December Tourniquet
I arrived on a Thursday evening, met my roommates and settled in for the night. Next day, met everyone at the office, registered at the police station, and had a tour of the city. The weekend happened. I have no recollection of what happened during said weekend, didn’t get drunk or anything, just remember anything significant occurring. Got to meet one of the other volunteers, a non-roommate. She waterboarded our beginners enthusiasm with some pretty random stories. A master move on her part, since it set us up with really low expectations. Expectations that were soon to be exceeded.
The following week started off in a nice, yet relatively banal fashion, had two days of arrival training, then a day of team building exercises. Team building being a great time to assess everyone’s dominant character type, the jittery type, the joker, the charmer, the wallflower, and so on. Yet, for me, team building can be pretty boring, no matter how good the organizer is.
The next week and a half went by quite fast. I was introduced to the environment where I'm expected to volunteer for the next 6 months. A school specialized for intellectually disabled children, and for hearing impaired children (Beethoven), and the centre for people with autism in Craiova (ANCAAR).
Initially, working with the children in the school and the kids in the autism centre seemed a daunting task to my eyes. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the kids were actually quite open to our presence.
The sign language class, for example, was very formal and cold with the teacher in the room. Then, she left. The kids lit up and started teaching us a multitude of words, and the Romanian sign language alphabet, so we can spell our names. We spent the rest of the lesson joking around and being tested on our newfound knowledge by our new juvenile teachers.
We got specific sign language names that correlated to our specific physical characteristics, chosen (and imposed) by the children. For example, I wanted the sign for “wolf”, they said “no way, you’re a ‘two fingers sliding down from the mouth to the chin’”. I guess I should’ve shaved my silly beard before coming to the class.
It felt like being accepted into a tribe, with its own language and customs. The whole experience was strangely refreshing and surreal.
The interaction with the kids in the autism centre on the other hand was largely spent being mostly helpless (talking about myself, not my fellow volunteers, they managed to handle themselves well) and being chaperoned by the staff so as not to upset the kids too much. My adaptation there wasn’t as smooth as in the school, but it felt just as rewarding (in spite of my mishap with the holiday decorations, of which I will not speak in detail). The staff were extremely welcoming, and the kids were getting more and more receptive to our presence as time went on.
We ended our work week by attending the ANCAAR Christmas celebrations. There was a Santa, cookies, singing in Romanian (which although cheerful, is still unintelligible to my ears), and we were made to feel welcome by the people at ANCAAR, who went to the trouble of buying presents for the volunteers they had met only a couple of days prior. A really nice touch on their part.
Holiday cheer (or Winter has finally come)
The holidays went as they did. Fun, freedom, love, expression, the freezing cold, a back ache that wouldn’t quit for the whole first week of this most interesting of years to be, 2016. I mean all I was imagining at this point in history, back when I was a toddler watching movies obsessively, was a sci-fi world with flying cars and flying skateboards and flying people, and it seems to me, that I didn’t imagine a lot of walking in the future. But, walking is what I have been doing since I wrote anything for this personal blog thing, that isn’t really a blog. I walked from the apartment to the centre of town to witness the contextually impressive fireworks of Craiova. There was live music after the fireworks, but I couldn’t care less, since it sounded like Craiovan rap (C-rap if anyone wants to brand it), and I don’t like to stand around in the freezing cold listening to rapping in a foreign language I still can’t understand. I hope that will get fixed by the next entry, by then, the protagonist of this bloggy thing (me), will have gone through a montage in which he has “learned their language”. Here’s to hoping it works out exactly that way, and the Romanian Language lessons I’ve started will become surprisingly redundant by virtue of aforementioned montage. Sure.
Anyway, things have been progressing modestly in ANCAAR (the centre for kids and young adults with autism) and Beethoven (the centre for kids with learning disabilities and hearing impairment). Not to say they haven’t progressed that much, but life, sadly, doesn’t get resolved in a montage, and there isn’t catharsis anywhere near the end of the story. Still, this story has not ended yet, it’s still beginning. As far as a constructive progress report on my activities, here I goes , SIR!
I’ve done some elementary yoga with the kids in ANCAAR, and have participated in the previously organized activities in Beethoven. Also, not to be boring to myself, I’d like to drop the progress report real fast, and mention only two anecdotally interesting people. First, this kid in Beethoven is wearing a suit to school, and I don’t mean any kind of suit, I mean a full-on business suit, as one would witness in the TV show “Suits”. And he carries himself with the demeanor of a Dean Martin/Barney Stinson combo, hitting on every female volunteer, and “bro”-ing up with every male volunteer. I wish I had the courage. Anyway, the other interesting guy, is this kid in ANCAAR, a 7 year old livewire that won’t stop running around and kicking or throwing balls at walls and people. Only when he does that, he fakes an injury. At first I was worried, then I noticed, he doesn’t do that always, only 90% of the time. It’s frankly quite endearing (and amusing) to watch a 7 year old play dead anytime he comes in contact with the ball, or a shoulder, or anything for that matter. Then he’s splayed out on the ground, one eye half open, trying to check if his ploy has worked this time. It’s the little things in life that keep you smiling, like a small child’s penchant for sporting deceit.
Anywhere, I’ll be writing something after the on-arrival training, or a couple of weeks after it anyway, so stay tuned, audience of one (or none).
Dissolved is my despair in mountains of disrepair
The on-arrival training is this event that happens 2 months after your EVS starts. It just passed. It was fun, in a seedy kinda way. Imagine getting a venereal disease when you’re a 12-year old boy, and having to go to a doctor, and have him/her “congratulate” you on your premature induction into physical adulthood. To clarify, this is more of a metaphor than anything remotely close to a memory. Anyway, the on-arrival training went as it did. I have a feeling that it is organized on the preconception that everyone doing an EVS is an irresponsible child-person that signs contracts without reading them. It’s designed to educate the kind of kid-person that doesn’t read its contract with the insurance company, and then admits, with no shame whatsoever, that they have not read a damn thing before arriving here, especially not the CONTRACT it signed. So… where to go from here? We did a thousand energizers, and I feel all the dumber for it. The on-arrival gave me a niggling feeling that this whole EVS thing is a complete waste of time that only exemplifies how absolutely deluded and disorganized the EU actually is.
As always,
see you next time, partner in my head
the only one reading what was written
is the one writing this abed.
Every morning, you wake up. You put on your make up. You say a little prayer for you (-rself). Forever, and ever, you will be without … Ok, so those are (sort of) the lyrics from a relatively old song. Sometimes we lose internet in the office. The owner/manager/landlord of the building forbids us from restarting the internet machine, so we don’t have internet for a while. Then I write one of these substandard articles on my gaming equipped lap-top. I wish I was gaming right now. But no, no, nooooo… I’m doing this, whatever this is. I like the sky, the clouds, and the sun. I have in their presence, the most fun. Anyway, look at that word count go (smiley face, winky face, satisfied grin).
When was the last time you felt fulfilled? South of the border, west of the sun, east of never, north of forever. Gibberish, poppycock, and the Oxford comma. These are three of my most fay-voa-reet thiiiings. This is my personal article, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
How does one fight the great war of our time, the war of the ring?
Well, one doesn’t. It’s a book, and a movie, and not real (sort of).
I wish I had a great war, or a great fight, or some kind of clear cut enemy. Makes things simpler. Realistically, the orcs are fighting against millennia old oppression on the side of the so called “fairer” races. The dark lord is simply fighting against the status quo…maaan.
Things end, things start, things go on after one dies. It is only a passing shadow this darkness, said a man more real and more fictional than me, once upon time, in a fiction not far removed from…
Oww, damn. Are you still reading? Good. Here it is, the lowdown. Here’s a bit of wisdom from an aged and weary soul. Here it is. Next couple of sentences. The 2nd most important currency in life is money (gold or silver or jade in a barter economy). The number one currency you have (listen now), which you can’t use in trading (lend me your ears), which you can’t get more of (get closer), is time. Time is not retrievable. You don’t have much of it. Not enough of it to spend it with the people you love, let alone like, and you do not have enough time to dedicate to yourself and your personal ambitions. You might think it’s all ahead of you, a world to conquer, a life to live, and all that gibberish. But, no. Just, run, run, run! Get away now. Your time is nearly up. Our time is nearly up, voice in my head. Another three months of being here or hereabouts and then I’ll be done and dusted and gone. The Oxford comma be damned, I will leave for sunnier skies and clearer waters and ice-cream and sunscreen and better times ahead and a nicer bed and always being a bit more than well fed.
THE TITLE AT THE BOTTOM?
IT'S A MAD WORLD OUT HERE HAVE ANOTHER KITTY!
APRIL FOOLS
The lion seeks a reprieve in the wild hunt of his days, the wolf sleeps dead in the moors, the flower grows strong, the kraken awakens and the snake beckons. But aside from that, HELLO again from me, the person writing to you, here from me to you I come to be in this place instead of the other me. The word count grows strong and winter has passed and now we are gone to the hinterlands of time.
We did an event about autism awareness. We had helium balloons that saw freedom. Also, the song “Freedom” by Pharell Williams was playing in the background of our freeze flash mob. I had to dance. Not a structured dance like a waltz or something. I had to do freedom of expression kinda dancing, which is an absolutely deplorable thing for me to engage in. But, we raised awareness, I hope.
Next came a cavalcade of weeks and days and minutes that bore down on me in a miasma of a rotten intertextual marriage of joy and despair. I was helping a beloved come into her own ascendancy and assume the mantle of her perceived maturity. I have been in a state of rot for some time now, and I can’t quite stop it completely. But, helping those you care about achieve their momentary ambitions is a singular kind of substitute for pursuing your own, whatever they might be. It may come to pass that I will come to be a lowly scribe, as so I imagine it could be, that only will come to be, if only I discard all else I hold dear to me. For it is not the cruelty of discarding that will help me in my goals, but the time that might be afforded to the lonely and abandoned. And so, I must become abandoned in my solitude or I will persist, till I perish, in a the mire of the choices I have not yet made.
I won’t talk about purgatory in the theological sense, since I am not interested at this moment in researching the religious fictions. I will only talk of purgatory as I have it already formed in my head. A ready-made concept. Something out of Beetlejuice, though a bit less colorful.
It is this world draped in gray, where people are alive and living and working and bothering each other senseless. The sun shines in theory, but only behind some curtain of gray that can’t be outrun by a ghost horizon of an indelectable quality.
When you leave the waiting room, you are transmogrified into a winged being, incapable of flight, but most able in wisdom. One only hopes.
Goodbye my readers, you are as imagined as these words here scribbled.
Gray
