am humbled and I feel like crying when I leave the orphanage. But I don't let myself because its too easy... too easy to feel that it is somehow about me. I don't want to leave.
#3: Shortly after leaving the village we find ourselves in Peleş Castle, the home of the (German) King Carol I of Romania from the late 1800s into the 1900s. I find myself seeing exquisite art and even more exquisite craftsmanship that overwhelms me. Each room has a different theme. Viennese, Italian, German, and Turkish extravagant rooms assault each step. The wealth is crippling and makes me viscerally sick to my stomach. I see chairs that were crafted by three generations of craftsmen that took over 100 years to build. I can't stomach the discord between these chairs and the poverty of the orphanage.
I heard several students say that they wished they owned the castle and I feel the need to flee. I want to hide in the countryside. I want to smell grass and feel rain on my face. We finally leave and I settle into a mallaise of considering all of the crap in my life at home and wondering what it means. I yearn for simplicity and some grasp of the depth of my character. The world feels too large and too small in different ways. I'm not sure what love is, but it seems more important than it was before I left the United States a few weeks ago.
