The MAK 15s, the newest group of wannabe volunteers aka trainees, arrived in Macedonia this week. This also means I have officially made it through my first year, with another 15 months to go. When I read the newbies' blogs about their orientation, it feels like I was just there, wondering what the 1,000 bill in my wallet could buy and struggling to remember good morning vs. good afternoon, but it also seems like a lifetime ago because so much happened here since.
I want to think that I arrived in Macedonia not believing that I would solve world hunger through my volunteer service but even so, it has been frustrating sometimes to realize how little I can do. The role of politics in multiple facets of life here is discouraging, and it is hard to see projects stall and people I care about struggle as a result. I myself wrestle with whether I try to initiate a new endeavor and attempt to build up local support or just wait for interested locals to come to me. So far I've taken more of the latter approach because I don't want to start something and then just have it fall apart after I go. However, that means that I see a lot of needs here that don't necessarily get addressed. I hope in my second year to figure out how to strike the right balance and get more accomplished.
Reflective as I am hitting this anniversary, I took a trip down memory lane and re-read my blog entries and I certainly couldn't have asked more a more eventful year. I met tons of new people, am perfecting cooking from scratch (good experiment lately with baba ganoush), and my Macedonian is good enough that I'm starting a verbal battle with my noisy neighbors about their propensity to yell outside my window. My expectation is that there will be plenty more craziness and drama to chronicle for another 15 months, but I want to make an appeal that if anyone has some facet of life in Macedonia that they want to hear about and I have not touched on, just leave me a note in the comments. As the blog title says, what do you want?
what i find interesting/weird/disturbing about seeing the 15s starting their training is that they are all so hopeful and idealistic still. i think i have much more realistic expectations for what'll come of the next 15 months than i had, a year ago, for my service, but it's rough to see a lot of needs in my community that i can't address because people aren't coming to me about them. so far i've found that the little things i try to get going at school without support don't work out, so i don't want to take that to a higher level....but still, i do wish sometimes that i were doing a little more than going to classes and smiling at little kids.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, Ellen--we need the locals to be on board that 1) there is, in fact, a need and 2) they want to be part of addressing it. Keep doing what you can though--we'll both try to recapture a bit of the 15s' newbie zeal.
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