Macedonian Holiday Season

Since my last post just after New Years, we've been in the middle of the Orthodox holidays here in Macedonia. The two most significant celebrations involve events around Bozhik (Orthodox Christmas), held on January 7th, and the Old New Year (according to the Julian calendar) on January 14th.

For Bozhik, most of the other Peace Corps volunteers throughout Macedonia, especially in my MAK 16 class, spent the holiday with their old host families from PST. I decided to stay with my new host family in Obleshevo and it was really interesting and often fun cultural experience. The festivities started on Thursday night, the night before the day before Christmas (which is called Badnik). I went with my host parents to a large bonfire in an old soccer field on the outskirts of my village, and I spent most of the night making new friends, watching people dance the oro in the cold rain, and drinking hot rakija. Hot rakija has to be my favorite of the national drinks because while it is super strong, it has a nice taste to it (sugar helps) and keeps you warm in the cold Macedonian winter. I don't know if it tops drinking delicious hot mulled wine in the center of Krakow a few Decembers ago, but I'll take it.

The next day was Badnik, and there wasn't a whole lot going on until the large dinner we had around 8pm. It was by far the most ceremonial meal I've had since I've been in Macedonia. There were no guests (aside from me) outside of the immediate family. Once the food was all ready to go on the table, my host grandfather (dedo) went outside the room to invite Jesus to the meal, and then set aside a small piece of bread for him at the table. Once it was all set, we started on our meal, all without meat, and included sarma (cabbage rolls stuffed with rice), phyllo-dough pastry (cant remember the name) similar to burek, and assorted fruits and nuts. For drinks we had kompot (sort of like a non-alcoholic sangria) and rakija, along with a bottle of wine that I bought to share with everyone. Finally, on the actual day of Christmas, we went na gosti to my host mother Silvana's parents' house in Kocani for a golem ruchek (big lunch). It was overall pretty low-key compared to the previous days, but enjoyable nonetheless. Photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150478789449117.365947.525244116&type=1&l=d5444ac91c

After a few days off, next on the agenda was the Old New Year, and a bunch of volunteers from all over Macedonia decided to make the trek to the renowned Vevchani Carnival. Located in a small village about 30 min from the town of Ohrid, the Carnival has been known throughout Macedonia as the place to go for Old New Year. It didn't disappoint. The costumes were crazy and creative, everyone had a great time, and I'd definitely go back again next year. I don't want to do a complete play-by-play here, but the first day (friday) was the opening parade, which involved seeing all the costumes/masks on display, along with the burning of the Greek flag wrapped over a wooden coffin. Yeah, Greece isn't super popular here in the Republic of Macedonia.

For Day Two, we expected the main event to be a bonfire where all the masks were burned in the town centre, but additional highlights included a massive snowball war ('fight' is too mild for this one) where we were initially chucking snowballs at each other in our small group of 5 or so before locals got involved, and it escalated into all-out urban warfare with a like six neighborhood kids (and passing locals...one of which dressed as a SS officer). They tried hiding behind parked cars so eventually we started charging them and it was just crazy fun. In the midst of all this, we were invited to join a group of people dressed as trees to go na gosti with them at random houses in Vevcani. So we marched off with them, still trying to defend ourselves from the 'snipers' continuing the snowball war, until we reached the first house, which welcomed us with hot rakija and free food. We stayed there for about 20 minutes, then we went off to another house...then another...eventually it was time to go to the bonfire after 6 houses or so and we proceeded to dance around the fire for a while before a few people from our group needed to go catch a bus. At that point the Carnival was pretty much over, so we just retreated back to our hotel to relax, find food, and look at the all crazy pictures from the weekend. Here are some of them: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150478846599117.365957.525244116&type=1&l=afce36c0bd

Goodbye 2011. Macedonia owns 2012.

Four days into 2012 and I feel like I should at least acknowledge what a crazy year 2011 was before I look ahead. To start, I rang in the New Year in San Francisco with my best friends at MIIS. By the next month, I had learned not only I was medically cleared for Peace Corps but was given my 27 month assignment to Macedonia. Leaving in September. So instead of spending a relaxing stress-free summer at home, I decided why not apply for and take an internship at an NGO in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Build some experience working with NGOs, use Russian all summer, live in a part of the world that is at best known by most Americans as the "Stans"...what's not to like? So I bought my $1700 roundtrip ticket and sent in for my business visa to get me through the summer without getting booted.

However, before I could embark on this particular journey, I needed to knock out another semester of grad school at MIIS. This entailed totally rocking several group project assignments (and brought me out of the Stone Age on social media topics), managing to write a 10 page paper in Russian on bureaucratic corruption (given that I couldn't put together a basic sentence in Russian around June 2010, I'm fairly proud of this), a 3 week intensive seminar on development project management, and topped off with an epic going away party in San Francisco with my best friends from school. With everything academic done in mid June, I had a week off to pack up my life, or sell/donate it, because I was getting lean and mean for my upcoming Peace Corps service. So I shipped everything I wanted to keep or take with me to Macedonia to Springfield, packed my remaining bags with stuff I needed for my summer adventures. Which started with a family vacation in the Canadian Rockies! My sister's family road-tripped from Seattle to Canmore, AB while my parents and I met up in Calgary enroute to Banff National Park. It was an short but amazing trip, and I have never seen such consistently beautiful mountain scenery. More than that, it was one of the best family trips I've ever had, and it was going to be the last time I would see my sister's family in person until Christmas 2012. So my parents and I took the same flight back to Virginia at the end, and after a 24 hour breather I repacked my bags and departed for Istanbul enroute to Almaty.

Let's just say the travel to the eastern end of Central Asia is pretty killer. Since I rarely sleep on planes, I was beaten down and exhausted by the time I arrived in Kazakhstan, and it took me a good week to get on a normal sleep schedule. But I dove right into the work at the NGO, got involved in a bunch of different project ideas and proposals, stumbled at first and eventually found my stride in Russian, and before I knew it the summer was over and I was heading back to Virginia for another short breather before heading across the Atlantic again, this time to Macedonia. I was fortunate to have some time with my parents and catch up with a few old friends before catching a train to Philadelphia for Peace Corps staging. Somehow we managed to get a hurricane and tropical storm flooding in that timeframe, and I just missed an earthquake. Not exactly natural disaster-central in suburban northern Virginia, but hey, why not. I arrived in Macedonia on September 11th, and the rest is in my other blog posts that I don't feel like repeating.

It's been a strange, fascinating, and exhausting year. Fittingly, I welcomed the New Year not by attending some big celebration or house party, but instead doing absolutely nothing except relax, listen to music and enjoy being warm. Perfect way to end a crazy year. Looking forward to seeing what the Year of Macedonia has in store me.

American Christmas in Macedonia after one month at site

It's been a few weeks since my last posting, so I figure it was time for an update. The month of December has been an eventful one, though my work at the municipality has been relatively slow. Many people at the office are busy trying to finish their end-of-year requirements (like accounting audits) but for me, definitely not busy yet. As we were repeatedly told throughout PST, the first couple of months are often slow, and also I think being placed in a small village without previous work with Peace Corps volunteers could be a factor. It will take them sometime to figure out what it is I can do, while it will take me time to get better at the language (particularly the dialect) and figure out how I can make my own contribution. It's not like I haven't been sitting around doing nothing, though. I've been in contact with another volunteer based in southeastern Macedonia with extensive knowledge of agriculture and the business world in general, and he has put me in touch with some people who might be able to work with the Rice Cluster (a cooperative of rice producers in the municipality) to address their desire to find international markets for their special brand of rice. I've also done some research on some programs that could be useful, such as study tours and knowledge transfer opportunities, but it is very much a work in progress at this stage. I'm glad at least to have a little more to focus my attention on, but mainly I just want feel more comfortable with the language. On the plus side, I've spent a lot of time reading Macedonian news articles and my vocabulary list is growing daily. I'm not going to lie, knowing how to Russian well is a huge help.

Outside of work, I have spent a lot of time both at home and visiting the nearby town of Kocani (9km) in the past few weeks. One of the volunteers from our class, Morgan, lives in Kocani and we have become good friends fast, and it practically feels like we are neighbors, except for the fact that I have to rely on unreliable buses and taxis that run through my village to get there. I have become quite used to standing at the bus stop for 40+ minutes and freezing my butt off waiting for a bus. The main problem is that buses are either a few minutes early or really late. So you have to arrive early in case of the former, but most of the time the latter is the norm. Last week I waited an hour and 20 minutes for a bus (partly due to weather) in the blowing snow. It was cold. But anyway, Kocani has become my 2nd home, which is nice because I really need to have a break from Macedonia sometimes and spend time with Americans who live nearby. Fortunately they are awesome people so I lucked out with my location in that sense.

Within the village, I've gone na gosti (basically means going over to a friend's house) a few times to my counterpart Blagoja's house, including a special occasion called slava. Slava is a Saint's Day celebration for an individual home, and in this case it was Saint Nicholas (Sveti Nikola). Generally, slavas involve a lot of food and a fair amount of alcohol consumption. In this case, it was more low-key but I also missed the first day of the slava where there were more guests.

Finally, the most recent big event was spending Christmas with my fellow volunteers in the nearby town of Makedonska Kamenica. It was a very nice way to spend a Christmas when away from family back home. In total, we had about 11 people from various sites throughout Macedonia, including places that are practically on the border with Kosovo. We spent the majority of our time just hanging out, making good food, enjoying hot and cold holiday beverages, and doing our best to make something normal out of the abnormal situation of not being home for Christmas. For me, it was my second Christmas away from home. My first was spent on my first deployment in the Navy, somewhere in the South Pacific, and I don't remember much other than watching Elf in the wardroom with my fellow officers. We didn't watch Elf this time, but we got the Grinch, and Love Actually...I would have preferred Elf, but it is funny that we watched Love Actually because it was definitely on the ship's close-circuit feed during Christmas back on that first deployment, and I remember always seeing the last 15 minutes of that movie, never anything before that. Random I suppose. Anyway, some other activities included chopping down real mini Christmas trees (elka is Christmas tree) in the forest near Sara's (our gracious host and legit domakinka) house, making Gingerbread houses, and feasting on three roast chickens and moussaka for Christmas dinner. All of us had a great time, and I can't think of a better way to spend Christmas when abroad and away from family. For now that's all I've got, but I've included some photos below from the last few weeks to show what I've been up to.

Sworn-in and Settling-in

Since my last post, the next day we had our official Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony at a large restaurant/special event facility near Kumanovo on Thanksgiving Day. The US ambassador to Macedonia, Paul Wohlers, was in attendance and personally led the swearing-in, and gave a short speech before being followed by several officials from the Macedonian government. But the biggest moment (and a bit nerve-wracking) for me was my chance to give a speech thanking the people who helped us get through our training successfully, only it was all in Macedonian and in front of roughly 200 people. The speech was a team effort because another volunteer gave a translation of the speech in Albanian after each paragraph, and we tried to make it light and funny, while still sincere and meaningful. Anyway, when I able to get laughs from the Macedonian audience after the first 'funny' part I knew we were in good shape, aside from 10 sec of terror after losing my place while trying to read tiny Cyrillic text with my glasses and microphone in the way.

So after the ceremonial portion, it was a mad dash get some Thanksgiving turkey and the massive variety of side dishes prepared by the host families and some of the volunteers. And before we knew it, the event was over and everyone went home, and it didn't really register that I wouldn't see most of the other volunteers I've gotten know well until at least a few months, maybe some not until our June inter-service training next year. Although, I suppose we have it pretty good compared to most PC volunteers who are in larger countries with much less developed transportation infrastructure.

The next day I moved to my permanent work site in Obleshevo. I am living with a home-stay family for the duration of my service here. My room is a decent size (see photo), with essentially a large sectional couch for my bed and plenty of storage space. My host family includes two parents (Silvana and Venco)( who are both teachers at primary schools and Dedo (Lazar) who is a retired veterinarian. And of course two cats, one kitten named Marko and an older, less crazy one named Boni. Marko likes to pretend he is Spiderman and you are a large building to be climbed. But he's great and usually just likes to hang out and fall asleep on you. The parents also have two children, but both are away studying, one in Skopje and other in Austria at a music school. The son in Austria plays the accordion, and Silvana showed me a video clip of his accordion skills, so hopefully he'll give us a free concert when he comes home for the holidays. Everyone is very nice and I already feel much more comfortable here than I did in my previous homestay in Kratovo.

For work, I've been at the main office in the Opstina (municipality) and basically have spent the majority of my time reading material about the region and some various things to help me get more familiar with what what's going on around here, along with building my work vocabulary in Macedonian. My exposure to Macedonian is constant since it is rarely spoken at the office (usually either if people want to practice or if I look particularly lost during a conversation) and my host family does not speak English. It will definitely accelerate my language acquisition but it was a pretty intense first few days.

Near the крај of training

Since we arrived in Macedonia on September 11th, we've been in pre-service training, and finally tomorrow we will all be sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers in a ceremony to be held near the city of Kumanovo. The current US ambassador and high-level Macedonian government officials will be in attendance, along with two members of each home stay family from the training communities of Kratovo, Probishtip, Lozovo, and Romanovce. It will be an ironic moment for me, since the oath of service will be take is almost identical to the one I had to swear to back when I was commissioned as an officer in the Navy in 2004. Just replace "United States Navy" with "US Peace Corps". I suppose that means I have no excuse to screw it up! In addition to various speeches and presentations by each training community, I also have the honor to jointly speak on behalf our training class and will give a short speech in the Macedonian language to recognize the people who helped us get through training and prepared us for our future work sites. My friend and fellow volunteer Carly and I prepared the speech in English, and she will give the Albanian language translation. It is a bit humorous that the largest audience I've ever had for a presentation will listen to me speak in Macedonian rather than English. Once the ceremony is over we will have a big Thanksgiving dinner with all of our host families courtesy of the dozens of turkeys flown in from the US for the event. Apparently last year's dinner was quite a free-for-all for food, so it should be an entertaining and fun experience. On Friday I will leave Kratovo for my permanent work site in Obleshevo, and I will also meet my new host family for the next two years. I just found out today that this will be a different family/home from what I visited a few weeks ago, but it sounds like a good living situation.

This past weekend Mary and I managed to get out of our training communities for an excursion to the wine-growing region of Macedonia in the Southeast, and stayed overnight at the Popova Kula winery in Demir Kapija. While we only had about 24 hours in the area, it was totally worth every minute, as we had a chance to walk around a beautiful river/gorge area, taste several different types of wines, and had a incredibly nice dinner at the winery. The winery itself is one of the most impressive places I've visited yet in Macedonia. Everyone at the winery we met was extremely professional, spoke fluent English, and it was just plainly obvious that they knew what they were doing there. It reminded me of the nicer wineries I've had a chance to visit in California, only with friendlier staff. Here are some additional photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150374088984117.350403.525244116&type=1&l=f976d5d6c3

First Visit to Obleshevo

Today I just returned from a two-day visit to the village of Obleshevo, where I will spend the next two years working as a volunteer at the municipality of Cheshinovo-Obleshevo. Thankfully, the trip to get there was not particularly arduous since it is a relatively short distance away from my training site in Kratovo. Several of us decided to take a taxi to the town of Probishtip, where we proceeded to catch another taxi to the larger city of Shtip. Finally, I got on a bus from Shtip to Obleshevo, and ran into a couple of other volunteers going to their sites in Kochani and Makedonska Kamenica.

After a short bus ride, I arrived in Obleshevo, and met up with one of my counterparts (Dragica), met a few people at the Opshtina (municipality), and went off to the nearby (6km) town of Kochani for a two hour meeting with representatives from 11 different municipalities in eastern Macedonia regarding PR and tourism promotion (as far as I could understand, it was all in Macedonian). We returned back to the municipality afterwards for a meeting with the mayor (gradonachalnik), and then met with him one-on-one for about an hour (again all in Macedonian). My other counterpart (Blagoja) joined us at some point and then I went with him to his family's house in Cheshinovo after work for rychek (the main meal of the day). I enjoyed spending time with the family and they were definitely curious about me! Later in the evening we went over to a coworker's house for about an hour to chat and then went home (I stayed at my counterpart's house during my site visit). Exhausting but good day!

The next day in the morning I sat in on a 7th grade English language class at the primary school in Obleshevo (just a short walk from the opshtina), walked around town with a coworker, met some local business owners and toured a rice factory, and drove around various villages in the municipality with some coworkers to post flyers advertising a community forum to be held Nov 3 (today).

Also, I visited my new home- a two story house about 5 min walk from the opshtina in Obleshevo. I will be sharing the house with the two children of the landlady who lives in a house next door. The children are both in their mid 20s and work during the day, one I think is a nurse in Kochani. Apparently they eat their meals with their mother, so the kitchen space is basically mine, along with the refrigerator. My room itself seems pretty small and there was no bed in place yet, but I think it will work out ok. Here is a link to a Facebook album with some more photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150343758019117.345981.525244116&type=1&l=425f2c4b60

It was great to have a chance to see some of the municipality and get my bearings...I have a feeling that I'll plan some running routes to random villages once I move on the 25th just to figure out where things are. Fortunately, the mountains that surround the valley aren't too far, maybe 6km or so. Much better than living in Nebraska, when you had to go to Colorado to find the mountains. I am planning to buy a bike at some point after I move later this month, not only assist with my hiking plans but also to allow me to get to Kochani easier. Obleshevo does not have a bank in town and has a fairly limited selection of small food stores, so I think I will need to go to Kochani fairly often for groceries and other necessities.

Overall, it was a good visit to my future home. I've never lived in a village, so it will be an adjustment for sure, but I am excited that the people I've met at the opshtina are extremely nice and welcoming. There seems to be ample opportunity to contribute as a volunteer, and I look forward to seeing what that is once I've had a chance to get to know the community and how I can fit in.

Heading to Obleshevo!

Yesterday I found out that I am placed for the next two years in the small municipality of Cheshinovo-Obleshovo, working directly for the municipality. I will live with a host family in the village of Obleshovo, about 15-20 minutes by bus to the larger town of Kocani. I've included some map screenshots below to help with identifying where I will live. It is situated in a valley between mountain ranges. The area itself is well-known throughout Macedonia for rice production and other agricultural products. Next week I will visit my future work site and I should have a better idea about what I'll be doing for the municipality and hopefully will have a chance to meet my future host family.