Tags
Airedales, Cross Cultural Experience, Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Memoir, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, Russian, Travel Writing, Ukraine, Welsh Terriers
As my days in Ukraine dwindle down, I’ve been thinking back over my service. A couple of things have stood out to me. First, I am not nearly as excited to leave as I once thought I’d be. Even more, I feel sad all of this is almost over, which I guess is natural anytime people move from one stage of their lives to another. I mean, there are still times when I get fed up with Ukraine or my institute or my students and I think, “I am so happy to be leaving soon.” But those thoughts do not consume me like they used to, nor do they linger on after the moment’s over.
Second, the first year of my service seems like a completely different experience than what I’ve done the last half. Euro 2012, my first semester at work, my original sitemates Adam and Elise (who I miss a lot), are all crucially important parts of my early service that seem like something I once dreamed. It’s hard to reconcile them and myself then with who I am now.
I’ve also been reminded of incidents and encounters from my earlier service because students and teachers have asked me questions like, “What’s the worst mistake you ever made while speaking Russian?” and “What was the most frustrating thing about your experience?” The answer to the last question is my institute had an earlier volunteer named Sally Reagan to whom they constantly compared me when I first arrived. I don’t know how many times I heard, “Sally Reagan did this…” or “Sally Reagan said this…” during my lessons. One time, the day after my first Christmas in Ukraine, one of the teachers even said to me, “Robert, why are you not happy? Sally Reagan used to walk around here like this,” as he put an index finger in each corner of his mouth, pulling his face into a beaming smile. Apparently even my emotions were inferior to Sally’s and I should have mimicked hers. It got to the point that when my regional manager visited, during one of the epic showdowns with my president, my RM finally snapped, “He’s not Sally Reagan!”
One time while sitting at a beer tent along the Dnieper River in Dnepropetrovsk, I talked about Sally with my good friends Bailey and Logan. We decided should I ever write a memoir of my Peace Corps service, I would call it, I’m not Sally Reagan. And if I formatted it around essays, each title would begin with, “Sally Reagan Wouldn’t…”
All of the reflecting I’ve done lately brought to mind another story, one that answers the question about my biggest conversational blunder. I am terrible at Russian and I was terrible at German in college and French in high school because I am afraid of making mistakes and thus find it difficult to speak with people.
Not long after arriving at site, I noticed a middle-aged woman would walk her dog around my neighborhood. I don’t mean just any dog. I’m talking about this big, beautiful Airedale that looked like it just wanted me to pet it. Anyone who knows me knows I love two things: the Atlanta Braves and then my parent’s two dogs (one a Welsh Terrier, the other an Airedale). If I see a girl I think is cute but who probably doesn’t speak much English, I’m not likely to talk to her. If I see an older woman with an Airedale, I’ll drop all inhibitions and we’ll have a conversation.
The first time my walking path crossed with the lady and her dog, I forgot all about my crummy Russian and launched into explaining how much I love dogs like hers, that they are my favorite, etc. (I also apologized for my language skills, explaining I was from America and hadn’t been here long.) The woman loved it and the dog loved me even more–I have yet to meet an Airedale or a Welsh that didn’t love attention.
Everything was going well, so well that I began to have fantasies that this woman would allow me to take her dog for walks and I even dared to dream she would ask me to dog-sit if she ever left town. I was excited, but I got too far ahead of myself. I wanted to tell her Mom and Dad had dogs like hers. The Russian word for “to have” is “есть.” So I said “Мои родители есть собаки, как это,” to which she replied in horror, “Как что??” (Like what??) I hesitantly replied, “Kак это.” (Like this.) For the remaining few seconds, she eyed me suspiciously before saying goodbye and walking away.
That was the last time I ever touched that dog. I still see the lady around, walking her Airedale, but she always keeps her distance from me. One time, she even crossed the street to avoid me as I walked down the hill towards her.
For a while, I couldn’t understand what happened. It didn’t make sense: Why would this woman, who had been so excited because I liked her dog, respond in horror to the fact that my parents loved the same dogs as she? Eventually, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. “eсть” can be used to signify someone possesses an object, but in order say someone has something, you must use У + the possessive pronoun + eсть. So, “They have dogs like this,” should read, “У них есть собаки, как это.” Which is not that far off from what I said and one might assume a person would realize what I meant, given the obviously poor quality of my Russian.
I suppose, however, the shock value of what I actually told this poor woman could explain why she did not understand my simple mistake. Without the above mentioned grammatical structure, “eсть” simply means “to eat.” And while I did not conjugate the verb correctly, I effectively told this woman my parents eat dogs like hers.
A humorous story in and of itself if it ended there. It does not.
In July, at least seventeen months after the incident, I walked into my apartment building with my friends Greg and Kristina. On the second floor, one below mine, a little wiener dog was sitting in the hallway, waiting for its owner to lock her apartment door. The dog ran up to us, eager to be petted. We all obliged. The woman turned around, saw me and said, “Очень вкусно, да?” That means, “Very tasty, yes?”
Sally Reagan wouldn’t have inadvertently convinced her entire neighborhood that dogs were her dinner of choice.
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P.S. I’m sure Sally Reagan is a lovely woman.